30 years of the Swindon derby - Part 3

During the day, The Manor was a mere tiny pinprick on the world. It was surrounded by a hospital, bowling club, houses and a busy shopping street, competing with the rest of life for attention. When the sun was out, it was just your average 6 sided stadium.

At night it was very different. The darkness smoothed out the imperfections, closed the gaps in the stands, switched off the outside world and put the spotlight on the club.

By March, Oxford’s 1995/6 season was finally beginning to gain momentum; spluttering form throughout the early part of the year had left us in that tantalising position just outside the outside of the play-offs. 16 points from a possible 18 had seen us suddenly gain impetus for a late surge towards the play-off places.

Swindon, meanwhile, were grinding their way to the title. They had retained a number of players from their Premier League and Division 2 days; with a bit of organisation and focus offered by Steve McMahon, there was enough quality to succeed at this level.

When it came around to the derby game at the Manor, it was the ultimate case of the Swindon's immovable object meeting Oxford's irresistable force.

Denis Smith, however, was under pressure. Despite finding some form, he was never that far from the fans’ ire. He’d resided over relegation, a failed promotion attempt and an unconvincing opening to the following season. A defeat to Swindon could have stopped the revival in its tracks. The season could have meandered into meaninglessness and Smith may well have been shown the door. In many respects, the season, and Smith's future, hung on this one game.

The game was held on a mild evening, the Cuckoo Lane End was full, as one would expect from the champions elect. The home support was buoyed by our form and the fact it was the derby and a night game. I took a friend along. A Crewe fan by birth, he liked the ‘In the Swindon slums’ song. I accidentally washed his ticket and needed to get a replacement the day before the game.

The game started with a degree of calm on the pitch in complete contrast to the frenzy in the stands. Each Swindon attack was greeted with a disproportionate amount of angst. Amidst the hysterics on the sidelines, there was an emerging feeling that we were in very much in the game. Nothing they were doing hurt that much.

Early in the first half, Matt Elliot made a nuisance of himself on the edge of the box forcing a poor clearance from a Swindon defender. He was the kind of player who always seemed to have time and, despite his enormous frame, a grace on the ball that you rarely see. He had a lot of time to think as the ball dropped, he could have brought it down – inviting a defensive blockade - or swung a leaden leg at it – which could have seen the ball go anywhere. He did neither; I was directly in line with its direction of travel and with consummate control he made contact with the ball, using its energy to redirect it back towards goal with enough pace and accuracy to beat the keeper. 1-0.

Amidst the hysteria, I turned to see my mate being cuddled by a delirious Oxford fan. He was cerebral chap who enjoyed his own company more than others. Having a wide armed factory worker giving him a cuddle was not in his comfort zone. He managed to show both delight and anguish at the same time.

We added a second through Martin Aldridge to give us a sense of comfort. As the game drifted into its latter stages, substitute Paul Moody picked up the ball inside his own half. Not a natural winger, he couldn't decide whether to go for goal or the corner flag. He just ran.

Having a Paul Moody running at you is clearly no fun and he soon found himself approaching the Swindon box. Without really looking, he put a sensational, Beauchamp-like cross into the back post where  Beauchamp, the focal point of the whole affair, arrived to volley home.

You can see Beauchamp's frustrations coming out as he belts across the front of the Cuckoo Lane punching the air in front of the Swindon fans. The derby was won and Beauchamp was liberated. It was one of the most perfect nights at The Manor.

The victory validated the promotion charge. We sythed through almost everyone standing in our way, including an equally famous 3-0 win at Wycombe. Swindon secured the title as expected and we slotted into second with a 4-0 win over Peterborough. Denis Smith's position was secured.

Next... stability, collapse and Jefferson's arse.

30 years of the Swindon derby - part 2

A number of factors converged to affect a step change in the nature of the A420 rivalry. Firstly, after 10 years lording it up, Oxford finally lost its grip on the upper reaches of the Football League, this coincided with the formation of the Premier League  and the emergence of Oxford's finest ever homegrown player.

