Thetownend.com

We got demoted 2 divisions.
I remember the pain very well.  :(

I don't. I was four months old.

I'm perfectly prepared to believe that it was all Bates' fault mind.

I can remember gathering outside the CG, then marching up through old town signing derogatory songs about the FA

I can remember hearing you!!

i was 11 and went into my room and cried whilst my older sisters boyfriend tormented me by putting up pictures around the house of the headline Swindle Town.

I was gutted

I wasnt even born.

Your all a bunch of old cunts.

You have missed on a lot then little boy

I was just finishing my final exams at college and my grandad had just died. I didn't go to games between 87 and about 94, either away at college or away working, so this period passed me by without too much hurt.

Pah! Missed out?
Steve McMahon, Maurice Malpas, Paul Hart.
2 relegations from League 1, Championship relegation
I've seen the wonder years.

have you seen us win at Wembley though?

You poor thing - and you are still here

I was 6, I can just about remember gathering at Faringdon Park and then marching round the town, have an image in my head of going down Commercial Road

my only memory of being at the Sunderland game though is when my Dad started crying at the full time whistle haha

I can remember seeing Denis Smith the Sunderland manager drinking champagne on the news. babe

I was 13. Will probably remain the biggest injustice in the club's history. And god did we batter Sunderland that day.

3 months old. Boom

Still remember it as clear as if it happened 1 year ago, 30,000 people in the march apparently.

My car was covered in 1st not 3rd free stickers.

Very unhappy days indeed but they were still the real "wonder years", football that would have graced any division or even at times europe too, we were playing with class and flair and scoring some fantastic goals, if we had stayed up in the 1st I have no doubts we could have had a few seasons there.

I was 12, I don't really remember the game although I was there, but remember hearing on the news on the radio that we had been demoted 2 divisions, was a sad day.

no doubt about that at all, was just before all the money started to roll into the top division, if we'd have stayed there we could be a very different club by now.

still like we all say success is nothing without the bad times, just need the success part to come along soon.

The worst feeling i've ever had related to football. We were well and truely fucked over. There's no doubt about it, that team would have easily held it's own in the then 1st division. The 1-0 scoreline against Sunderland doesn't do us justice at all, we fucking battered them. That season is still my favourite and I hold better memories until that point than the 1993 promotion season.

In the clubs history? That was one of the biggest injustices in English footballing history.

Similar things have happened since, to bigger other clubs and nothing like that has happened.

I was 8 and didn't go into school the next day.

My teacher said it was ok, she knew why I wasn't in that day :D

My Dad always tells me the News of the World ran a story on Swindon after we were done and it ended with the comment next week we tell you how Man Utd did the same thing..Obviously nothing was ever printed.
Does anyone remember this?

Agreed matey. You're preaching to the already converted. 21 years on and i'm still angry about what happened. Oh the Football League is full of ....

Am I right in saying our punishment was made by the Football League and nowadays punishments are handed out by the FA?

Not sure the relevance or this or owt.

Those '1st not 3rd' GWR Radio stickers were everywhere.  You could tell the town cared.

I wasn't on the march, but remember feeling sickened by the unfairness of the demotion.  (It didn't get any better a few years later when Spurs were given a smack on the wrists for doing the same thing.)  I started keeping a scrap book of newspaper cuttings that summer following the whole saga, which I still have in the loft.  And that September, I started going to games.

I started going to games in 1994 so I don't remember anything about 1990. However, I can imagine how awful it must have been for the club back then. If it were to happen now it would be gutting to say the least.

Worst moment in football ever for me that was.

I remember watching Spitting Image when they did the football scores;

Swindon Town 2-Divison3

....that hurt, that did

I remember it well - was totally gutted - the World Cup followed on not long after and to be honest I didnt care about it one jot -

On this day itself most of the supporters headed for the CG and actually got into the ground ... christ knows why but they did - I remember chanting for the TV Cameras and my two mates being the little bit in the corner on the ten o clock news

It was the most disgusting thing in football ever that demotion ... not really tempered by the fact we eventually made it a couple of season later - this team would have stayed in the top flight and who knows where we would be now as a club.

