Phil Sumbler
As Luke Williams spoke this week about a “frenzy” at the end of the January transfer window our mind again drifted back to a very different time when transfer deadline day had a very different viewpoint and a desperate attempt for news on what your club may have been up to.
Today’s generation do not know they are born. First off they believe that the transfer deadline involves two windows, one in the summer and one in the winter. They don’t know of a generation when there was just one transfer deadline day and it was a Thursday in March with a 5pm deadline.
Go on, hands up if you remember that particular transfer deadline day? You know it’s showing your age, but to the younger readers there really was a time when you could buy players whenever you wanted to, until this deadline passed. They were good days, although they missed something that a modern transfer deadline day brings you – the cameras up and down the country at various training grounds and stadiums, telling you just who has arrived in their Range Rover for discussions.
A transfer deadline day used to involve waiting for page 302 of Ceefax to refresh, just to see if there had been any new deals that were worthy of their own headline. Then you used to skip to the page the number that said ‘All the deadline day deals as they happened’ which would list every deal… funnily enough, as they happened. Halycon days and was it just me that lived in a house where the TV signal would fail just as it loaded page 7 of 19 where you could make out it said “Swansea City” but you had absolutely no idea who we had signed as that particular part had not loaded properly. Cue sit and waiting another 5 minutes or so for page 7 to appear again.
Excitement would build as you realised that so much had happened that Ceefax had added another page to the listings and that hope, excitement and desire to see your club’s name next to a deal would increase. Amusingly, it would die down just as quickly as you realised that the latest big deals reported were the move of two midfielders from Aldershot to Torquay in return for an undisclosed fee.
To those that have just related to this, you are now nodding your head because you know that you then went one step further by ringing the local club call number (remember the 0898 numbers?) just to see if there was anything that had bypassed the man that populated Ceefax and, indeed, your club had pulled off the transfer coup to end all transfer coups.
They never had and the only people who gained were the people who ran ClubCall, who surely have to be multi-millionaires these days just from my input alone!
This was a world miles away from the one that we occupy now – Sky Sports will be in overdrive next Monday and – for reasons nobody really knows – the transfer window has to be occupied by the colour yellow. There must be a reason for this but does anyone know what it is?
The above was football transfers in the 1980s and 1990s before the internet was available or, in fact, it was football news in the 1980s in general – believe it or not it was the only way to find out what was happening in the world.
So when you sit down and watch the always-excited Jim White on Sky Sports News, desperately hoping he is about to report on Lionel Messi joining QPR on loan, spare a thought for the older generation and the fact that we are desperately missing Ceefax and all the football news it brought us in our generation. Well, that and cursing the fact that club call wasn’t our invention.
Let the madness commence.
