Alan Suddick:

As an avid collector of football annuals, particularly from the sixties and early seventies, I have often found jumble sales to be a rich source. At one such event I came across the All Stars Football Book No.10 published in 1970, edited by Jimmy Armfield and claiming to contain "True and exciting stories of football by the stars themselves." Amongst the usual tales of glory from the stars of the day, was one article that didn't quite fit in with the rest. A Weary Tale by Alan Suddick was subtitled as A timely warning for lads stepping into the world of professional football. The main point of this warning being, if at first you don't succeed, don't lose heart.

In actual fact, most of the article is Suddick moaning about the hard times he experienced after joining Blackpool as a record £60 000 signing in 1966. There is lots of gloom and doom about relegation, heavy defeats, being dropped and bad relations with managers. A run of bad form resulted in relegation to the subs bench, and a subsequent transfer request failed to attract a single enquiry. You can almost imagine the players coming in for training one morning and finding their depressed team mate hanging from his dressing room peg. As we get to the last couple of paragraphs things do begin to look up, and he begrudgingly admits to having "hit it off well" with new manager Les Shannon, and "got rid of the thorns in that bed of roses." Despite this relative state of euphoria, he still can't resist reminding us how Pool have struggled along for most of the season, and how they crashed out of the cup at the hands of Third Division Mansfield.

The irony of the whole thing is that the article was obviously written before the end of 1969-70, a season which of course culminated in promotion to the First Division!