It hurt and it still hurts today ....

i actually videoed all the news footage for that season and the aftermath - on a 4 hour video -- if anyone can convert this and wants to borrow it to put on a website I would be willing to hand it over

I remember getting on the train at Preston and there were quite a few Sunderland fans heading down from that way to Wembley, they were very quiet on the train back. 

A few weeks later and as many have said one of the biggest piss takes in football history took place.  Tottenham , Manchester and I think Chelsea did similar things around that time without any punishment.

If memory serves, Forest too.

This thread has brought back a lot of anger for me, even 21 years on! I 100% believe we would have established ourselves as a top flight club for at least a few years had our promotion stood. Cunting football league!!

I believe West Ham also had a similar thing that was effectively let off.

The only thing I'd say to this would be remember the season after - we were dreadful, unfit & disorganised.

I do believe that Ossie inherited a very fit side from Macari, which he taught to play football. Would we have stayed up having invested and bought wisely ? Who knows ?? However I do think we would have had a better chance than we had in 93/94.

I remember the Chesterfield trust guy doing a talk on the day the STFC trust kicked off. They were in the brown stuff with the league shortly before, not quite the same but under reporting of gates and transfer dodgyness were part of it. I think the payment to players was not proven.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/c/chesterfield/1270117.stm

They got off the points deduction.

To paraphrase his words from my memory was "perhaps the difference between our case and yours was we had good lawyers".

What makes me a little sick was we seemed to roll over and take it up the arse. Maybe times were different back then. Maybe it was different because IIRC we had a whistleblower from within. Probably wrong.

Who was the whistleblower?

If I remember correctly there were a group trying to take over the club & oust Brian Hillier.
One of the group (can't remember her name) got hold of documented evidence of the illegal payments & threatened to go to the press if the current board didn't step down.

They didn't believe that someone would actually fuck up the club they were trying to take over and refused. The info was sent to the press & the rest is history.

I remember not going to work the following day because I was so fucking angry. Didn't help that I was working in Brizzle at the time.

There was a lady from Calne....Carol Embrey, who fell out with Brian Hillier, and a director, Somerset farmer Lionel Smart, who was also on the FA Council, a typical old fart.

Seems like a life time ago to me.  I had been told by a very good sauce that the result of the Sunderland match wouldn't stand, and always felt Sunderland knew too as they were so shit on the day.

Remember going down my local about 6 or soon hearing the news to be greeted by some Town fans already drowning their sorrows....these fellas still go. Everyone just seemed to have their heads in their hands and chins on the bar.  :(

 

Did this embrey cunt ever get near the club after?

She has a suite named after her at forest green

after the summer of up, then down, then back to parity the squad were deflated and robbed of their right to play 1st division football, without the upheaval I have little doubt that we'd have been ok.

Carol Embrey died in 2002, aged 55.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-14214146.html

I was only 4 at the time. Had already been to some games. Although Dad said I was always more interested in playing with the seats!

This.
They wanted to "make an example" of a club, and who better to choose than little old Swindon?

I had my 1st year A level mock Accounts exam the following day. I was still in shock that when the exam got marked the first couple of questions I only got about 10 out of 50, but got my head together by getting 45 out of 50 on the last two questions.

I was told some years later by an ex colleague of mine that he didn't go to Wembley as a friend of his knew some press who knew that we were going to be demoted, and couldn't see the point in wasting money.

I found out the other day that the reporter who spilled the beans on us in The People newspaper, Bill Bradshaw, supports...Sunderland !!

You were born after 1990 and count the Steve McMahon era as something you experience? You would have been 4/5 when it started and not even 10 when it finished!

I was too young back in '90 to understand... Tell that to my dad though. I was living in Germany back then and my dad called me up on this day to tell me and explain... I would have been 6! I think he needed someone to talk to :)

I agree with that. The players had had the shit kicked out them (as had we) and were really just going through the motions that following season. They did well to stay up in hindsight.

