Most liked posts in thread: Subbuteo & Other Nostalgia

I do these for charity. Just a bit of fun

 

Many a happy rainy afternoon

 

When I was a student I spent the summer of 1982 at the "Holiday Home for Hassled Heads'" in Acomb, York, with my brother Dave and our hippy mates - Niall 'Kellogs' Kennedy, Mark Brown and Bill Marlow. I used to busk near to the cathedral to get money to buy ‘interesting substances’.
At the Holiday Home we would get stoned senseless and play endless games of Howzat. The point was to take it really seriously. Dave had a proper cricket scorebook and we would do it all completely by the book - marking off each ball/run scored, changing bowlers after each over, clapping fifties, centuries, fifty partnerships etc. If there was a run out we would throw the numbered roller twice to determine which fielder had caught it. We had various other innovations to make it as much like the real game as possible. It was completely addictive - so much so that the others who weren't playing would be commentating and clapping sixes, fifties etc.

 

Be careful with those cardboard players they soon get injured and there were no substitutes back then.

 

I’ve mentioned in the past on another thread that my cousin is married to one of the Carters that had the toy shop in Bradford. Definitely the go-to place for EVERYTHING toy related when I was a kid in the early 70’s.
Definitely had an extensive choice of Subbuteo related stuff and was always a joy working your way up each floor before you reached your destination.

 

Keep it for "the boy" can only increase in value
I think you should get more than that for the BPA set alone
It reminds me when my parents were in a care home in Bradford when discussing City with my father
Another lady resident called me over to show me her Father's football medals
Low and behold her father was a member of our cup winning side he was Scottish but don't remember his name absolutely amazing seeing and holding a medal from the cup win

 

You pointing that out to someone is like the hunchback of notre dame pointing out a boil on your shoulder.

 

I was even sadder. I had a proper cricket scorebook that I spent hours filling in each match I played.

 

I repainted Clyde Best

 

I've got a Subbuteo record somewhere. It was a 7 inch vinyl, and played "crowd noise". Used to have it going alongside the full kit of floodlights, terraces, fences and tv camera crew scaffolding. I think Subbuteo players are up there with lego men in terms of things you don't want to stand on. As people have earlier mentioned, mine used to get shorter the longer the season got. As well as cricket, there was also rugby. It had some weird thing for a scrum. Never took off.

Test Match Cricket was a superb game. Rolling a ball bearing down a drainpipe sort of device to the batsman. Used to love that game, but it was absolutely vital you didn't fold or get any creases on the playing surface, or it made bowling the equivalence of kicking one of those 99p footballs you used to buy from petrol stations.

I'd definitely put that set up on Ebay if you're not going to use it yourself or hand it down. Some of the "buy it now" prices on Ebay are a bit ridiculous, but you could always put it up with a "reserve" to make it worth your while and monitor how many bids you get (and how much it gets up to).

Thanks for sharing, and for everyone who has prompted some nice memories. When I was twelve, we moved away from Bradford, and it turns out that Subbuteo teams sold in shops are regionalised. I couldn't get Bradford City where we lived in South Wales, so I used to send a cheque (mums) in the post up to Carters, and they used to send me a City team by mail once it had been cashed! Happy days!

 

I think an Avenue supporting practitioner of black magic placed a curse on that Subbuteo set.

'No Bradford City team shall prosper whilst it remains in darkness'.

[Or something similar that sounds like a rejected plot device from a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings film, it's quite obviously really not my area of expertise.]

A kid who's lived there previously had a play with it when City made it to the Prem before putting it back up there and there might have been a loose slate directly above it when Parky was in charge, letting in a slither of light. But, for the most part it's been in darkness for decades.

Now it's out in the open again, never to return, I fully expect the club to be challenging for a Champions League place within a decade.

 

What a fantastic shop Carters was. Toys, Airfix kits, football kit, fishing tackle, maggots?, air rifles and pellets...everything a kid could want!

 

Hah! Which spoilsport edited my post to change 'd*pe' to 'interesting substances'? Good grief.

 

Missing the point @Storck , been worth more than that already to us old buggers. Cheers.

 

My drug of choice in the early 80s was draught tetleys, and thanks to the pub hunt, got hundreds of tee-shirts to prove it.

 

I wish I had the cardboard ones. I was forever kneeling on mine then gluing them back together with Airfix cement. They got shorter and shorter til I ended up with a team of Fordy's midgets

 

I had endless hours of fun with subbuteo as a lad. Me and my friends had loads of teams and played fixtures just like the real thing. We even had two divisions with promotion and relegation. We started off with the cardboard figures which were useless as they soon got crushed and wobbly, and I have it in my mind that we were really excited when the more robust plastic figures became available, but Storck's set looks like it comes from the fifties and the figures are plastics. That doesn't fit with my memory but we all know what that's like in people of advanced years. We invented teams by looking in an atlas, picking an obscure place and adding an English element. For some reason some of mine came from Afghanistan so I had Kabul United and Kandahar Hornets as well as Barranquilla from Columbia and Mashad from Iran. I also had King of the North, an inversion of Queen of the South. It really was a wonderful game. There was also a catalogue showing all the English and Scottish teams strips which led to my lifelong affiliation to Alloa Athletic. The rugby version of the game had counter-like players that could be set on their ends and set off on a run. The defending side did the same and tried to 'tackle' the running disc. Pretty ridiculous and really didn't work. I'm sure the cricket game with the bowling chute was called 'Cricket at Lords'. Again pretty weird but you could become quite skilful at it. Crikey, this has really taken me back.