The Big Match - Week 9

This week's Big Match comes from the corresponding weekend in season 1980/81.

It's West Ham United v Bolton Wanderers and the wonderfully eccentric hardware at the old Boleyn Ground.


West Ham played out between these marvellously distinctive goal frames foe decades and any time you saw them playing on TV you KNEW the game was at the Boleyn because of the stanchions.

Where now any similar totems of distinctive identity at West Ham?

101 Great Goals - Frank Worthington

You could put Frank Worthington's picture in the dictionary under the word laconic. With a skill so great, Frank needed few words of explanation (though he did write an autobiography, the hilarious One Hump or Two).

In his 1979 goal of the season contender for Bolton Wanderers versus Ipswich Town, the goal nets too go all laconic. 

Yes, if they were of 2016 vintage, the goal nets could have responded to Frank's wonderful keepy-uppy and volley by making a big noise and springing a rebound round three sides of the goal before jettisoning the ball to the penalty spot. 

However the old, laconic Burnden Park A-frames are happy to kill the shot behind the line which requires the beaten goalkeeper to walk the walk and retrieve the ball. The game is paused in this time and Frank's magnificent skill can be celebrated properly. 

A-list A-frames - Nottingham Forest

Looking at Forest's History of Goal Nets it was hoped the installation of the Continental D's would coincide with Cloughie's arrival in 1975, or winning the League in 1978, or winning the European Cup in 1979 and further demonstrate the talismanic importance of changing the goals (see Manchester United).




But Forest didn't install the Continental D's until the 1980-81 season, AFTER their second European Cup win against Hamburg. Indeed, the Continental D's could be seen as a herald for a downturn in fortune for Forest, much as they were for Liverpool some ten years later.

Prior to the D's a proud set of A-listers stood at either end of the City Ground, bearing witness to Cloughie and his glory years.

Off the stanchions at Wembley - Fabian de Freitas

Fabian de Freitas' late leveller in the 1995 Division 1 Play-off final is not so much off the stanchions as stuck to the stanchions at Wembley.

Bolton Wanderers

You wouldn't go to Bolton to find innovation in on-field architecture.

As much as the clean blue and white lines at the Reebok this season look like geometrically correct prototypes for boxnets in Season 10/11 -



 So the same or similar, stanchions of yesteryear could be found at Old Trafford or Elland Road.



But NOWHERE ELSE would you see a goal like Frank Worthington's!