Thetownend.com

Can't remember if I have started one before  ???
I'm confident of a win.

Please tell me this is your attempt at humour 4D  :D :suicide:

I assume it is but...

 :doh: a day late.

Ah, I forgot this was boycotted.  :-[

Jesus Christ 😂

Going for 1-0. Late goal to seal it... probably from a defender.

Vigs to not be included and all kinds of toys to be thrown out of the pram from Town fans on Twitter.

anyone know the attendance  :hmmm:

It will be 1236.

It was 1,236 official attendance.

Were Advertisers on sale outside the ground?  :hmmm:

Lowest home attendance since the war..........the Second Boer War.

At what stage do the clubs start losing money on these games and thus press for the right to withdraw from the competition?

Yep lowest home attendance for a 1st team game since 1895.

What a shame it wasn't 0-0: "Worst Bore Draw Since Boer War"

Kop trying Paul  :)

I think you're Spion on me :)

I hope you are going to put in a Transvaal request ;)

Don't want to go too far though, could be a bit of a Trek

I just watched the highlights, just to see, very well taken goal by Preston and it looks like in the 2nd half we could have easily got another 2 or 3 goals.

Even if its not a "proper" game its still a 3rd win on the spin and 3 clean sheets in a row too, gotta be good for confidence.

Indeed, there is nothing wrong with a good training session.  I'd have though Reg would be pleased about these "open" training sessions, with a chance to see the Reserves in a kick about.  It's like the old Combined Counties stuff isn't it?

I used to love watching the Football Combination on a Saturday in the late 70s early 80s when Town were away, always a 2pm KO and if we were playing a Div 1 team they almost always had first team players, once when Spurs came down in 80 they had Hoddle, Ardiles, Villa, Crooks, Daines, Roberts, Brookes, Falco and Galvin playing for them. Arsenal, West Ham, Spurs, Chelsea, QPR etc all used to bring strong squads.

We had a crowd of over 4,000 for the Spurs game.

Used to be £1 entry and 2p for a team sheet, free entry if you had a season ticket.

Wasn’t there one of the reserve games where they were handing out tokens for a Cup game and had a crowd of nearly 10,000 (well for part of the game anyway)

That does ring a bell, wasn't it before the Wolves LC semi or the Spurs FA cup game the same season?

I'm not sure I remember it like that. I seem to recall a massive queue for tickets that snaked off down Shrivenham Road past Mitchell's Cycles.

Could very easily be wrong mind, as it's a long time ago now.

Might have been for the Everton game in Jan '77?

Bet you remember the miners strike like it was yesterday though.

Not really.  I do have a sort of time line in my head, which packages up bundles of events and then orders them into a chronology.  However I do like the strange effect that say a piece of music, a smell or meeting an old chum/flame can have in transporting the imagination off into a recollection of a time, but I'll always see that as relative.

Of course he does, as does his protege young Horlock. Though i’m disappointed that there was no mention of Derek (Red Robbo) Robinson yesterday in either the ‘Lets Get Political’ or ‘The 8 Year Old People Who Have Died’ threads. Maybe there was a silent and personal tribute with black ties and a rousing rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ instead?

Stick an entry into the 8 Year thread.

FWIW, I'd regard Robbo as a decent Trade Unionist, who fought for his members. My old man worked for BL, and always maintained that its demise was in the main down to poor management. It should be noted that Longbridge ceased car manufacture some 25 or so years after Robbo got sacked.

and there was me thinking that BL ceased car manufacturing. . . because they made crap cars.

Young.....  ::) However I am young enough to barely remember the miners strike, although you have again confirmed my suspicion that Reg is in fact my father...

I would say that the cars were not crap - some of them included technology years ahead of its time, just were not cars that people wanted to buy. The UK care industry is much like village post offices, no one bought the cars and the industry went to shit, then the same generation that didn't buy them now moans that there is no UK car industry. Strangely they are often the same people who are now pinning their hopes and justifications of a successful Brexit upon the potential impacts upon the German car industry, which in interesting when one considers what their parents lived through.

I'm sorry mate but for anyone old enough to remember the 70's and remember those rusty piles of crap first hand, every part of that statement is equally and utterly hilarious. 8) :Ride On Fatbury's Lovestick:

Triumph, Austin, Rover, Morris to name a few made decent cars until they were absorbed into the BL empire.
Much the same as AEC, Scammell, Albion to name a few made decent lorries until BL fucked them up aswell.

The reasons for the decline of the UK's traditional manufacturing are no doubt complex. Look at Wycombe once considered the chair making capital of the western world, and famous for other furniture.

In my early lifetime Wycombe had 10,000 people employed in furniture manufacturing, by 75 this had declined to 6000, now all gone.