The start of the Premier League in 1992 ignited a gold rush Oxford failed to react to. They'd been stymied by an inability to secure planning permission for a new ground and without sufficient funding or infrastructure, they were always living on borrowed time. Relegation almost came as a relief, it was an opportunity to flush out some of the detritus and start again. It was confirmed at home to Notts County with the club's most bankable asset, Joey Beauchamp, signing off with a magnificent goal.

Beauchamp's departure was inevitable, he wasn't going to slum it in the 3rd division and the club weren't going to pass up the opportunity to cashing in on him. He left with everyone's best wishes; we'd enjoy following his career wherever it took him. At least that's what we thought. Famously, he then joined West Ham and left within 6 weeks claiming to be disenchanted with the commute to East London.

Swindon had hit somewhat of a purple patch. They'd taken a chance on Glenn Hoddle, a player so talented it seemed unlikely he was going to have the patience to coach players whose abilities were below his own. To everyone's surprise, he turned out to be a natural manager and took the Robins into the Premier League. This could have killed the derby off for good had they not been caught out by the heat of the competition the top flight, and all its new-found riches, had bought. The toxic shock of losing Hoddle to Chelsea before the season began, itself an act of the cynical Premier League elite, and a torrid season in which they were persistently outclassed, resulted in an inevitable relegation back to Division 2.

The Premier League was a slightly different proposition to the one it is today. Debt was investment, and there were no foreign gazzilionaires pumping money into their toys. The supposed opportunity to succeed at the top end of the game remained a possibility, even for clubs like Swindon. They were happy to bet the farm to get a piece of the action and Swindon specifically, were convinced that they were deserving of their place back at the top.

John Gorman set about rebuilding his addled team with an eye on instant promotion back to the Premier League. He needed some impetus and a bit of class and knew of a homesick winger looking for a club. Beauchamp signed. He wasn't the first to cross the border, Mark Jones had moved directly to Swindon without any fanfare. But there was deep symbolism in Beauchamp's move. Oxford were failing, Swindon were thriving and the signing of Beauchamp was like us pawning a family heirloom to pay for food.

The lure of the Premier League shouldn't be underestimated here; the £800,000 Swindon paid would be the equivalent of £5-6 million today. This was being paid by a team just relegated into the 2nd Division, for a player who was untried at the top level of the game and who showed some signs of, well, flakiness. 

The recoil from their Premier League season was just too great and Swindon collapsed to another relegation. They started 1995/6 in the same division as Oxford. The previous season, with an instant return to Division 2 in our sights, we had one of our trademark storming starts followed by a post-Christmas collapse. However, there was class in the squad, with Matt Elliot, Phil Gilchrist, Phil Whitehead, Chris Allen and Bobby Ford all playing. Paul Moody gave the side goals. The failure in 1994/5 spurred us on to believe another crack at promotion was on the cards.

For the first time, Oxford and Swindon were gunning for promotion in the same division. And to add extra spice, our golden boy, the epitome of Oxford United, the player we had all wanted to be, was playing for them.

The two teams met at the County Ground in August in a high quality 1-1 draw. Beauchamp skulked around on the bench absorbing abuse from the Oxford fans about his girlfriend. He made a brief substitute appearance but cut a lonely figure. He was in no-man's land - disliked at the club he was at, hated at the club he'd left.

With some inevitability, Beauchamp was released and Oxford were happy to take him back. All was forgiven back at The Manor. Swindon fans, of course, could barely contain their loathing of a man they considered to be at the heart of their ignominious collapse. In their eyes, the sulky, homesick, mummy's boy was the manifestation of what Oxford was about and he'd been a cancer within their club.

