[HerefordBull]

Thanks for the great info on Town players at the Battle of the Somme.

The 1st Battalion Middlesex did not take part in the first offensive but did move up 10+ days later for the second phase and you mentioned Delville Wood which was a terrible place to be because of the salient formed which, meant that fire from the Germans came in from 3 directions / sides.

McCraes battalion , 16th Royal Scots , which was the Scottish equivalent, did not fair so well as they were "over the top" on this day 1916. The battalion contained many sportsmen from all disciplines but is most famous for the bravery and sacrifice from the players of Heart of Midlothian where 16 of their top players had signed up. There was also a good contingent of players from Dunfermline and Raith Rovers.

I'm still looking for your John Wood and suspect he may have transferred to a different regiment prior to the battle. I have found a number of players who originally signed up for McCraes but then transferred prior to the Somme. A common destination seems to be the Machine Gun Corps.

[Lord Snooty]

Yes I was reading about Hearts this morning. Can't find it now but did they lose four players on the first day of the Somme?

---

https://twitter.com/Hearts_Heritage/stat...4293434370

@Hearts_Heritage: On the 1st July 1916 four @jamtarts players who were members of 16th Battalion Royal Scots were killed in action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Duncan Currie
Ernest Ellis
Jimmy Hawthorn (played in 1899)
Harry Wattie

Rest in Peace Boys https://t.co/17tz8MxiVs

[HerefordBull]

Aye, on the first day they lost four players along with some from Kilmarnock, Raith Rovers and Dunfermline FC.

[Lord Snooty]

July 2:

On this date in 1912, Huddersfield Town goalkeeper, Ron Brebner played in the semi finals of the Olympic Games Football event for Great Britain, in Sweden. The opponents for this one were Finland and a win would guarantee the GB players a medal of some colour or other.

They would win at least a Silver after the 90 minutes were played at the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, running out 4-0 winners with our Ron keeping a second clean sheet. It was one nil to GB after only a couple of minutes through an own goal and then Harold Walden, the Bradford City centre forward, made it 2-0 in the 7th.

The third came in the 75th, again scored by Walden, with the goals being completed in the 84th from Vivian Woodward of Chelsea making it 4-0 and getting his third mention on here for three days in a row.

Ron's Town team mate, defender William Martin was again an unused sub, if they had subs back then. He was there watching anyway.

So the Gold Medal match will be the 4th of July, with Denmark as the opponents.

Ken Taylor had twelve years at Huddersfield Town. He also had fifteen years as an all rounder for Yorkshire CCC. During his cricket career, he played three Test Matches for England, the last of which started on this date in 1964.

He had played a couple of Tests a few years earlier before being dropped. This one was against Australia at Headingley and it was the only game of the five match series to have a positive result. Unfortunately it was the Aussies who won it to go 1-0 up, which followed by a couple of draws, won them the Ashes.

England batted first, with our Ken coming in at number 6. He only scored 9 before Neil Hawke had him caught behind. He only got to bowl a couple of overs of his right arm mediums at the Aussies as they built up a first innings lead, with Fred Titmus hogging the bowling.

Ken only got 15 in the second innings, breaking a finger doing so, before getting clean bowled by Tom Vievers. And that finger break meant he didn't get selected again and thus ended his England career.

Welcome to Slow Sports News 1925. I'm jolly Jim White, alongside my colleague Kirsty Gallacher. Only kidding! Sports reporting is no place for a woman in 1925. Now we have some big breaking news this hour........

Reports are coming from our reporter Guy Cholmondley-Havord who is stood outside the Leeds Road stadium in Huddersfield and has sent this report via telegram that the manager of the two times Football League champions, Herbert Chapman has tonight left the club to take up the vacant post at the Arsenal.

That message reads, and I quote.......

Chapman quits [STOP] Gone to Arsenal [STOP]

Get me out of here [STOP] It's grim up north [STOP]

Well Kirsty, that position became vacant when Leslie Knighton was dismissed earlier this month, but it's unclear as to why Chapman would leave the league champions to go manage lowly Arsenal.