Beautiful and classic

http://youtu.be/9sRu4FAn32o

Commercial shipping containers and air freight - enabling global supply chains, followed by automation.  I went to see the then Rover plant when at College and it was clear as day to me then that they could probably have gotten away without 10 people running the whole thing with a bit of investment in robotics.  People were literally paid to pick up a sheet of metal and place it in a press and then press a button.  Someone is either going to do that cheaper in another country if we can get it supplied back to a local market, or find a way of using a robotic arm.

In the 60's-90's it was Manufacturing, now it is warehousing, soon it will be office work (it has already begun to ramp up).

Anyone who ever watched a John Harvey Jones Troubleshooter episode with Morgan cars will see why the manufacturing industry slept walked into oblivion.

Certainly there's an element of "we're British and are just better then Johnny Foreigner"  Unfortunately as soon as we've innovated the rest of the world has caught up and copied....look at something like Cheddar cheese  :cheese: 

The same happened with football...

Parker Knoll

Except JHJ was famously wrong about Morgan, who survived because they understood their customers much better than he did, and resisted the degree of automation that he was proposing.

Probably should have put it better than I did...

The cars were not crap as designed, technology that was often years ahead designed by innovative engineers, let down by shoddy production techniques and a workforce (led by Union officials more interested in career advancement within the union movement and Labour Party) more interested in battling the management rather than understanding that the best way to keep jobs was to make sure costs were reasonable and the product well made), a management regime that rushed things to market way too soon, strangled investment needed to get things right and had no idea about marketing (a five year old could see through the badge engineering) and that was a puppet of a government, so many nationalised industries who was placing battling the unions higher than actually sustaining the company.

The cars are often shit but that mainly down to being paper of paper thin steel, badly painted with cheap parts bin mechanics, for instance Issigonis was having to use the A Series years after he had designed a more modern and better engine as the company would not invest in the new line. 

ha, I remember my great great aunts story taking delivery of a brand new Austin. A few days later a lump of filler fell out the door.

But aunty Doris didn't live through two world wars for that kind of shit. She drove it to Longbridge and demanded they put it right (successfully iirc).

A good name were they ever in Wycombe?

An interesting study is the Silentnight bed dispute. Happened at the same time as the Miner's Strike, but went on for 18 months.

It was about the ability of management to reduce the pay of workers for doing the same job as previously undertaken. The company was owned by Tom Clarke, a local Tory in the Yorks/Lancs border region... the union had negotiated a deal whereby they'd accept a pay freeze in return for no redundancies. As soon as agreed 50 odd people were sacked, which provoked the strike.

Clarke was one of the highest paid directors in the land at the time, and Thatcher called him "Mr Wonderful" as he wished to break Trade Unionism and return to something like the popular Thatcherite trope of the time, Victorian values, whereby the 5 evils of the Beveridge post war settlement,  Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness would be unleashed.

Sadly some 30 years later we see an increase in all 5.

It's what the Austerity Project was all about.

I'm not sure who that game was against but I was there, standing as usual then at the back of the Townend right in the middle. We won 6-2 and I had my proudest Townend moment, actually starting a chant of Swin-don. Attendance was c9,600 I think.

Another memory is being at a Combination match standing a few yards away from Ernie Hunt and Mike Summerbee.

Just to correct a few things as I used to do a lot of work in Barlick, the strike did not start until after the miners strike had finished which probably actually explains its failure as much as anything as the public were by then sick of strikes, equally Thatcher called him Mr Wonderful once because he was a self made man who had launched the business on the money he got after leaving the Navy and in the 70's (when she said it) he had a reputation for being fairly benevolent to workers. This was picked up and used by The Sun during the dispute to try and push the idea that Thatcher said it for his actions then against the Unions. Finally not sure of the relevance of what he said as it was a private family owned company.

The moral being never believe much of what has been written about Thatcher especially if the source is The Sun!

This is one of the longest running match day thread in a long time. Perhaps I should start tomorrow's?  :sherlock:

Maybe add tomorrow's on to this one...

Or even Sundays ;)

I think you're better off with posting the day after, rather than the day before... but you never know.

Or start one on Monday, after our inevitable cup exit, and call it the "How it might have been different had we played on the Saturday instead Match Day Thread"

I was thinking more the scene where you see them wheeling the engine across the road to the other part of the factory.  Nothing wrong with being hand made, but that one scene to me shows the stupidity of British, no, Western, manufacturing at times.

Because Britain in many cases was the first country to organise mass industrial production, working practices often became set in stone, as they worked well enough. Other countries could look at how we did it and find improvements.

Post war, the country was on its knees, but the industrial infrastructure was largely in place if battered.  No such problem for the US, who reaped the victor's dividend, and Germany could start afresh and put into place better working practice in modern facilities.

A classic example of how difficult it is to get innovation would be Brunel's broad gauge. Vastly superior, to Stephenson's standard gauge, based as it was on stage coach technology....but we ended up with standard  :(

Yep, agree with that. They were comically resistant to change in the father's time, but they seem to have managed to update while holding onto their values. A friend bought one this year and gave me a ride. It was a joyous experience.