Beauchamp's decompression from the Wiltshire wilderness took some time, but as he found form, our season spluttered into life. Swindon's big diesel locomotive chugged its way towards the title under the tedious, but effective, reign of Steve McMahon. Our form had been patchy; strong at home, but without an away win until the end of January. By the time we met at the end of March, however, we were on a run which had taken 16 from a possible 18 points. At that point, the play-offs were a vague aspiration, automatic promotion had been largely written off. But something had clicked, and all the struggles of earlier in the season fell away.

The immovable object was about to be meet the irresistible force.

Next... 19th March 1996

30 years of the Swindon derby - part 1

My first memory of Swindon has been curdled with the passing of time. It's 1982 and we've just romped home 5-0. As is the 80s tradition, there is a pitch invasion and some fighting. This might be some specific derby-trouble, but, to be honest, if a game in the early 80s didn't end in some kind of ruckus, then someone wasn't trying hard enough.

One man, who in my mind is dressed in a vest, a pair of bell bottom jeans and has a red and white scarf tied around his wrist, is being chased by a hoard of Oxford fans. It is like a scene from the Children's Film Foundation. Sensing the futility of a chase he can't escape from, he turns and runs at them. Shocked by the audacity of the man, the crowd scatter; the momentary confusion, plus a few flailing punches, allows him to escape into the Cuckoo Lane End.

Admittedly, parts of this scene may have been drawn from a Roy of the Rovers story where Melchester's resident football hooligan becomes a prime suspect in the attempted assassination of Roy Race. The fundamental mechanics of the story are sound.

However, the most significant thing about this story is that I remember only the incident and the result. The opposition - Swindon Town - were largely an irrelevance. They could have been Gillingham, Colchester or Northampton - one of those generic football league teams we periodically meet.

To me, derbies were between teams from the same town - Liverpool/Everton, Manchester's City and United, Sheffield United and Wednesday. Not Oxford Swindon; I didn't know where Swindon was and a 5-0 win, though a lot of fun, does not instill a feeling of intense rivalry, which requires at least some degree of injustice or negative bias to really burn. Our supremacy on the night was proof that whatever feud the two clubs might have had, the result proved beyond doubt, and permanently, who ruled supreme. When you're at school, that is how the world works.

I was vaguely aware of a rivalry with Reading because about 3 months earlier 9000 people - 4000 more than the season's average and 2000 more than the Swindon game - suddenly turned up at The Manor to watch a turgid 1-0 Oxford win. I remember queuing down the London Road and the kick-off being delayed to accomodate the big crowd. This was what big-time derby football was really like and it didn't involve anyone wearing red.

On that point alone, it was not unusual in the early 80s for Oxford have a red away kit. Nobody thought anything of it. Today, even a splash of red would result in apoplexy.

Aside from the return fixture with Swindon the following May and a meaningless Associate Members' Cup game in 1984, we would be promoted twice and have a trip to Wembley before we met them again. We didn't have local rivals during The Glory Years, they were all swamp bothering in the lower leagues. Our focus was on the battles to stay with the country's elite; Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal; they were our marquee league games. Any Swindon rivalry was an antiquity. If we had a derby, it was against Reading. We faced The Royals 9 times in various competitions over the mid-80s fallow period of the A420 derby.

The bias towards Reading during this time was probably fueled by the proposed merger for Oxford and Reading to become the Thames Valley Royals. Robert Maxwell got perilously close to achieving his goal, and although both sets of fans were unified by the same goal of defeating the intiative, the rivalry was stoked up a notch simply by the fans trying to prove just how different they both were.

From 1988, for the next five years, having Oxford and Swindon steadied in the 2nd Division and the rivalry was renewed. But, we exchanged blows to no great effect; we'd do OK at home, they'd do OK at home. We'd reached a period of stability where we'd agreed to disagree, we didn't like each other particularly, but it was difficult to know exactly what we were arguing over; the A420 itself? Kingston Bagpuize?

