A couple of weeks ago I did something unusual with my blog: I posted Wrong Number, which was just text and an image, with absolutely no music videos. It was well received, so I thought I’d try doing it again. Like that one, today’s piece is a response to a prompt from John Holton in the Writer’s Workshop. You can read all about it in his post here. I have chosen to go with his suggestion of telling you about a favourite childhood toy, at the risk of causing waves of nostalgia amongst those who knew and loved it like I did, or waves of bemusement amongst just about everybody else. Let me enlighten you.
As you may have seen from the header picture, I am talking about a game called Subbuteo. This was a football game (that’s soccer, for American readers), which involved the ‘flick to kick’ approach, as it was described at the time (and still is). This should give you an idea of what it was like:
I was given my first Subbuteo set when I was around 8, and fell instantly in love with the game, to the exclusion of just about every other toy that I had. It was like real football, the idea being to flick little figures at a ball and try to score goals to win games. My Dad kindly pinned the green baize playing pitch onto a piece of hardboard, and we either played with that on the dining room table or, much more frequently, I played games against myself with the pitch on my bedroom floor. I wouldn’t say that the game was an obsession, but for little boys of my age you were left out of playground chats if you didn’t play it: everyone who was anyone was a fan, even me.
Subbuteo was invented by a chap called Peter Adolph (not THAT Adolph) in 1946, and was patented in 1947. Generations of small boys owe Mr Adolph an enormous debt. As the game’s Wikipedia page tells you, he actually took the idea from an existing game which he improved, but even if we had known that at the time (we didn’t) none of us would have minded. I said I wouldn’t be playing any music videos in this, but here’s a talking one – a brief clip from the BBC tv show QI (which stands for Quite Interesting) in which Stephen Fry explains how Subbuteo got its name:
The benefits of an education in Latin! To be honest, I don’t think I ever knew that until I looked the game up, but it was clever, I think.
As well as the basic set – two teams of players, a pitch, goals and a ball – we were encouraged to collect extras, particularly teams in other kits than the basic red and blue ones. These were made in the colours of just about every team in the UK and in many other countries, which meant that you could be creating games which looked like the real thing. Many of us played leagues on our own, in which we played both teams, and much to my great surprise my team always seemed to win the league – in reality they have only done that once in my lifetime, just before I got my first Subbuteo set, but it was fun to dream. And that was what the game was all about: dreams of being a real footballer. I used to go to all of the home games of my local team, and would have loved to play for them, but that never was even a remote possibility so the dreams of a little schoolboy had to suffice.
We also played against our friends, either as one offs or in leagues: six of us even managed to persuade our school to let us play a league in the weekly free period for ‘activities.’ They sent a prefect in to keep an eye on us, and he was useful for deciding on disputes: a kind of very early version of VAR really. That’s Video Assistant Referee, for the uninitiated, which is a system whereby people in a little room miles away from the game they are watching take ages to decide on goals, penalties, red cards and the like, and usually come to the wrong conclusion.
The game has gone through various incarnations and is still being marketed today. In the age of video games that is quite remarkable, I think. They even have their own website which tells you more than you could ever wish to know about the game. It looks an expensive hobby (sorry, Buteo) today, though: you can expect to pay over £30 for the basic game, and additional teams can cost up to £15 or more, a far cry from my younger days when they were around 10s (50p) each!
The game has also lived on in the days of the internet, in meme form. In 2012, after the Olympic Games, the then Mayor of London – a certain Boris Johnson – engaged in one of his earlier forms of cronyism and corruption when he gave the Olympic Stadium to West Ham United football club, at a ridiculously low annual rental and with hugely favourable commercial terms. Never ones to fail to live down to their reputation as whiners, their fans were very vocal in complaining about how far away they were from the pitch in that vast expanse, leading someone to provide a visual comment:
I absolutely loved that, and shared it on my own Instagram page at the time. I missed this next one, though, which I found yesterday. Liverpool are currently top of our Premier League, and one of their best players is Mo Salah. He does, however, have quite a reputation for diving to win free kicks and penalties. Cue the internet:
The Subbuteo company also made versions of other sports, including cricket and rugby union. I had the cricket game too, but it didn’t feel as good as the football version – not so easy to play against yourself when you were trying to bat and bowl at the same time! Judging by the way things are currently going in India I think the England cricket team is having difficulty doing either of those in real life.
I believe I grew out of my obsession with the game by the time I was around 15 or 16, when other, more adult, pursuits opened up. But for some it carries on through their lives: there are several YouTube pages for it, in which people post videos of games they have played, and there is even Subbuteo World Cup. But it doesn’t feel like a spectator sport to me: you had to be in it to win it, as the saying goes.
Has this sparked childhood memories for you? What did you enjoying playing – apart from doctors and nurses, of course?
