The Big Match - Week 26

This week's Big Match is the FA Cup 5th Round tie between Luton Town and Leicester City on 16 February 1974.

While a star-studded line-up for Leicester (including Peter Shilton and Frank Worthington) won through to the quarter finals, the winners on the day were the remarkable Continental D-A-frames holding up the goal nets at either end of Kenilworth Road.

Has anyone seen their like before - or since?

Match of the Day - Week 26

This week's Match of the Day is the Championship clash between Ipswich Town and Leeds United.

In season 1973/74, Leeds were the mighty Leeds and were on their way to becoming league Champions in Don Revie's last season

At the same time, Ipswich were four years into what would become known as the Bobby Robson era and matches at Portman Road were played out between marvellous A-frames that would see Town through their platinum, late 1970's peak.




Nearly 20 years later, Leeds were again league Champions and Ipswich had jkust been promoted to the new Premier League. Matches at Portman Road were now played between Continental D' and blue nets.



Of course, for nets aficionados, no feature of Ipswich Town would be complete without reference to the bizarre and unnecessary (yet still unique) low net supports installed later that 1992/93 season.

The Big Match - Week 6

The Big Match series reviews the History of Goal Nets at a fixture played on the corresponding weekend in years past.

This week's Big Match comes from Highbury in September 1974 and features one of Luton Town's most famous goals (at 10:30 in the clip below).

It's a 4-goal thriller Arsenal v Luton but the real star of the show is the old Highbury stanchions.


Still wonderful after all these years.

FA Cup Special - Manchester City v Leeds Utd

This weekend's fifth round of the Cup has Man City and Leeds squaring up to one another at Etihad.

In respect of the aesthetic value-add goal nets can bring to the game, Etihad's black, almost invisible nets are among the worst around.



This wasn't always the case at City. They used to LOVE their goal nets.

Nearly 40 years ago the sides met at Maine Road in the old First Division. Similar to the way City responded to Euro 76 by installing Continental D's, so after the West Germany World Cup they found a way to follow the free-hanging fashion while keeping their A-frames, and went for the hybrid design.

Off the stanchions at Wembley - Mick Channon and Colin Bell

Everybody knows Czechoslovakia won Euro 76 with still the most audacious penalty kick of all time.

But who remembers Czechoslovakia's first game in qualifying for that tournament was a 3-0 defeat at Wembley, with two headers rebounding off the stanchions at Wembley?

Great headers, first by Mick Channon, then Colin Bell.

Total Goalnets - Eredivisie

Explaining the unique Dutch perspective that created total football, "Brilliant Orange"author David Winner writes that the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe and that, "The Dutch think innovatively, creatively and  abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they had to think about space in every other area of their lives."

And in "The Ball is Round,"  David Goldblatt waxes long on the roots of total football, and finds them in total architecture - where Dan Roodenburgh, architect of Ajax' De Meer stadium proposed that the many separate elements in a building or project must be functionally and stylistically integrated into a whole vision - and the fine arts. Goldblatt argues eloquently that the "stripped down modern form (of Vermeer) can be seen in the abstract paintings of Mondrian who progressively reduced landscape and the natural world to the simplest elements of the visual arts - lines and blocks, horizontals and verticals, primary colours, black and white."

Both ideas can be seen to have come together in the Dutch on-field architecture of the 1970's, where simple, stripped down A-frames were designed to fit within the tight spaces of the cramped stadia that were such a feature of the Eredivisie at that time.

Total Goalnets - Eredivisie is a club-by-club review of Holland's history of goal nets of the era when the Dutch played the game in a way no-one had done before, and when Johan Cruyff was "Pythagoras in boots."

Off the stanchions at Wembley - Steve Heighway

Liverpool celebrated Bill Shankly's last game in charge - the 1974 FA Cup final - by undressing the Newcastle defence.  Steve Heighway fired in Liverpool's second goal off the stanchion.


Is this the only goal to have ever been soured aesthetically by Wembley's on-field architecture?

Wouldn't the aesthetics of this goal have improved out of sight if the goalnets had retained the ball?

Check out the somewhat similar finish to the goal below.


 What do you think?

Off the stanchions at Wembley - Kenny Hibbitt

Kenny Hibbitt's sliced half-volley in the 1974 League Cup final is a study in geometry - or is it physics?

Check out the strange deadening effect the Wembley stanchion has on the ball, which must've been spinning like a top.

World Cups - West Germany 1974

Before the violence and negativity of the 1986 and 1990 tournaments plunged the game to new depths of despair, the 1974 World Cup with its miserly 2.55 goals per game was considered the nadir of football history. At a distance of 35 years it can now be seen as the apotheosis of European football. Holland destroyed Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. West Germany became champions and the pace and tempo demonstrated by each became the new standard in world football

Matches were played at 9 different stadia but for the first time the on-field architecture was standardised.

So be they in Berlin

or Hamburg


the new box goalnets were the same - and would themselves go on to become the first class standard in world football.