If you can remember Pink ’Un newspapers and the days when FA Cup shocks really were shocks, then God bless you, you’ve got a few miles on the clock. Pink ’Uns (occasionally Green ’Uns, as in Sheffield and Bristol) were Saturday evening regional newspapers carrying results and reports of Football League matches that, in a miracle of newspaper production, mesmerising to behold, were on sale on the streets while spectators were still leaving the grounds after the final whistle. All closed now of course, along with the demise of the Saturday 3 p.m. kick-off. Who needs papers anyway when football fans can discover the state of play in matches at any time, anywhere?
I worked in Liverpool and, after a match at Anfield or Goodison, fans could take a bus into the city centre and buy the Football Echo, the Pink ’Un, by the time they arrived. It was the closest printed newspapers could come to matching the virtually simultaneous reporting of the internet era. They were wonders of teamwork, with writers, reporters, copy-takers, printers, headline-writers, photographers, typesetters and compositors all equally vital. For every minute beyond 5 p.m. that it wasn’t on the street, the Echo lost a thousand sales. Speed was everything.
Magnificent as Macclesfield’s win over FA Cup holders Crystal Palace was the other day, Palace began the match with less than half their first team and featuring several academy graduates. FA Cup shocks really were shocks when Football League teams considered winning the Cup as an infinitely greater prize. But this was long ago, when England would come to a standstill on a May afternoon for the Cup final, the last game of the season. Television offered dawn-to-dusk coverage, from the players’ breakfasts, to the journey to Wembley on the team coaches, then an almost interminable build-up to the game itself.
They were a miracle of newspaper production, mesmerising to behold
And as for the Pink ’Uns of legend, a rather beautiful little book has just been published. It’s called In The Pink, by a retired headmaster called Ian Addis, clearly a man who loves his football. It’s devoted to the Northampton Evening Telegraph’s football Pink ’Un, which had a slew of teams to cover: Northampton itself, Luton, Bedford, Kettering and so on. And plenty of matches, all kicking off at 3 p.m. and all printed within minutes of the referees’ final whistles blowing at 4.40 p.m. It is lovingly illustrated with cartoons from the time, and you marvel at the ingenuity, charm and wit of those involved in the production. And you could have done a similar book all over the country, from Weymouth to Wolverhampton, Swindon to South Shields.
Miraculously, mistakes were few and far between, even though reporters dictated their words down the phone line to copy-takers against the din of tens of thousands of people cheering, booing or hurling abuse at the referee. But my colleague Nick Hilton, a 40-year veteran of Liverpool’s Football Echo, recalls the inadvertent amputation of Gary Bennett, a Chester forward. To distinguish whether ‘Gary’ would be spelt with one ‘r’ or two, the reporter would say ‘Gary one “r” Bennett’. But when the copytaker misheard, the Echo’s report read: ‘The ball was headed into the net by Gary “One Arm” Bennett.’ Fortunately Bennett had a sense of humour and rang the paper’s sports desk to say that when he had woken up on Sunday he still had two arms.
And of course, this being football, editors could be fervent fans like anybody else. The editor of the Manchester ‘Pink’ was a mad United fan. One Saturday evening, he was producing the paper on a day when his team had lost 5-1. The headline said: ‘Reds get hammered.’ The editor was incensed and ordered it to be changed to ‘Reds in six-goal thriller’.
So long Pink ’Uns: we miss you.
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