Time Transfer , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Roland Langdale Mark

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202 pages

English

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Time Transfer is an enchanting story about football- a game which lost its magic, and follows the trials and tribulations of Manchester United and Accrington Stanley FC.It's hard to pinpoint the exact date the magic appeared in the FA Cup. Perhaps it was there from the beginning when the very first ball was kicked, or perhaps it first appeared in 1923 - the year the final was first played at Wembley, known then as the Empire Stadium. Just as the Premier and Champions Leagues were battling it out for the top spot, the magic disappeared, much to the fans disappointment.Can the Football Association bring the magic back to the cup, or will they be powerless to act to restore the magic, like old wizards who no longer possess the magic touch?

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Children's

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	07 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838599843
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

TIME TRANSFER

Mark Roland Langdale
Copyright © 2019 Mark Roland Langdale

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781838599843

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Contents
Prologue
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Epilogue
Timeline – Stanley Higginbotham
Epilogue
Timeline – Duncan Best
Epilogue
FA Cup
Dedicated to Accrington Stanley FC, the Busby Babes of Manchester United and the Manchester United European Cup-winning side of 1968, Alex and Ben Smith, my sisters Jackie, Lindsey and brother Neil, and my mother and father, June and Alan Langdale. Thanks to Rosie Lowe and Emily Castledine for their help.
I am a football supporter, which means I belong to the biggest club in the world. It also means I have many favourite football teams, the number one being Accrington Stanley. Arsenal, Barnet and Millwall were my father’s and my grandfather’s teams, Brighton is the family team, Haywards Heath the first team my father ever took me to with my brother and Hamilton Academical… it’s a long story and has nothing to do with academics unless you count counting the numbers on the football pools as academic! Then I have a list of my all-time favourite dream teams; 1970 Brazil World Cup-winning team featuring Pele, Rivellino and Jairzinho, 1970s Ajax team featuring Johan Cruyff, the 1950s Hungarian team featuring Ferenc Puskas, Wanderers, the first team to lift the FA Cup back in 1872, the 1953 Blackpool FA Cup-winning team featuring the wizard of the wing, Sir Stanley Matthews, the 1958 Busby Babes featuring the great Duncan Edwards, the 1966 England World Cup-winning team captained by Bobby Moore, whose boots I won in a competition back in the 70s, and actually played in them and that day I bossed the game… fairy tale… lie – the true story was I was sent off for a bad tackle!
Leaving the best to last; my favourite side of all time are the League Two Champions of 2017-18, Accrington Stanley, although not far behind them are the Accrington Stanley Conference-winning side of 2006. I have to admit I am not a supporter of Manchester United, other than the vintage United sides and Newton Heath, although my nephew Ben Smith is another author in the family who has penned the excellent Hero trilogy.
This story is part fact, part faction, part fiction and part fantasy, set in the past, the present and the near future. The reader is asked to imagine this story as shown on an old magic lantern, viewed one lithograph slide at a time. Though the story is in part set in the near future, at no time is the reader asked to imagine the story viewed through a virtual reality headset, as this is not FIFA 3000!
Nobody has a crystal football that they can gaze into to see the future so there will be times in the story certain players are not playing for the club they are playing for at the time I completed the story, which was at the beginning of 2019 – Third Round of the FA Cup, a few days after the transfer window opened. But then again this is just a story and football is full of stories, some which sound more fiction than fiction which should probably come under the heading of a fairy tale!

I often have a recurring dream in which I beat the Benfica goalkeeper and faced with an empty net time stands still .
George Best talking about the second goal he scored at Wembley during the 1968 European Cup Final.

Time Stands Still – BBC report online 2015 referring to the Ronnie Radford goal he scored for Hereford against Newcastle in 1972, one of the greatest football fairy tales of all time, although Wimbledon FC, winners of the FA Cup in 1988, might have something to say about that.
Prologue
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact date the magic appeared in the FA Cup. Perhaps it was there from the beginning when the very first ball was kicked in the competition way back in 1888. Or perhaps it first appeared as if by magic in 1923, the year the final was first played at Wembley, known then as the Empire Stadium.
To pinpoint the exact moment the magic disappeared from the Cup might be a little easier as most football historians agree this occurred around the time the Premier League and Champions Leagues got up a good head of steam. Perhaps 1999, the eve of a new century but anything but a party for lovers of the FA Cup, was the very moment the magic disappeared from the cup as it was then that Manchester United pulled out of the FA Cup 2000 to take part in the World Club Championship. “It’s hard to defend the indefensible” as they say in football circles, as United, who had won the FA Cup more than any other club at the time, chose not to defend it, preferring to play in a competition that Accrington Stanley of the Conference North would have fancied their chances of winning. This to football historians was a major own goal by Brand United and a clear sign of where football was heading, which was not in the right direction. It would have been better at this point in time if Old Father Time had turned the timeline around and we’d all travelled back along the timeline in the Flying Scotsman to season 1922-23 and started again. To some young Manchester United fans, the club pulling out of the competition in 2000 was simply a story, an urban myth, as was the legend of Accrington Stanley.
It is at this moment along the timeline 2000 that the fans started to disappear from the terraces and stands in the grounds where FA Cup ties were being played and this time by a magic of a far darker variety. Shadow teams or reserve teams replaced first teams and to the fans who remained loyal to the Cup it felt as if the players on the pitch were little more than bit part players, understudies for the star performers in a show way, way off Broadway or the West End and you can forget the Theatre of Dreams!
Since re-entering the FA Cup Manchester United FC have constantly fielded a strong team, unlike certain other clubs, who obviously think they are too big for what is now being referred to by some in the media as a “small-time competition”.
Many players and fans swore their team’s name was written on the cup before a ball had even been kicked in anger in that year’s competition, their name written in invisible ink or quicksilver. If this were indeed the case then the engraver at the cup final was simply pretending to engrave the cup with the name of the winning team, as it materialised as if by magic right before his very eyes just as he was about to engrave the first letter onto the historic trophy.
Once upon a time the FA Cup had been able to conjure up magic at the drop of a hat, or at least with the help of a wand of a left or right foot from a wizard who performed his magic on the pitch. But that was all in the past and, as we all know, the past is dead and gone and is never coming back no matter how much at times we wish it would.
The FA Cup sat silently in its glass case at the Football Museum in Manchester some time in the future covered in cobwebs, what time is unclear as the crystal football is anything but crystal clear, shrouded in the mists of time. Fans young and old passed the cup by on the other side of the trophy cabinet as if it were invisible. The FA Cup, once the jewel of the football crown, not just in Britain but all around the world, was a relic of the past (as was once said about Accrington Stanley), an idle curiosity, a time capsule, a museum piece and nothing more. The challenge for the Football Association in this day and age was to bring the magic back to the cup, but the FA seemed powerless to act to restore the magic to the cup, like old wizards who no longer possessed the magic touch.
The spider spinning its web around the FA Cup was not, I’m afraid, a money spider, even though, to be fair to the FA, they had doubled the prize money over the last few years. This was too little too late, critics of the Football Assocation said, shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted, a white horse named Billy. It was Billy, with the help of his rider, who marshalled the 200,000 plus fans who were on the pitch that historic day for the 1923 FA Cup Final and that was before a ball was even kicked in the game, let alone over. Compared to what the Premier League big boys earned most who did not want to play ball unless it was money ball , and were happy to hang on to what they earned for simply staying up, clubs who, it appeared, for the most part had turned their backs on the football pyramid, which was beginning to creak like an ancient Egyptian pyramid, the treasure of which had been stolen