Perhaps I was too young to know otherwise but the rivalry was little more than a grumbling dislike. Unlike the Manchester and Sheffield derbies, where rival fans worked with each other, comparatively few Oxford and Swindon fans would meet each other beyond the games themselves. At least, there weren't any Swindon fans at my school. There was no wider forum to constantly exchange insults and taunts and so the rivalry would cool in between games. 

In addition, the second division afforded us the opportunity to play larger teams than Swindon. Manchester City, Sheffield Wednesday, West Ham, Nottingham Forest, Birmingham City and Crystal Palace were all regular visitors to The Manor around that time. The Swindon fixture had to compete with that and the occasional visit by a Division 1/Premier League club in the FA and League cups. Although always among the best of the season, it was rare that the Swindon fixture would draw the year's biggest crowd.

By the early 90s we were holding steady while Swindon began to find traction under Glenn Hoddle. They went off to have their own glory year and the derby fell into another of its periodic hiatuses.

In 1993/4, Swindon made the Premier League, at their second attempt, just as we finally lost grip of our 2nd division status some 10 years after we'd left the 3rd division. This was to become a significant turning point in the history of the fixture...

Next... Promotion and Joseph Daniel Beauchamp.

Is Ryan Clarke Oxford's greatest goalkeeper?

The funny thing about goalkeepers is they usually need to leave in order to make an objective assessment as to their quality. Unlike strikers, whose legend (or not) is forged in the here and now, most goalkeepers are treated well by fans and it is only some years later that a more considered view can emerge.

For example, in the 10 years at the Kassam, it is perhaps only Ian McCaldon who was butchered by the Oxford faithful whilst actually guarding his goal. Despite being in the doldrums, others like Woodman, Tardif, Turley and now Clarke (plus the odds and sods of loanees and juniors) have all been treated well. Perhaps it's because goalkeeping looks genuinely difficult. Most of us can kick a ball reasonably straight and true - we can at least make some vague connection with what outfield players do, but how many of us naturally throw ourselves full length to the floor? Goalkeeping contains counter-intuitive actions, maybe we admire that.

So, it's not really possible to make a genuine assessment as to where Ryan Clarke sits in the 'legendary goalkeeper' firmament. But lets try. Let's look at the three aforementioned Kassam regulars. Andy Woodman was part of a sturdy defensive unit that included Matt Robinson, Scott McNiven, Andy Crosby and Matt Bound. They didn't concede many goals, but, with hindsight, the ball seemed to rarely get to Woodman, so whilst being a solid component of a larger unit, he was a largely unremarkable keeper.

Time And Relative Dimensions In Football - Chris Tardif was equally unremarkable, but for different reasons. Unlike Woodman, he was exposed by a more porous defence and so was able to show off his shot stopping skills, but he wasn't a significant and reassuring presence and so loses out on that count. We admired him for his exploits, but looking back, he was probably just benefitting from being used as target practice.

Billy Turley was my Kassam All-star XI goalkeeper. There were times when he was magnificent, outshining those around him time and time again. He was also a narcissist and his charming eccentricities did have a habit of getting the better of him. This happened most notably against Orient in the last game of the 2005/6 season and Exeter in the play-off semi-final 2nd leg in 2007 - the two most important games he played in. As I say, it is relatively easy to paint yourself as a great keeper when you have plenty of shots being fired at you, it's saving them at critical times that counts.

Turley will forever be labelled an Oxford legend, and rightly so, but as time progresses, he will probably be known more in the Johnny 'lager' Durnin than Johnny 'goals' Aldridge sense. A character.

My frame of reference for The Manor goalkeepers stretches back as far as Roy Burton's bumcrack. Burton was deeply loved and still is. Not surprising in that he kept goal for 11 years, from the Nothing Years right to the edge of the Glory Years. The memory of Burton, however was as much about his inability to hold up his shorts as it was his goalkeeping skills.