That was without doubt the worst experience you could possibly go through as a football fan. Nothing else can come close to that.

I personally think the '90 team was a better overall team than '93 which relied too heavily on Hoddle pulling the strings at sweeper. As has been said, this was pre-Premier League and that gap was not quite so huge then as it is now and maybe, just maybe we could have stayed up, gained a bit of a toe hold and stayed up for a few seasons. We'll never know of course.

I think the absolute most galling thing about that whole episode was the fact that the football league fixtures had already been produced with us as a (as it was then) 1st Division team. Then, when the whole demotion episode had been played out, they were published with Swindon and Sunderland having had their fixtures swapped.

So we knew then, that our first ever game in the top flight would have been away to Norwich City. Every week after that when we were playing Barnsley or Oldham, we had to look and see that Sunderland were playing Arsenal or Liverpool or whoever. That was the absolute fucking pits.

One last thing. That performance at Wembley was far and away the best Town performance I have ever been fortunate enough to witness. It could and should have been five or six. Sunderland could not have complained if it had been. To suggest they were not bothered because they 'knew' we would subsequently get demoted is fucking bollocks. In fact there was no guarantee that they would have gone up in our place. All sorts of permutations were discussed (Bournemouth staying up in Div 2, the last relegated team in Div 1 not getting relegated etc.) So please, Reg, tell your sauce to fuck off and for once, just once, give your club some fucking credit.

Lionel Smart was the cunt who dobbed us in - a fucking Slave Trader as well. Carol Embury was a micro celebrity and if she was involved then she would have been a "patsy" for someone else. It got pretty tasty for a few people while the accusations were flying around.
We were superb against Sunderland and we were lucky enough to give Steve Cram some stick afterwards. On the positive side Sunderland fans got a real hiding that day.

Sunderland were lucky to get NIL that day. If we had won by seven, they couldn't have complained. They did have the ugliest ever forward line in Gabbiadini and Eric Gates though.

Jeez, this thread has brought back all those bitter memories.... I was 16 at the time and was Town mad. I remember sitting by the radio awaiting the news conference on GWR. I was so shocked and angry that I don't think I ate for about 2 days! I just wanted to go up to London and smash Lancaster Gate! :crash:

The Football League fuckers.

Can remember the following seasons singing "The football league, is full of shit" and "You don't know what you're doing" to all the representatives of the FL.... even the North Stand got involved!!

Hey ho, the whole episode taught me how the world works e.g. the "big guys" always win.... and it's who you know that really matters.....

Jonah

My sauce at the time, told me that the club knew they wouldn't be promoted, and had offered to withdraw from the game on the proviso that we'd remain in Div 2.  If we knew this then why shouldn't Sunderland...

I'll give credit where credit is due....

if sunderland new this surly they would have made more of an effort, rather than go up in there minds by default

We'll probably never know, the thought occured some years later, when I could bring myself to watch the highlights of the game. We were so dominant....ok it was hot and we were suited to the big pitch and conditions, but the seed of doubt has been there since for me.

I was 34 years old and I admit I was in tears that day.I wrote to every newspaper and football magazine-got a few published too.Still have the reply I got from the Football League.Cunts!

I love posts like this.

I'm not long past that age so it makes me feel young still. Cheers adje.

....and we were a far, far, better team...go on Reg....admit it....let go....you'll feel better....

It makes me feel young still that I'm over half your age. Cheers Bangkok Red.

Oh man, half a life time away, as I'm 42 now.  I was 7/8 of my way through finals and had come home to recharge, but also subconsciously because I knew where I had to be when the announcement came.  

As was the norm then I turned to John Peel for solace during such matters of national urgency.  The great man, who was a friend of the Bring The Noise guys didn't let us down.  I can hear him now, he opened his show after the 8:30pm news by saying "that is a monstrous decision, Swindon fans, this is for you....."

The days that followed are a blur.

