[Lord Snooty]

August 14:

On this date in 1971, our second season back in the First Division got underway with a 2-2 draw at home to Leicester City. Just like when we played in the Premier League, our second season in the 70s started full of optimism after a reasonable mid table finish in the season before.

Leicester had come up as Second Division champions and as such were invited to play in the Charity Shield the week before this game. That match is usually between the Cup winners and the League champions, but Arsenal had done the double and didn't want to play this fixture. So Leicester played the FA Cup runners up Liverpool.

The Filberts won that 1-0 and so came to Leeds Road looking forward to an easy win. They had England internationals Peter Shilton in goal and David Nish in defence and it was Nish who scored Leicester's second goal to add to one from Alistair Brown. Frank Worthington and Trevor Cherry scored for us though and the match ended 2-2.

They finished the season in 12th and we, just like our second Premier League season, got badly relegated.

On this date in 1993, Town played their first League game with Neil Warnock in charge. And it was utter bloody garbage. The match was against Reading at home, still Leeds Road, and we got stuffed 3-0.

We'd been playing some great football in the previous season and you could see it was slowly coming together when unfortunately Ian Ross and Mick Buxton both left for Sunderland. But why Terry Fisher brought long ball, boring Colin Wanker in, I'll never know.

This was one of the worst Town performances in living memory at the time...........

........but not as bad as this one 12 months ago. On this date in 2021, we played Fulham at home and got stuffed 5-1. How Carlos Carberan, the Town Head Coach survived this one, I'll never know. This was the second match of the season, with the first game coming against a Derby team in administration, managed by whingeing Wayne Rooney, who claimed he only had half a dozen players. Corberan couldn't even get his team to beat them.

How on earth did he survive this? Gawd knows!

We have a happy birthday to finish off with. Born on this date in 1957, it's Peter Hart, the captain of our glorious 4th Division champions of 79/80. He was born in Mexborough and is 65 today.

He played as the midfield enforcer and was in the Town youth team that made the FA Youth Cup Final in 74. This led to him getting into the first team squad and making his debut against Southend. He was 16 years and 229 days old then, making him our youngest ever player, taking that record off Denis Law. The record still stands today.

After leading us to that title in 1980, he surprisingly left the club to join our rivals of that season, Walsall. He'd played 229 times for us, scoring eight goals. He then added over 400 games as a Saddler to his tally, before hanging up his boots and becoming a Vicar. He was vicar of St Luke's Church in Cannock and then of St John the Baptist church in Armitage.