On This Day for 26th September looks at the programme produced by Huddersfield Town for their return to the top flight in the 1970/71 season. Read our notes on the Terriers’ issue below and see the other Division One issues from 1970/71 here.
The Terriers’ issue for the 1970/71 season was a standard example of the club’s programmes from the time, offering 20 A5-sized pages for the one-shilling cost.
The programme opened with a short column from Manager Ian Greaves, who wrote about ‘The Luck of the Game’, noting the club’s lengthening injury list but adding that “sad faces are banned at our club”. The idea of the part that luck plays in the game was taken up by Bill Lowis in his column titled ‘Looking at the First Division’. Lowis pointed out the overuse of the word luck to cover up often poor play and mistakes by players.
Visitors West Ham United were covered over two pages, with a full-page team group picture accompanied by brief profiles of the players. The text noted the inclusion in the Hammers’ ranks of former England striker Jimmy Greaves. A related article analysed the threat posed by West Ham with their ‘deadly’ counter-attacking football, which Huddersfield had witnessed at first-hand when defeated by the Hammers in the 1968/69 FA Cup, when Huddersfield was still a Division Two club.
The programme also included an action shot of Huddersfield’s centre-half Roy Ellam, from a recent League Cup tie against Nottingham Forest, while winger Jimmy Lawson was the subject of ‘Finer Points of the Terrier Breed’ – a brief feature on the “background and opinions” of its subject.
The first team’s season record was spread over the centre pages of the programme, while the club’s reserve team was covered with a league table, match reports, and appearance records. ‘Terriers Titbits’ meanwhile pulled together news snippets from around the club, completing a solid programme from Huddersfield.