A week later, more refreshed and positive I sat down focussed and ready for my final exam.  The invigilator, a lecturer and Forest fan called Jennings gave the usual intro "3 hours, 3 questions, silence...." and then followed it with "unlucky Christy, that's bad news about Swindon".  The focussed bit went out of the window and I spent the next hour stewing and stumbling through....not that I'm still bitter about twenty plus years on of course.

i was 15 and this came at the time when stfc was the most important thing to me.i was well hooked and followed the club up and down the country.
i remember a group of us were at the fair on wootton bassett road and someone had a radio.the news came through and everyone went to the county ground. roger malone was there and got abused by the fans.one fella in particular went mental at him.

all this had followed my favourite season and all that went with it.generally brilliant football,away games were brilliant with us taking loads and singing loud as fuck,it was just the best time as a town fan.the parade the day after the final,calderwood standing on the civic offices balcony and giving an s. great memories.
all that came down with a massive bump that evening with the demotion.the march was a good show from the town,although it got us nowhere in regards of justice for the club.

Reading through all your memories makes me glad I was just an infant. I would've been absolutely distraught if I was old enough to appreciate what was going on.

Really interesting to hear all these stories 20+ years on.  For me, it was the event that got me started as a Swindon fan...helped, in no small part, by being at school in Bath and surrounded by Bristol Rovers & City fans who were loving every second.  I guess I got naturally defensive about people having a pop at my home town, even though I'd not been to a game at that point.  Felt it all very personally.  The rest is history (for me).

As a fan base, I don't think we talk about 1990 as much as we could or should...given what a seismic event it was in the club's history.  Those of us old enough all remember it.  Hearing these stories just makes me remember the sense of injustice and how wrong it all was.  Brings the memories right back.

as a few others have said,i think we would have easily stayed up if we had kept our place in the top flight.
we had a proper good side then with real quality from front to back. depsite the injustice i felt back then,the good memories outweigh the bad. my most enjoyable time as a town fan.nothing has ever come close since.

Some of the news footage from that period is uploaded on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-982bfDXM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gobMS5_6OGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOPFhLl7g7U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZSPZSCSOKc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjLuZSP8j60

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouwnuLisTPE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oILHIIhzHS8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HcdASQuPP4

As a Town fan, memories of this episode and the current news about the shit that has been going on at FIFA which the FA have complained about makes me want to laugh. Corruption rools.

Bunch of cunts, the lot of em.

Weird time for me. My son was born in June '90 and I collected him and his mum from the hospital on the day the march took place.
As this was before the advent of the internet a lot of fans, myself included, didn't realise how much shit the club were in, even on the day of the final. I remember first hearing the news that we had been demoted 2 divisions - it felt like I'd been kicked in the bollocks.
This episode showed perfectly that, even over 20 years ago, money is the only thing that the football authorities care about.

The last 2 decades could and should have been so different.

This is true. The town reacted brilliantly at the time, but the Football League knew they could stitch us up because ultimately, in the long term, nobody outside Swindon would give a shit. And they were right.

It stands as one of the greatest injustices in English football history, yet how many fans beyond our own even know about it today? If it had happened to Liverpool (which, of course, it never would) you'd never hear the end of it. Perhaps it stems back to the way the club just meekly accepted the decision at the time.

Presumably the statute of limitations has long since run out regarding our popping a belated claim for compensation through the Football League's letterbox?

I worked around Lincolns Inn at the time and watched some of the court case in my lunch hours - did not really have a clue what was going on - remember the FL barrister was highly Eton/Oxbridge - our was excellent but totally off the wall. Went for the final decision where there was a massive discussion re costs but had to wait for the Evening Standard to understand what the final decision was  :doh: Ozzy was there watching and I think he was legally trained.  Bad times - thought it could only get better  :cry:

You are right, Ozzy was legally trained.  He came out with a classic line about the town being a "sacrificial lamb at the altar of hypocrisy". 

watching those videos makes me feel sick and angry. Cunts the lot of them.

Opposition fans used to call us 'Swindle Town', but at the end of the day we were the ones that were swindled.

The amount of 'tax free'money that was involved was estimated to be about £100k, which is what Rooney gets paid in 3 days nowadays. Did we fix matches? No, but Juventus did over 3 years to help them win the title in each of those years and they got the same punishment as what we did.