It is funny that we are uncompromising towards managers and other players, we consider football a 'results business' and if results don't come we're happy to diagnose instant redundancy. When it comes to goalkeepers, it seems we're drawn more to their personalities; and specifically the ones that make us laugh.

The gap between Burton's last game and Steve Hardwick's first was a matter of weeks. I do remember the absolute shock of Paul Butcher taking up position in the green shirt (with blue shorts and yellow socks - just how it should be - none of this special outfit nonsense of today). 

During the boom years, Hardwick never seemed to concede a goal and my addled brain remembers him leaping higher than the cross bar to tip the ball over on a regular basis. I thought he was brilliant, but I thought everyone in that team was brilliant.

Given Hardwick's contribution to the Glory Days, it was surprising that Alan Judge seemed to take over once we reached the 1st Division. It's difficult to know how good Judge was, though. After 2 years of attacking devil-may-care, when everything seemed to go right for us, we were suddenly placed on the back foot as England's top strikers attacked a defence forged in the lower leagues. The Guardian recently described that defensive unit - as legendary as it is to us today - 'a disgrace'. Conceding goals and scratching out points was a sobering experience and whilst Judge will always be our Milk Cup Final keeper, he'll also be one which was in a team which was constantly in a battle to stay up.

After Judge came a more fuzzy period. Peter Hucker was around for much longer than I remember, but it was difficult to see games in that time and perhaps for me his 1982 FA Cup final appearance for QPR eclipses his time in an Oxford jersey. Ken Veysey's stay was brief but well regarded, unlike Paul Kee.

Then suddenly, one evening in 1993 Phil Whitehead appeared between the sticks. Whitehead grew to become a contender for the greatest keeper we ever had. He saw us through promotion in 1996 and down the other side. His sale to West Brom propped us up for a period. 

Like Clarke, he was playing behind a solid back-four but there were times when he pulled off the remarkable. I still remember this save against Port Vale in the League Cup as being utterly miraculous. The ball seemed to be sitting on the goalline with the striker ready to prod home, but from nowhere Whitehead appeared to parry it to safety. The thing I remember is that we were 2-0 up and cruising and yet Whitehead's desire to get the block in was undiminished. That moment sticks in my brain to this day.

Post-Whitehead, there was another period of fuzzyness; Pal Lundin, Andre Arendse, Richard Knight, all had their moments in the sun with various levels of success. Knight, in particular, was a brilliant shot stopper, but we broke his spirit in the final season at the Manor as he conceded over 100 goals and still ended up player of the season.

So, is Ryan Clarke Oxford's greatest ever goalkeeper? Given the nature of the opposition each keeper faced and the defences they stood behind, it's a marginal call. For me, it's between him and Phil Whitehead. However, on Tuesday, as Izzy Macleod stood over the ball ready to take the penalty, I had an unreasonable amount of confidence that he would save it. How often do you get to think that about a goalkeeper? He's perhaps the only player from the Conference years who has shown no signs of needing to adjust in the Football League. 

On the other hand, Whitehead took us up in 1996 and was playing at a higher level. Clarke, of course, has been part of one promotion team - and you could argue that the Conference is one of the hardest leagues to get out of. If he manages a second promotion come May, perhaps then we can make the claim that he's the number 1 number 1.

Wingers' Week Part 4 - The resurrection of the winger

Darren Patterson didn't enjoy a great deal of success on the pitch, he was stymied by a precarious financial situation and burdened by having the man he replaced sitting on his shoulder watching every move.

He could, however, spot a player; it's easy to forget that he brought in James Constable for one. Sam Deering was another that he nurtured into first team action. Deering like Courtney 'shit shit shit' Pitt, he was 'from Chelsea', which always sounds impressive (like Danny Rose, Manchester United reserve team captain) but is a bit like hiring a 17 year-old gardener as chief executive of a small software company on the basis that he once pruned the borders at Microsoft HQ.

