Drama of 82-83

I found Ray Lewingtons account of the end of the 82-83 Fulham season very interesting and I learned a little bit more about our great club.

http://www.fulhamfc.com/Club/News/NewsA ... Derby.aspx

 

Great read!

 

Shocking that the powers that be let that final game result stand. What about the surrounding teams from either end of the table? Fulham lost out at being promoted, who went in their place? (my guess it was a 'big club'). conversely how screwed was the team that were relegated? (geussing again that it was a team viewed as inconsequential).


EDIT; good old wikipedia. Leicester City was the 3rd team that got promoted and Bolton was the last to be relegated.

 

Now I understand the animosity many Fulham fans have towards Derby County.

The "Baseball Ground" was one of the first things about the history of English football that caught my eye. Went looking into it and, sure enough, it was an old baseball park. Apparently, the great Steve Bloomer was a strong second baseman as well!

The same site where I found out about this I also found a great picture of the Derby County team from '38 in Nazi Germany. The starting 11 from Derby were instructed by the Home Office to give the traditional salute to Hitler. Ten of them did so, but the goalkeeper took a stand:

http://beehive.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/default.asp?WCI=DisplayImage&ImgID=46974

That is one of my favorite photos.

 

The Derby fans behavior that day was disgusting, but their club failed to control them and the Ref should have taken the players off 15 minutes earlier. The Derby fans were actually standing on the pitch and at one point our midfielder Robert Wilson was kicked by a fan as he ran down the wing.
Having said all of that, the Fulham Chairman at the time wouldn't invest any money in the team and it was clear that they needed additional quality players by Jan / Feb 83.
Our loss of form coincided with the emergence of a young superstar at Leicester, Gary Lineker, who later ended up top scorer in 2 world cup finals (Mexico and Italy) and became England captain and second top England scorer of all time.
Leicester won something like 8 out of their last 9 games (can't quite remember exactly) to overtake us.

 

Welcome to the forum Glide. Thanks for giving us a bit of context from a fan's perspective. I could discern a hatred/dislike for Derby in the Fulham camp, but really didn't get the full story.

While you were enjoying that season, many like myself could only get news on English football filtered through Cronkite or Brinkley on the national evening broadcasts. The only thing I knew about English football was that Europe was going to ban English clubs from European competition. That was the extent of it living in the Southeastern U.S. The only exposure I had to European football as a kid was a Public Broadcasting program called "Soccer Made in Germany."

You look around now and you have the means to get information about your favorite club and others in England almost as quickly as someone living there receives it. The revolution that has taken place in what we can see and learn through various media has been amazing.