But now it seems that the Gunners have offered him an annual salary of..... get this Kirsty, two thousand pounds per annum. Well that may have something to do with the decision. That would make him the highest paid football manager of all time.

A statement from the Huddersfield directors has now come through and says that they thank Mr Chapman for his services and as a mark of respect have awarded him the sum of two hundred guineas. The statement goes on to say that they expect to appoint a new manager tomorrow.

So watch this space for that one.

Whoever gets the job will have a big job on trying to match Chapman. He of course, has won the League championship for Huddersfield for the last two seasons, as well as winning the FA Cup in 1922. And this really does come out of the blue as Chapman had already begun making additions to his squad by bringing highly rated Scottish winger Alex Jackson, down from Aberdeen.

Coming up in the next hour, we discuss the new British Broadcasting Corporation. Will it ever get going and how much will the licence fee be? Will Yorkshire win the County Championship again for a sixth time in a row? And when will we get another British winner at Wimbledon? It's now sixteen years since we had a British winner of the Gentlemen's Singles.

That's all coming up on Slow Sports News1925, at a Fleapit Cinema near you........

[Lord Snooty]

July 3:

On this day in 1925, Huddersfield Town appointed Cecil Potter to be the new manager, replacing Herbert Chapman, who had left to take up the vacant post at Arsenal.

Born in Sussex in 1888, Potter was an inside forward who had played for both Ipswich and Norwich before the war. During the war, he served with the Army as well as assisting Hull City during their Wartime League campaigns. After the war, he joined Hartlepools United as player/manager in the newly formed Division Three North, guiding them to a 4th placed finish.

He then had a go at a Second Division club in 1922, when he got the job in charge of Derby County, taking them to the FA Cup semi finals and twice narrowly missing out on promotion to the First Division.

Following his appointment at Town, Cecil's first task at his new club will be to get his players to adapt to the new changes to the offside law that has been introduced to boost the goal scoring rate. That new rule seemed to be working. It was not until Game 11 of the new season that a clean sheet was found in any of the games involving Town. One of those first eleven matches was a 5-5 draw with Spurs at White Hart Lane. Town's new boy, Alex Jackson scoring a hat trick in that game.

Other big wins were to come. A 5-1 win at Maine Road against Man City, a 5-0 win at home to Man Utd and a 5-1 win against Aston Villa at Leeds Road.

Potter had succeeded Chapman so well that with two games spare, Town had won the League for the third time in a row, by beating Bolton Wanderers 3-0 at home in April. The first team ever to do this.

But then just before the next season started, Potter resigned his post, stating ill health and he would be replaced by Jack Chaplin.

So, the offside law changed in 1925 from three players to two needing to be between the attacking team and the goalline, like it is today. The change worked a treat with 6,373 goals being scored in 25/26 throughout the Football League as opposed to the 4,700 in the previous season.

That was 97 years ago and given that they are spending an absolute fortune on technology to try and get it right, do you think the best thing to do would be to just scrap offside altogether?

[Lord Snooty]

July 4:

On this date in 1912, it was the Olympic Games Football Final in Sweden, the Gold Medal match. Huddersfield Town had two players in the Great Britain squad, goalkeeper Ron Brebner and defender William Martin. The opponents were Denmark and the game was played at the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm with a 25,000 crowd.

Both the Town lads were amateurs, as were all the competitors, professionals not being allowed in the Olympics. Ronald was a dentist from Darlington, who had previously played for Sunderland and Chelsea. After just one game for Chelsea, he returned home to Darlington and played in their great FA Cup run, being man of the match when they beat Sheffield United at Bramall Lane, with Ron getting chaired off by the jubilant Darlo fans.

He had just the one season at Leeds Road, playing 23 games, but still keeping his dental practice going at the same time. Martin had five games in the same 1911/12 Second Division season.

