Page 59 - 368603 LP250721 AWY AWY AWY Book (238pp A5)

stand and had a great view of proceedings. Three weeks later we lost 0-1 to Oxford and Col, Anth and I all took a distinct dislike to one of their players, a balding bloke with very short shorts. We didn’t know which Oxford player had got the winning goal and were mortified to discover it was the very player we’d been calling a tit all afternoon. There were two players with the same surname and he was listed as Atkinson, R. As in Ron. Our hero at that time was striker Joe Baker, who’d taken a very long time to get off the mark I seem to recall but he knocked quite a few in that season including one great back header from the edge of the box that will always stay with me.
Crowds had dwindled badly since I’d first started going in 1962 and one particularly grim day was 13th February 1971 when we lost 4-0 at home to Cardiff. If I remember rightly, one of their goals was scored when Cec Irwin was bending down to tie his shoelace but unfortunately he stood up just as Monty booted a goal-kick away and the ball cannoned off him and into the net. The crowd of eleven and a half thousand was not amused.
The first game of the 1971-1972 season was against Birmingham at home and it was the wettest I ever got at a game. My mate Keith and I were in the uncovered Roker End and there was an almost non-stop deluge so we were completely soaked through. The crowd was less than ten thousand and the score was also a disappointment, 1-1. On the evening of 1st September I took my new girlfriend Gillian
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