Programmes

& fanzines

Pile them up in the spare bedroom

Season 2000-2001 (so far)

Luton (28 Oct) by Daniel Jennings

Cost: £2.
Pages: 48 including covers.
Good things: 'Captain's Log' - done by the Luton skipper. 'Hatters Away' - clear travel info. Proper match reports. Good 2nd Division review.
Bad things: Same stats and facts as in every other programme up and down the land. Team line-ups rather than squad line-ups - and only two blank spaces for team changes.
Bizarre things: One whole page devoted to the Club Secretary, Cherry Newbery.
Great one-liner: 'It was frustrating to have Tuesday's game called off…At 4pm there had been little rain in the area…Two hours later there was a downpour and the pitch took a real soaking' (p.9).
Verdict: 7/10.


FANZINE
Mad As A Hatter
The May '99 edition had 40 pages and cost £1. It's a varied magazine, with good visuals and is affectionately known just as Mad. This edition is dominated by the impending threat of receivership.

Peter Davies

Swindon (7 Nov) by Gareth Davies

Cost: £2.
Pages: 56 (including cover).
Good things: Lots of content and things to read, which made a welcome change to most offerings we get. Quite a bit of Wrexham-related stuff.
Bad things: With Swindon being called the 'Robins' too, it made for some confusing articles. You'd read some pieces thinking they were about Wrexham…but halfway through you'd discover they were about Swindon.
Bizarre things: Apparently we had Duncan Ferguson playing for us. No mention of Darren.
Great one-liner: Re. the 1-1 draw at the County Ground in 1995 when Wrexham outplayed Swindon for most of the game: 'Wrexham were another team who came to "Fortress" County Ground looking for a point and they got it in a 1-1 draw.' Must have been a different game!
Verdict: Quite good. 7/10.


FANZINE
stfconline.co.uk
No Swindon fanzine, so we had a look at the unofficial STFC website, stfconline. It's quite smart and very red. There's also 'The Darren Simmons Column' (whoever Darren Simmons is).

Peter Davies

Millwall (11 Nov) by Dean Domerecki

Cost: £2.
Pages: 48.
Good things: Lots of them – good action photos from recent matches, player profiles that are worth reading, treatment room item, etc. Also a massive amount of ‘community-related’ input, of interest to all ages.
Bad things: None to mention really.
Bizarre things: A page devoted to Millwall players killed in the two World Wars – unusual, but not unwelcome. An advert for a pub called the Pyrotechnists Arms. 
Great one-liner: Mark McGhee: '…It is where games are tighter that we have to learn the old Arsenal way of winning 1-0.' No sooner said than done.
Verdict: A top programme. It even names the ballboys and ballgirls, for goodness’ sake.

FANZINE
The Lion Roars
Issue 127 of TLR was available on the day of our visit, costing £1 for 36 near-A4 size pages, complete with glossy colour cover. This really does have a professional feel to everything about it – layout, quality of pictures, quality and variety of contributions and regular features, advertising, and so on, and so on. There’s a good balance of material used – reviews, special reports, fans’ articles and letters – which all seem to confirm that even though they’re most definitely a big-city club, they’re still very much a ‘local’ concern when it comes to the commitment and warmth of the fans towards their club. Worth more than the cover price, so look out for it next time – if there is one.

Dean Domerecki

Wales v Cook Islands: RL World Cup (29 Oct) by James Morris

Cost: £3. But it was the official programme for the entire event.
Pages: A mind-boggling 136! It was a mighty tome indeed.
Good things: The whole thing, really. Detailed contents, foreword from some Blair chap, competition history, massive team details with pics, the rules, the ref’s signals, the development of RL as a worldwide sport. Just a general feel that the event was being used to 'break' League in non-League areas. In itself, the programme could be sold as a self-standing intro to the sport.
Bad things: None at all.
Bizarre things: Lebanon entered a team in the tournament. All very well and good, but it transpires that they are actually formed by Australia’s Lebanese community. So, surely they can’t claim to represent a country the best part of a hemisphere away? Or even play in the country they supposedly represent (they don’t). As well as this, they had to play their way into the tournament through the Mediterranean qualifying group. Geographical chaos.
Great one-liner: 'The aim of the game is to win, of course, by scoring more points than the other side.' You don’t say.
Verdict: Very good.