West Ham United: the Seventies

For best results, observe the following instructions. Get yourself a steaming mug of tea or coffee, settle into your favourite comfy spot and give yourself time enough to enjoy and reminisce times gone by. This was a labour of love. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing and re-living it. So strap yourself in and fire-up the time machine – we’re going back to the seventies!

Where to begin? I suppose each generation might lay claim that they were lucky enough to live through a so called “golden era” of English football - and who’s to say who is right or wrong? The truth is we all dearly cherish our footballing memories, but for me, there really is something very special about the early 1970s and in particular at Upton Park.

I was born in 1960 and to this day I am not at all certain when I was first bitten by the footballing bug. I can just about remember the 1966 World Cup Final and our Bobby collecting the trophy from Her Maj, but as a six-year-old kid I knew precious little about the game, the teams, the leagues or anything else to do with the beautiful game. But there’s no doubt about it, a subconscious seed was sewn on that July’s summer’s day and within a very short time I became a fully-fledged Hammer!

Why West Ham? By rights, being from North West London, I should have been a Tottenham or Arsenal fan like most of my mates and my brothers. It must have been the ‘66 influence of Moore, Hurst and Peters and the famous claret and blue colours (so much more attractive than plain old blue and white or red and white) that instinctively drew me towards east London. I’m almost embarrassed to say that there was also another altogether completely weird and totally quirky reason – goal posts!

Although I suspect that I might not be alone in this strange rationale. Remember those narrow-depth, boxed rectangular goal posts at Upton Park in the late 60s through to the late 70s? There was something special and different about them. I don’t know how they did it but they actually seemed to make the goals scored – look better, more attractive somehow? Strange but true! So there you go - it was West Ham for me and there was never any doubt about it. One of my better decisions which I have never, and will never regret.

Around the age of 11 or 12 I attended my first live match – at White Hart Lane! A family friend had a number of season tickets (can you imagine being able to afford that these days!) and used to take myself and my brothers to alternate games with his sons. My brothers weren’t as keen on football as I was so invariably I ended up going more often.

Whilst I enjoyed the experience, Spurs were never going to win my support – my heart was already claret n’ blue. To my joy the second game I attend at Spurs was against West Ham. Unfortunately we lost 1-0 to a very late “own goal” which if memory serves was “scored” by Bobby Moore of all people! Fortunately, my “uncle” always left five minutes before the final whistle so I never saw the great man’s faux-pas! To think that was the one and only time I saw our greatest hero live on the pitch, I’m forever grateful about that!

This was around 1972 when colour TV was really coming into its own. The effect on football was electrifying. Other than the FA Cup Final (a really special almost all day event on both main TV channels in those days – how things have changed!), European club competition finals and international tournaments like the World Cup, there wasn’t that much live football shown on TV.

Match of the Day showed highlights from just two matches on Saturday nights and The Big Match showed highlights from three matches on Sunday afternoons. Those programs were un-missable as compared to today’s televisual gluttony we were practically starved of football on TV in those days! I’m sure that those privations in their way added to the sense of anticipation and excitement and have enhanced the mystique of the “golden age”.

It was around this time that I formed an irrational hatred of a certain Mr Jack Hargreaves (sorry mate!) as his show (Out of Town) preceded The Big Match on Sunday afternoons and seemed to drag on forever – especially if West Ham were on! Actually, I’m of an age now where I can appreciate what the old duffer was trying to teach us – but at the time, I just wanted him to get lost!

The real shame of course is that so many great matches went unrecorded never to be seen by the millions of fans that would have appreciated them. Those games only live on in the fading memories of those who were lucky enough to have been present at them or in the black and white photographs that accompanied match reports in “Hammer” – a consistently great read and often praised publication woefully unmatched in every possible way by today’s full colour pitiful excuse for football programmes.

One match in particular fits this scenario perfectly. It’s 1973-74; West Ham 4 Everton 3. The Hammers came back from 0-2 down to win. In the “Hammer” of the following home game a Match Review entitled “A great one” lamented the absence of the TV cameras – “It is to be regretted that an absence of TV cameras precluded it being seen by many more than the near 30,000 attendance”. And how about this comment from the Sunday press “This was soccer at it’s peak and West Ham at their aristocratic best. It made for a game that will live long in the memory”.

I’ve chosen this match for a very specific reason. A reason I will forever regret – I wasn’t there! Missing what was obviously such a wonderful match and the fact that it was not recorded by the TV cameras acted as a catalyst. TV coverage was all well and good – but I was missing out on watching my heroes for real. I was 13 years of age and the time had come. One way or another, I had to get to the Boleyn Ground!

* Continue to Part Two

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