You look what other clubs gone soon afterwards and you see that we were the ones that got screwed over :

Chelsea got fined for illegal loans in 91
Spurs got a £1.5m fine in '94 for illegal payments
Chesterfield got a 9 point deduction and fined £20k for illegal payments in 2001, but still got promotion that season.
And of course Boston got a four point deduction and fined £100k, when they used dodgy means to get promotion to the FL, where their manager was also found guilty of being involved in a cover up....

http://www.twohundredpercent.net/?p=8698

I was in a nightschool class at Swindon College when I heard the news on my personal stereo. I went to the CG and the gathering at the Magic Roundabout. There was an ace herse with 'people in glass houses ...' or something similar painted on its window. The spontaneous march up to Old Town and then back down town was something I don't think I'll ever experience again.

My mates and I spent a number of the following nights at the CG playing footy on the pitch in the dark. It was quite eerie, but there was a genuine sense of cammeraderie despite the obvious futility of trying to fight the powers in charge.

We were some of the fans that drove up to the Football League HQ at Lytham St Annes on a Sunday. Of course it was closed up so we performed a few chants, deposited our old style ST banner on the porch, and drove back to Swindon. Fuck all good that did us. And my mate had his car number plate broken off (accidentally) by one of two unknown Town fans who came with us...

I was angry at the punishment at the time, but I'm actually now glad that teams get points deductions for going into administration - after all they do, to some extent, commit football fraud by operating a team that they should not be able to afford to sustain (hello Crawley?).

The absolute killer has been the knowledge that we were singled-out as an example to all, yet no club since has suffered the equivalent points deduction that we were subject to. Every time some kind of football financial irregularity comes to light in the news I feel genuine anger at how our punishment NEVER set an example at all.

It's something that's still so vivid for anyone who was around at the time. It's the footballing equivalent of 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot/the twin towers went down'.

I'm not directly comparing it to those events, just how indelibly certain things imprint themselves on your brain ???

I still have the letter from the FA explaining to me on there decision after i and many others had asked them about the fiasco.

I wonder how many letters they got? I think my response is in a box with other letters at my mum and dads.

I was 15 at the time.  I was just about to go babysitting at a neighbours when the news came through.  I couldn't stop crying and eventually went to their house unable to speak through the tears. I made them about half an hour late going out, because they were worried about leaving me.

My dad wasn't in when the announcement was made.  He didn't come home until the early hours after joining the hoards who went to the CG as soon as he heard.  I vividly remember seeing the news the next day and my friend who had also gone to the CG, was crying hysterically and some twat pushed a tv camera asking for her view - pretty obvious really!

Ardiles is right, it doesn't get talked about much anymore, but it will always be there.  The worst ever day in the history of STFC, my worst ever day as a football fan and so wrong  in every sense.

When we were back at Wembley in 1993, I went with friends.  Before the days of mobile phones,  I didn't see my dad until around 8pm that evening on County Road.  The first thing he said was something like 'We're really there, no bastard's going to take it away from us this time'. I don't think I honestly believed it until we kicked off the following season.

Not quite sure what you mean by a real hiding. Our coach was in amongst a load of theirs, and quite a few of their fans got on our bus after the game, but only to congratulate us and swap scarves. They were asking us why we were looking so deflated. Even then, there was an air of foreboding of what was to come.. :badmood:

I really don't care how girly it makes me sound... I blubbed like a baby upon hearing this news. As a Town fan born and bred in South East London, I took an absolute slaughtering daily throughout my school years. Imagine having the opportunity to rub a few noses in it when we finally got into the top flight... only for a bunch of suited Football League no-marks to turn my world upside down. I was only 13... and got hammered for months thereafter by Sedgehill School's Millwall contingent (of which they were pentiful in number).

I'm frowning about it all now as I type. Grrrrr.....

They had 7 ManU players over 2 pages full of irregular activities.  One was even the England captain and they were handed nothing !!!!!