But, Deering, like Pitt could have been, became totemic in the club's revival. As a winger, he already had our interest, he was small and could beat a player, and that's all we wanted. When Chris Wilder arrived he announced Deering as our best player (he'd just broken his leg in Wilder's first game at Salisbury). Where were times when he couldn't reach the penalty box with his corners. We even forgave him for a racist post on Facebook, that's how desperate for something to love we were. 

'Suntan' Lewis Haldane was another of Patterson's signings in 2008. Like all good wingers he was frustrating but punctuated this with moments of thrilling. Not least a strike against Cambridge that was as clean as you'd hope to see. The club couldn't quite make a permanent move stick, and Craig Nelthorpe, brought in by Wilder to help ignite a remarkable turnaround, couldn't stop fighting with people. We ended the 2008/9 season with a renewed hope, but still no winger to get behind.

Alfie Potter came in during that summer. He'd already gained popularity when on loan at Havant and Waterlooville where he scored in a remarkable cup tie at Anfield. With his recent injury, it would be tempting, but slightly overstating it to say that he was pivotal in our promotion season. He certainly played an important role along with Deering, in stretching tiring defenders or offering new angles when things got stagnant. But then, like now, he frustrates with his lack of finishing and occasional dribbles into nowhere. That said, he offers something that no other players does. And while he does that, Oxford fans will have infinite patience to allow him to develop.

It seems fitting that in the last minute of the play-off final, what would become the last minute of a decade in the doldrums, that it was Deering and Potter, the two most traditional wingers at the club, breaking out from a melee to exchange passes for more than half the length of the pitch, like children playing in the park, before Potter slotted home. If anyone ever doubted the importance of wingers in Oxford's history, that moment alone, nearly 30 years on from George Lawrence, Kevin Brock and Andy Thomas, proved that this club, its fortunes and wing play are a key part of its history and spirit.

Wingers' Week Part 3 - The collapse of a dynasty

With Beauchamp, Allen and Powell all coming through around the same time, it was easy to think that we had a right to continue to produce this calibre of player. And this calibre of winger, in particular. But, we were changing. The Kassam Era's nuclear winter had brought a new coldness to the club. Football was changing too. Players were getting fitter and wingers were replaced by more versatile wing-backs who could attack and defend for 90 minutes. Also, managers were more paranoid about losing, so their teams were getting more compact, with a packed midfield and a single striker. The luxury of the winger, with his notoriously patchy involvement in the game, was being phased out.

But, as Joey Beauchamp's career wound down, it seemed that there was yet another waiting to take to the stage. Chris Hackett had the rawness of Chris Allen, but he was playing in a team in steep decline. Fans continued hold him in high regard, in hope that he might emerge as the next in line to the throne. Occasionally, he'd show something of what he had, but usually only as a substitute and, only then, when he was linking up with Dean Whitehead or Jamie Brooks. New Year 2006 came and Firoz Kassam committed suicide on behalf of the club when he sold Lee Bradbury to Southend, Craig Davies to Verona and Hackett to Hearts. This stripped us of our attacking talent, even a faltering one, and our crumbling edifice finally collapsed.

The decay started some time before that though, it was impossible to not have reservations when Graham Rix was appointed in 2004. He'd been placed on the sex offender register five years earlier, for having sex with a 15 year old girl who was the daughter of a family friend. With this in his background, he was never realistically going to survive for long. In addition, he carried a label of being one of the best coaches in the country despite a track record of abject failure in his only management role at Portsmouth. It was the classic Kassam problem of recruiting CVs not people. Rix wasn't going to survive at a club which had expectations beyond all measure and failure deep in its DNA.

However, he brought with him a philosophy which tried to turn Ian Atkins' direct and pragmatic game on its head. He wanted to play the football that his text books said was 'right'. He introduced a passing game instantly, I still have the hair raising memory of Andy Crosby and Matt Bound passing the ball along their own 6 yard box in Rix's first game against Doncaster. 

