Great Football League Teams 35: Fulham, 1982-3

[White Noise]

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Great Football League Teams 35: Fulham, 1982-3


By Lanterne Rouge on May 23, 2012





Image available under Creative Commons © nicksarebi


In This Season:
Booker Prize winner: Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee.
John Peel Festive 50 Number 1: New Order: Blue Monday.
Poet Laureate: John Betjeman.
President of Libya: Muammar al-Gaddafi.


Every one of the previous thirty four entries in our Great Teams series has featured promoted teams and this would seem apt given the epithet 'lower leagues' so often applied to the English divisions 2 to 4.

Today, however, we feature a Fulham side that finished the 1982-3 season outside the promotion places. A tempestuous and controversial 1-0 defeat at Derby (more of which later) left the Cottagers short of Leicester City by a point and well behind the Queen's Park Rangers and Wolves representation previously featured in our annals. Why therefore the fuss? Is a team that lost 13 games and that chalked up a modest 69 points really worthy of our attention?

These boys were not the nouveaux riches of the Fayed era remember. The triple promotion winners of 1997-2001 really were among the best to ever feature in the Football League and we hope to provide coverage of their exploits at some point in the future – but the 82-83 vintage were a different animal altogether. The 1981-2 season had seen them promoted from Tier Three to Tier Two but with an infinitesimal fraction of the finance afforded to Kevin Keegan's 101 pointers.

Malcolm MacDonald can also lay a claim to be one of the country's great lost managers. Under-rated as a player, he was deemed lacking in natural ability despite a five goal haul against Cyprus for England and a more than handy 10.9 seconds in the 100 metres in Superstars. Forced into early retirement after a goal poaching career for Newcastle and Arsenal, he brought a touch of finesse to managerial theory.

Supermac and his assistant Ray Harford had supervised that earlier promotion and the club took to the higher level like mallards to H2O; commencing with six unbeaten games including a four goal tallies against Bolton and Middlesbrough and a 3-2 win over Leeds, covered by ITV's Big Match and attended by this correspondent as a 13 year old. The style of play on a new technology pitch was pleasing and MacDonald's eighties career deserves a higher opinion than the memory of his later spell at Huddersfield would thrust upon him.

MacDonald picked a very consistent line up and no less than six players were ever present in the league – goalkeeper Gerry Peyton, midfield water carrier and future Crawley Town supremo Sean O'Driscoll, centre backs Roger Brown and Tony Gale and the versatile Ray Lewington were joined as 100% men by the season's real find – Scots-Irishman Ray Houghton, discarded by West Ham after one substitute appearance and a man who would go on to forge a glittering career. Houghton was an absolute revelation that year, angling in a brilliant goal in the televised 4-1 win at Newcastle after a sweeping passing move – the presence of the Magpies, Leeds, Chelsea, Sheffield Wednesday and Team of the Eighties Crystal Palace alongside the promoted clubs gave the League a fearsome aspect.

In addition, right back Jeff Hopkins missed only the 3-1 reverse across West London at the Champions and Robert Wilson played 44 times. Up front, the attack was led by Welshman Gordon Davies and Londoner Dean Coney. The latter relied on his link up play and assist building for his first team starts, netting only 4 times, but Davies was effective – scoring 19 and keeping the Cottagers in the top three for the bulk of the nine month period. Highlights included a sparkling 4-2 victory at Molineux and dual 4-0 thumpings of Grimsby. At one point, a twelve point cushion protected them from fourth spot.

But Fulham were to slump badly in the Spring and this despite the personnel remaining largely unaltered. That Loftus Road defeat was the third of three at the season's business end, with a 1-0 home loss to main rivals Leicester especially excruciating. The young side often found it difficult to maintain their passing on that era's mud heaps and even the emergence of talented youngster Paul Parker failed to ignite the charge. A 2-0 win over Carlisle in the campaign's penultimate encounter left Fulham level on points with the Foxes going into that final game.

What followed seems inexplicable. As Leicester faltered to a 0-0 draw with Barnsley, Fulham, starring in a rather natty red kit with black shoulders, went toe to toe with the relegation threatened Rams in the aforementioned match. Trailing to a pinch hit from Bobby Davison, the Londoners pressed ever desperately and Ray Houghton tested Steve Cherry with a fizzer. But from the point that Davison put the Rams head, Derby fans began to encroach on the pitch and final moments were subject to chaotic scenes with the nadir coming when a supporter stretched out a leg to tackle Wilson as he manfully attempted to retain possession.

Subsequently, the referee admitted to not playing the full ninety minutes and yet the Football Association in their infinite wisdom decided not to order a replay because they felt it would be impossible to replicate conditions on the day. Highlights of the piece and a revealing interview with a very passionate MacDonald can be enjoyed here.

So Fulham may have choked to a degree on that May day in 1983 but can you imagine the furore should such events come to pass today?



Lanterne Rouge

Rob Langham (pen name: Lanterne Rouge) is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 43 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Football Attic, Twisted Blood, In Bed with Maradona, A United View on Football and The Blizzard.

[Burt]

Ugh...that Derby game...  :035:

[HatterDon]

Malcom MacDonald? Underrated as a player? Really?

Seems to me he set the transfer records for both a top flight and second flight player [not in that order]. I think the writer is too young to remember him in the early 70s.

[Travers Barney]

Remember Derby like it was yesterday....the walk from the train station...the newspaper programme..the pigs head thrown from the stand above us...the feeling throughout that it wern't our day...the yellow and blue pringle I wore...their thugs...the despair and kidding myself that the game would be replayed...seeing a band on the following Sunday in Soho with nothing other than fulham on my mind

My sporting life's biggest disappointment...far worse than Hamburg.

[Travers Barney]

Remember Stan Bowles effort on Superstars with a shooter...'absolutely' (the most over used word in England today) one of the funniest things ever.

[b+w geezer]

It was a disgrace at Derby of course, but the feeling was that we could have carried on all night and still not scored. The team's clockwork had simply run down.

In the following season there was an extraordinary three-match sequence against Liverpool -- a cup tie and two replays with extra time, as was possible in those days. They had their best team, Rush, Dalglish, Souness and all, at the very height of its powers, and yet had to strain every muscle to eventually squeak through. That's how good the MacDonald team was.

It then dispersed, circumstances altered radically, and within a few years we conceded 10 at Anfield.

[Travers Barney]

The Derby fiasco is on the Big Match revisited this Saturday morning.

We still won't score though.

[Travers Barney]

Good old Graham Kelly investigated this debacle....very painful memories.

[SP]

I wonder if the Kelly review was ever published?  If not, isn't there a 30 year release clause on such things?

[Burt]

I actually wrote and complained to Kelly and asked how it is that an abandoned match was not going to be replayed.

Surprisingly, he did respond. The reason given was that the pre-match conditions could not be replicated i.e. Derby would have nothing to play for, whereas on the day they could have been relegated and so did have something to play for.

To this day, that game, the result, and all the stuff that happened during and after it remains by far the worst experience I have had following the whites.