The Gold Medal match started brilliantly for GB, going 2-0 up with Harold Walden of Bradford City getting the first, his ninth of the tournament. Gordon Hoare of Glossop got the second. The Danes pulled one back after 27 minutes, beating our Ronald for the first time in the tournament.

Amateur footballers were "gentlemen" and as such, played the game in the true spirit. But goalkeepers were fair game and so when Vivian Woodward, the GB skipper charged into the Danish keeper, he was so badly injured that he had to go off. No subs back then so the Danes played on with ten men.

Great Britain made the most of their advantage, scoring twice more before half time, Hoare getting another and then Arthur Berry of Oxford City got the fourth. Brebner was beaten again late on in the second half, but the GB boys held on to win the Gold Medal.

Ronald didn't return to Leeds Road for the new season, deciding to go and play instead for Leicester Fosse. Like I said, goalies were fair game back then and in a match against Wolverhampton Wanderers, he broke his neck in a perfectly legal challenge. That was his football career over and within fifteen months, so was his life with complications following his injury causing his early demise. He died in November 1914 at the age of 33 and is buried in Darlington's West Cemetery.

As for William Martin, he was born in Norfolk, moved to Ilford and captained the Essex County side. He had played and toured with the England Amateur team prior to this and unfortunately, not playing in any of these games meant he didn't get a Gold Medal.

He only played five games for Town and served with the Westminster Dragoons in the war, which is where his bio ends. So whether he survived the conflict, I don't know.

Now then. Here's a little gem for you. A colourised version of this match from 1912. It might say 1928 on the front, but it's definitely the 1912 one. A bonus for architecture fans as well. A lot of the features of this stadium are still there today. Watching the Diamond League athletics from there last week, the place is basically unchanged. Even the Royal Box with it's canopy is still there.

And notice how quickly the keepers get shut of the ball. I don't reckon Lee Nicholls would've lasted long in this version of the game. 

EDIT: The colourised version didn't work, so here's the black n white one.

From an exciting Olympic Gold Medal match to a really drab goalless affair in 2020. It was the fourth game back after lockdown, Preston at home and it was dire. We had one shot on target, which was one more than they did.

The point gained left us in 20th position, two points above the bottom three. That bottom three as it stood right now were Boro, Barnsley and Luton, none of whom went down.

They're here
They're there
They've every f'kinwhere
Empty seats
Empty seats

[theo_luddite]

The offside laws were brought in to stop goal hangers like Jordan Rhodes standing on the goal line for tap-ins, so no I don't think they should be scrapped.

The way our useless PGMOL uses VAR is what should be scrapped. Funny when it's used in a EURO or FIFA finals competition everyone says how well it works, but when our lot get involved it goes-to-hell-in-a-handcart. Our lot are more interested in protecting their mates' dodgy decision making than getting the call right.

See the last World Cup in Russia.

We had no refs at all (from all of Britain), though that might also have been reflected in our press calling FIFA corrupt, which as it turned out, they were, but our timing could maybe have waited a few weeks. Then again, that would also have been corrupt.

[Lord Snooty]

Each player in the up coming World Cup will have twelve specialist cameras focused on himself for checking on the VAR offside lines.

The main argument for introducing technology into decision making in the first place was that from international games to games in the local park, everything had to be equal. I think that idea has gone now.

My argument is, if they're having to go this far to get the rules right, then there's something wrong with the rules. And what's wrong with goal hangers anyway? That was my best position in the playground.

[theo_luddite]

My argument is, if they're having to go this far to get the rules refs right, then there's something wrong with the rules refs.

Seriously? 12 x 22 = 264 cameras and that's before they start showing the game properly.

[Lord Snooty]

That's how I read it. Only read the first line on the Sky Sports site though.

---

Here you go. Told you I didn't read it properly.

I just read the bits I've highlighted.

The new technology uses 12 dedicated tracking cameras mounted underneath the roof of the stadium to track the ball and up to 29 data points of each individual player, 50 times per second, calculating their exact position on the pitch. The 29 collected data points include all limbs and extremities that are relevant for making offside calls.