What, is it 1974 all over again?

It is a commonly held if rather lazy view that the 1970's were unremittingly grim.  A decade stuffed to the gunnels with 3-day weeks, power cuts, beige furniture, the Yorkshire Ripper and flared jeans.  Those of us that lived through the 1970's as a kid tend to hold the decade in a more positive light.  

No, we kids recall more playing football with our mates until your legs ached and / or you were dragged home at dusk.  Penny sweets the size of your fist.  Real Star Wars at the cinema.  Watching Tiswas with your Dad.  I enjoyed the flan-flinging and pop videos.  Dad very much enjoyed Sally James.  If you were posh, i.e. you lived on the "new" Ise Lodge estate, you watched Multicoloured Swop Shop and your Dad had to settle for a disinterested squint at Maggie Philbin.  

Roles were reversed for The Sweeney (basically Life on Mars for real) when we joined parents for a hard-hitting drama where whisky sozzled coppers took on tooled-up robbers armed only with heavy sideburns and an even heavier length of lead pipe.

Music styles in the 70's were brilliant and seemingly every month brought a brand new type of music.  The decade started with the Beatles and went through Glam, Prog, Rock, Soul, Disco and Punk before depositing us with the New Romantics as the 80's dawned.  Take a random look at any singles or album chart from the 1970's and tell me it wasn't a time of musical Titans?  Compare that with the sludge being serve up now.

Football was real football back then of course.  Heavy balls.  Heavy pitches.  Heavy players.  The fighting on the pitch was only just trumped by the amount of fighting on the terraces and in the nearby streets.  It was definitely a different time for football and, to be honest, much of the dickheadedness isn't missed now.

Or so we thought before a wanabee "crew" seemed to have attached themselves to the Poppies over the past few weeks, culminating in the ridiculous scenes at the end of the Telford game.  I mean, what the f*ck is going on?  

Pissed-up would-be hardmen shouting the odds and throwing objects, and themselves onto the pitch.  Stupidity which culminated in the descent into actual violence after the Telford game.  Hopefully the subsequent arrests and naming-and-shaming on the official club Facebook page will deter these arseholes from venturing to Latimer Park again.  

The club, football and society doesn't need these wastes of skin.  Let them go back to acting the hard men in their own pits where they have our complete permission to drink, smoke and inject whatever they want into their bodies while they fritter their empty, preferably not too long lives away.

"C'mon Gary, get the telly onto ITV....."