For April 7th I'm going back 37 years to 1984 and Swansea City's League Division 2 clash with Manchester City.
This was my first and in fact only visit to Swansea's former ground, Vetch Field, which was their home until they moved to the Liberty Stadium in 2005. From when I first started going to football in 1977 I had the ambition to visit all of the 92 grounds comprising the Football League. Why? Well I'd been interested in the whole league (and not just the big clubs as seems to be the modern fashion) since I was old enough to buy Shoot which contained a free gift of League Ladders for the season. I loved getting hold of the Sunday paper every weekend and moving the tabs that represented each team up or down depending on how they had got on the previous week. Each tab showed the name of the club together with the name of their ground. There were no sponsors names back then! It was the same with the clubs in the Scottish League. Impossibly far away places with exotic and romantic sounding names like Cowdenbeath, Stenhousemuir and Queen of the South. Every club got a mention on the late Saturday afternoon TV sports roundup too as their results were read to enable everyone who had staked a few bob on the Pools to check their coupon. I wonder whatever happened to the Pools? Anyway, I'm sure that that was where my 92 club seed was sown.
Named Vetch Field due to a type of vegetable that was originally grown there, Swansea moved in in 1912. Amazingly, in their first season the pitch was made of compacted cinders rather than grass and the players had to wear knee pads to avoid taking the skin off their knees. They make 'em tough in South Wales! When I went, the Vetch was a hotch-potch of different sized and aged stands. The East end was particularly incongruous having a very large stand dwarfing the stands in the rest of the ground. It was the first phase of a planned redevelopment which never progressed beyond that first phase and had a monster of a floodlight pylon appended to the roof, also the only one of its kind in the ground. The Vetch was the venue for 18 International matches and was charming and idiosyncratic.
I have already covered Swansea's dramatic rise and fall from Division 4 to the top flight and back again between 1978 and 1986 (see my blog). This game took place in one of the seasons when Swansea were on their way back down. Unusually for the time, the programme was entirely in black and white. Whilst those are the club colours, I suspect that it may have had something to do with Swansea's perilous financial situation and indeed they were wound up in the High Court the following year before being taken over by a local businessman.
Manager John Toshack had been dismissed the previous month possibly as a cost cutting measure and was replaced by one Les Chappell who oversaw the final 12 games of the season. Manchester City cruised to a 2-0 win. A young Dean Saunders wore the number 7 shirt for Swansea that day as he started out on a long and successful career. Manchester City, making a promotion challenge under the stewardship of Billy McNeill included Clive Wilson, Kevin Bond, Mick McCarthy and scorer and former Rangers and Leeds United star Derek Parlane in their side. Parlane was to join Swansea the following year. The attendance that day was a disappointing 6,261, so resonant of the times.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Swansea finished the season second bottom and were relegated with only Cambridge United below them and a full 18 points away from safety. Manchester City failed to gain promotion and finished fourth in the table albeit 10 points behind Newcastle who occupied third place and the final precious promotion spot.
CRB Match No. 303
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