Who's the Z?

George Street-Bridge wrote:Who's the Z?

Zebroski?

Doh!

DeePeeNCAFC wrote:We've definitely had a player starting with Z and I think we had a Q, deffo had a Y. For the letter X, I'll allow any player, past or current, who had the letter X somewhere in his name, or nickname.

Mick Saxby

Struggling with a U player though. I’ve got one for all the other letters.

Dogger wrote:Struggling with a U player though. I’ve got one for all the other letters.

You will certainly struggle as we have never had one.
Only a few y's also.

Yak & George Young most recent.

Only 1 I & 1 Q also.

Cheers

Frank Nouble 3 wrote:

Dogger wrote:Struggling with a U player though. I’ve got one for all the other letters.

You will certainly struggle as we have never had one.
Only a few y's also.

Yak & George Young most recent.

Only 1 I & 1 Q also.

Cheers

U

what about 'U-ZEE' Andrew Tiger Hughes.

Another 3 letter Y was at the club and left after "Yak".

After setting the challenge, I must confess that it took me over 24hrs to compile a list of my own, and without checking online or any other source I managed 23/26 alphabet letters, failing to think of players whose names began with a U, V or X. My list is players who've played for County since Conf South days so quite recent.

Amond
Butler
Collins
Dolan
Evans
Foley
Gilbert
Hughes
Innis
Jolly
King
Labrador
Marsh-Brown
Neufville
O'Connor
Pipe
Quigley
Rose
Sandell
Todd
U
V
Warren
X
Yakabu
Zebroski

I got 7. Quite pleased, given the dubious nature of some of the questions.

Here's the programme article including the old quiz.. Sadly, Neil Brown has since died but his site is still there.

About 25 years ago I picked up a book which still sits gathering dust called “Rothmans Football League Players’ Records". It was enormously useful pre-Internet but of course like any book it had started to go out of date literally before the ink had dried.

I don't know who Neil Brown is, but he has published a website which shows just how far we have come in being able to get instant access to the sort of stuff that would have required a trip to the library, if you didn’t get your hands on your own copy of a book like that. In turn he acknowledges a series of books which I haven’t come across, by one Barry Hugman. You can find it at http://www.neilbrown.newcastlefans.com/

I'd be very surprised if he ever reads this, but if he does - top man, Neil, you and your collaborators have produced a masterpiece. I’ll buy you a pint if you’re a Gateshead supporter and we meet at the Welsh derby.

It's a database of all players in the English and Scottish leagues since 1947, arranged alphabetically by club with details of when they joined, when they left and where they went to. And what position they played. There’s an academic study just waiting to be written about when “IF” and “WH” gave way to “M”, or “CH” to “CD”. (“Phil Tanner, originally from Newport, researching football trivia.”)

If you're from my generation, born in the mid-50s - my wife would probably say that’s in both senses of the term - you might well have started getting familiar with football by snatching the paper from your father's hands as soon as he got in from work, long before you ever went to a game. Or you too might have wrecked your teeth eating kilos of Barretts’ sweet cigarettes just to get at the footballer cards. And always got stuck with 48 or 49 out of 50. And wish you’d hung on to them.

You would have been familiar with the names of probably hundreds of players you never ever got to see. And if you have the sort of brain that salts away this sort of totally useless information and fishes it out decades later, this archive is the place for you.
It would be a great source for pub quizzes, so here are a few to be going on with from a local perspective. (Answers below)

1. Name the three players whose surname begins with V who played for County in the league.
2. What did Peter Davies in 1964-65, Jim Delaney in 1969-70 and John Layton in 1983-84 have in common?
3. Was John Emanuel (1976-78) related to Gary (1984-85)?
4. Which post-war player had the most spells with the County?
5. Which mid-70s defender had two spells with County and moved on each time to manage a nonleague club in North Wales?

One beauty of the database is it's so even-handed. Mega-careers sit next to might-have-beens. On the Manchester United page, David Beckham's entry of 265 games is flanked by Russell Beardsmore, whose talent got as far as 56 games with them before he slipped down to Bournemouth and eventually retired through injury, and the totally forgettable lightweight striker David Bellion.

For real obscurity, go to the archives of former Scottish league clubs. The interesting thing there is that the Scottish system is so stable – critics might say stagnant – that only four have dropped out post-war, compared to 21 from the English league.

Gretna are probably the ultimate example of a club overreaching itself with catastrophic effect, Clydebank also went pop quite recently. A few of us will just about remember Third Lanark in the results on TV up to 1967, but who the heck has ever heard of Leith Athletic?

OK, probably loads of people. But imagine if you were interested (or obsessed) enough to want to know how many players they used in their sole post-war season, 1947-48? It’s all here.Thirty-four, and that’s many years before you could use even one sub. And it might be a pointer to what happened that 22 of them played fewer than 10 games and seven managed only one.

One thing, however, it's no substitute for the wonderful book "The Ironsides - a Lifetime in the League" by Tony Ambrosen. This is a companion volume to "Amber in the Blood" which has now been reprinted, and I hope it also reappears in due course.

Answers:
1) Nigel Vaughan, Tony Villars, Mick Vinter.
2) All played one game only. (And I had the misfortune to see Layton's at Eastville and I have never been so cold before or since!)
3) No - Gary spelt his surname with two Ms
4) Gary Plumley with four spells.
5) Dave Elliott, who was player manager at Somerton, joined Bangor after being fired, came back briefly in an emergency and played two games, then went to Caernarfon.

Frank Nouble 3 wrote:

Dogger wrote:Struggling with a U player though. I’ve got one for all the other letters.

You will certainly struggle as we have never had one.
Only a few y's also.

Yak & George Young most recent.

Only 1 I & 1 Q also.

Cheers

Scott Young as well.

Todd Quarterley would be another q I believe.