LEAGUE!LADDERS
SIMON SHELDON RECALLS WHEN SIMPLE TEAM TABS PROVIDED PLENTY OF AMUSEMENT...
Recalling an old favourite
BACK in the time before the internet dominated the world and young people’s heads were looking down at their phones, me and thousands of schoolchildren were obsessed with updating each week our league ladders presented as a free gift with Shoot magazine.
The magazine launched on August 16, 1969, with a set of league ladders and also with the legendary Bobby Moore on the front cover – he became Shoot’s first star columnist. This issue has now become very collectable indeed.
The ladders would be included as a free gift with the magazine just before the start of each new season. They were made of thin cardboard and each club’s name was on a small perforated tab, usually in the team’s colours.
Sometimes clubs would have random colours, which I think was just to make the different clubs stand out or because the printers only had certain colours that they could use.
The league ladder itself was a piece of card with the various divisions in England and Scotland printed on one side.
There was a slot cut for every posi- tion in the division, enabling us to move the teams around as the league table changed after the results on a Saturday afternoon.
The ladders would be given away first and then each week a set of team tabs from two divisions would be included - it would take about four or five weeks to collect the whole set.
Woe betide you if you missed a week – it would feel like the end of the world if you were missing teams from the Fourth Division or the Scottish Second Division!
Of course, back then almost all matches were played at 3pm on a Saturday and with the results in by 5pm, the updated tables would be shown on Grandstand or World of Sport, depending on which channel you were watching.
But as you only got a quick look and couldn’t pause live TV like you can now, it was easier to wait until the following morning and look at the Sunday papers.
That was unless you were lucky to have a TV with access to Ceefax. Then by using the hold button on the magical
remote control and using page 402, you could read the tables for as long as you wanted.
You had to be very careful with the team tabs as they were easy to lose, either down the back of the sofa, being hoovered up by mum or eaten by the dog!
Before the start of the season I would place the tabs in to the ladders in the order that I thought they would finish and write the position on the back of the tab.
At the end of the season, I would then see how many I got right.
I have also heard of people using the team tabs in making an FA Cup-style draw and playing the resulting matches either by rolling a dice, using a table football game like Subbuteo or Striker, or by playing with friends in the park.
For the first few weeks of the season, changing the tabs around was so exciting but then the thrill of rearranging the positions of dozens of pieces of cardboard that you’d only moved the week before began to dwindle.
Many of my friends would give up and lose interest, but I kept going. You could also fill in your team’s results and plot their league position on the progress chart.
I also learnt the names of the home grounds of all the 92 league clubs, at least for that season. They didn’t change as often as they do now, but that is for another time…
As far as I know, the first ever version of league ladders were given away with the Rover comic in 1923. Produced by DC Thomson, the ladder card was printed with only the First Division. There were 22 team flags printed in the correct club colours of the day that had to be cut out using a sharp knife or scissors. Then you had to stick a pin through two holes on it to make it look like a flag on a flagpole.
For the start of the 1959-60 season, Fleetway publications’ Lion comic gave away a set of ladders and team tabs for all four English divisions.
I was delighted to recently discover while looking on E-Bay that sets of old league ladders were available to buy, and I also came across a company called Retrocrafts.
They produce various versions for the leagues in England and Scotland, including retro looking 50s, 60s and 70s, plus leagues from abroad.
So, you can keep track of Barcelona to Lazio, or Dynamo Kiev to LA Galaxy. I went for the modern version of the English Leagues but was so tempted to go for the 50s version – it looked great!
Looking back, it seems strange that bits of printed cardboard could create such interest, but it does remind me of many happy childhood memories…