Tuesday 13th August 1968
Carlisle United v Portsmouth
Football League Division 2
Programme Price: 1/-
Its back to the 1968/1969 season for my review today and this programme issued for a Football League Division 2 encounter between Carlisle United and Portsmouth. Before I get into the programme, the first thing to note is what a mammoth journey this game must have been for the Portsmouth FC team and supporters. To answer my own curiosity, I have looked at the distance and it comes to a 700-mile round trip! Quite ridiculous for a midweek game!
Right, rant over! This programme consists of twelve pages from the front to back cover and makes for decent enough reading. With page 1 being the front cover, page 2 provides several adverts with the following page featuring an article written by Ivor Broadis, a Sportswriter for the Newcastle Journal and Sunday Sun. In his article, Mr Broadis talks about the previous season and in particular about the European Cup triumph of Manchester United over Benfica as well as looking ahead to the new campaign for Carlisle United.
Pages 4 to 6 all feature information on the visitors to Brunton Park, Portsmouth Football Club. This section starts off by stating that Portsmouth had never won at Brunton Park, gaining just one point from three league visits. We then see some pen profiles on the Portsmouth players. Ray Pointer was described as one of their most experienced men in the side having previously played for England on three occasions. Meanwhile, in the previous season, Portsmouth paid a club record £45,000 for the hero of Everton’s 1966 F.A. Cup Final win, Mike Trebilcock, formerly of Plymouth Argyle who hit two goals in that cup final win by 3 goals to 2 against Sheffield Wednesday. There is also a brief section provided on the Portsmouth manager George Smith, and the club secretary Jimmy Dickinson who played an amazing 764 league games for the club over 21 years! In addition, the left-half also played 48 times for England. Quite a career!
Page 7 provides a short piece with regards to crowd behaviour with the club appealing to the Carlisle supporters to maintain their reputation as being some of the best behaved in the entire football league. The same page also advertises two future games to be played at Brunton Park. On Saturday 17th August 1968 the first team would be playing a league fixture against Charlton Athletic whilst an XI would be entertaining Middlesbrough in the North Regional League the following weekend.
All the fixtures for Carlisle United’s 1968/1969 season appear on page 8 with the previous season’s league table coming on page 9 which for Carlisle was a decent campaign with them finishing in 10th position.
Page 10 provides information for supporters with regards to ticket prices for the 1968/1969 season and is followed by several adverts on the following page.
This nice little programme comes to an end on the back cover with the team line ups and the referee being named as Mr. P. Baldwin from Middlesbrough.
For the record this game finished as a 0-0 draw watched by 9,748 spectators.
Gareths Football Travels 