Get Ready for This: The Remarkable Rumbelows League Cup Era by Stuart Steelyard
By Karl Hornsey
While, nowadays, the Football League Cup is very much a footnote to a season, with few teams other than the finalists even able to remember much about it, that didn’t use to be the case. And Stuart Steelyard’s eulogy to two seasons at the start of the 1990s is a wonderful reminder of a time that seems like only yesterday to fans of a certain age, but also might as well be a hundred years ago, given how much has changed since.
While this book only covers two seasons of the competition, there’s plenty going on, both on and off the field. In fact, what happened away from the pitches of England and Wales was often more entertaining than the football itself, and this shines through in Steelyard’s account. The author is at his best when chronicling some of the bizarre events that took place, and gives as much space to the likes of Saint & Greavsie, the iconic Rumbelows Sprint Challenge and Donald Trump making the quarter-final draw one year, as he does to the action on the field. In particular, the chapter on the sprint challenge is treated with the same reverence one would give the Olympic 100m final.
“Incredible enthusiasm”
This book wouldn’t work without placing it into context, and there was a lot going on at the start of the decade that helped frame the football and explain some of the attitudes of the time. Steelyard goes into great detail to inform as to what was happening across society, but the key thing to remember is that this was a period in football history when the League Cup mattered. Really mattered. This was just on the cusp of the brave new dawn of the Premier League, of live matches of Sky TV and of football changing – for good or bad, depending on one’s opinion, forever. There’s a growing nostalgia for anything pre-1992 in football, as an antidote to the tedium of pretending that the Premier League and Champions League haven’t been ruined, and Steelyard, with this book and with his X account (Stu’s Football Flashbacks), has really tapped into it. The two seasons featured were ones in which every club was desperate to win the tournament, fielding all of their stars, with the concept of resting players or using it as a breeding ground for youth still a couple of years away.
What shines through on every page is the author’s incredible enthusiasm for his subject. While there are many bizarre moments, almost comedic, Steelyard treats the matter seriously, elevating the League Cup to a degree that it feels like the most important thing to ever have happened, which may be something of an exaggeration, but the enthusiasm is infectious and endearing. As endearing as the thought of Roy Keane turning up at Rumbelows to pick up his free TV for a man of the match performance. Oh yes, it really was a different time.
‘Get Ready for This: The Remarkable Rumbelows League Cup Era’ by Stuart Steelyard is published by Pitch Publishing
Karl’s love of writing was piqued at the age of eight, when he won a Blue Peter badge in an essay-writing competition. The location of said badge might be a mystery now, but the memory never fades. Hours spent writing about sport as a teenager, in pre-internet years when you had to make your entertainment, honed his skills, and Karl has worked in TV and radio listings at PA Media for 28 years, and the age of hybrid working means 50% of that can be at home listening to Classic FM and thinking about his next visit to his beloved Yorkshire Dales.
@KarlHornsey, hornskar
