League Ladders

League Ladders

As the Summer yawns before us (small matter of the World Cup notwithstanding) in an arid chasm of football-less-ness, any sane person has one of three responses:

1) Play golf

2) Go to the pub

3)...er, that's it

Otherwise there is seemingly no alternative to a diet of reality-TV with the missus (and the frighteningly-inevitable potential for conversation this might engender) or the crap that Sky uses to fill up the schedule (called Cricket I believe.)

The beginning of the season seems like a distant planet in a far off galaxy, viewed through a pair of kids' binoculars.

When I was a child, the signal for all this tedium to come to an end was not the endless and pointless set of retrospective-previous-season-taster-for-the-next-season TV punditfests, nor was it the onset of the first good weather of the season, just as it is typically ending.

No.

It was the publication of the Shoot League Ladders.

It will seem almost quaint to anyone who has never known anything other than a computer age, but boys all over the land would use this system to meticulously track the fortunes of every club in the Football League (that's Divisions 1,2,3 and 4 in old money.)

In a nutshell, it was a large piece of card with slits in it, on which was printed from 1-24 (again, before they faffed with the number of teams) all the possible positions in each division. Each position had a slit.

Then there was a second piece of card, which had pop-out tabs with the name and colours of each team in the league (14-year-olds countrywide are probably slitting their wrists by now.)

You pressed out the tabs (STAY WITH ME) and on a Saturday night when James Alexander Gordon read out the results, or on a Sunday when they printed them in the papers, you would meticulously re-organise all your tabs to reflect the new standings.

It really was brilliant - imagine the fun of having to reorganise 92 pieces of card once a week. But children had patience then. Shane or Chlyamidia nowadays would have ripped the thing up and binned it.

So maybe, like Shoot itself, the demise of the League Ladder has been a sad one. Now you can get scrolling up-to-the-minute information on the infobar of most sports programmes and websites. But where's the fun in that? The anticipation was the thing. Remember most kids at that time hardly saw any football on TV at all, so there was still something exotic about, er, putting little bits of card into another big piece of card. This was also the era in which I glued the sellophane wrapper which was wrapped round a bottle of Lucozade onto the screen of the black-and-white telly so I could pretend it was in colour.

Everything was in black-and-white then.

So Shoot began to die.

Its circulation fell from approximately 120,000 copies per week in its heyday to less than 35,000 in Autumn 2007. Its sad demise has led to it now becoming an online-only publication. The home of You Are The Ref , the esteemed organ that told us that footballers ate steak and chips and were fans of Lionel Ritchie - is now scrapping around for business in cyberspace along with everything else - including this article.

I guess it's hard to shove a piece of cardboard into a computer, and even harder nowadays to find that magical moment of excitement when the Summer ends and the season proper is about to start.