On the wing that day was Courtney Pitt, a signing Rix made 'from Chelsea' (although he actually came from Portsmouth). Pitt's 9 games for the club wouldn't normally be worthy of a mention in any Oxford story. However, the newly proclaimed philosophy and the introduction of a winger to illustrate its intent, he ignited a brief flicker of hope. 

Pitt once had a cameo appearance in a documentary about football agents. Sky Andrew was seen trying to negotiate a deal for him, while he walked with a gangster limp and drove a brand new Audi TT. It was the ultimate image of the vacuous professional, presented as something exciting and aspirational. Pitt's performance was disinterested and ineffectual, to me, he, perhaps more than perhaps any other player, illustrated and confirmed the terminal decline the club was in. The club died in 2006, but the spirit of the winger died with Courtney Pitt two years earlier.

The spiral of decline continued all the way to the Conference. Oxford were gripped with football's New Seriousness. Wingers were out, combative midfielders were in. There was virtually no evidence of any wingers during Jim Smith's era. When his plan A didn't stopped working in 2007, there was no plan B. He could have done with a couple of wingers to get us out of the sludge.

Wingers' Week Part 2 - The winged trinity

By 1988 the club was beginning a period of Division 2 stagnation, dog days in comparison to today and at any other club it might have been considered a halcyon time. The thing was, what had gone before was so wonderful it meant that life in the 2nd tier was decidedly mundane. Despite this, the winger production line was about to shift into overdrive.

Joey Beauchamp had been a ball boy at Wembley in 1986 and eventually made his first-team debut three years later. All great clubs should have a homegrown legend. It wasn't quite a one club career, but his dalliances with West Ham and Swindon proved only that money wasn't as important as happiness. 

People brand Beauchamp as a lightweight and a mummy's boy. He was notoriously quiet in the dressing room, but was mentally strong enough to know what he wanted. When the club was in financial difficulties, he was linked with moves to Nottingham Forest and Southampton but turned them both down. He got to the Kassam, providing a lineage from the peak of the Glory Years to the new era of the club, but was soon unceremoniously dumped by Firoz Kassam for being expensive, injured and ageing. A reasonable business decision, but one that indicated the callous and cold hearted Kassam-era within which the club suffered. Beauchamp left after 13 years, and was involved in almost all the good things that happened in that period - Tranmere, Blackpool, Swindon. 

On the other wing, for the early part of Beauchamp's reign, was the gangling form of Chris Allen. Nowhere near as refined as Beauchamp, it's fair to say that Allen was a little, well, raw. The joke was that he only knew when to stop running when he saw the Unipart advertising boards at the end of the pitch. His emergence suggested that Oxford were a natural breeding ground for wingers. 

In 1996, when we were hunting for promotion, Allen's head was turned by a move to Nottingham Forest. He didn't see the season out, moving to the City Ground and scoring his only goal for Forest in a Premier League game against Liverpool. He stayed at Forest for 3 years, playing just 25 games. At 27, his career capitulated and he played just 21 more league games. Interestingly, although Beauchamp's career was more fulfilled, Allen's involvement in football has been more sustained. Perhaps it was a sobering lessons of missing his opportunity, he now coaches the youth team.

Amidst these two homegrown talents was Stuart Massey. For all Beauchamp and Allen's empathy, pace and youthful talent, I think Massey was absolutely pivotal to the 1996 promotion season. Beauchamp or Allen played instinctively, with Paul Moody providing a target up front, the temptation was to get the ball to him quickly. Massey, however, refused to be rushed. It gave us the patience to create a quality, not quantity, of chances. This was key to us to building up a momentum that became the great promotion onslaught of 96.

With Beauchamp, Allen and Massey at their peak in 1996, hiding shyly behind the scenes was yet another local winged wonder. Paul Powell, unlike his predecessors, was a spiky, feisty character. His pugnacious attitude suggested that he might have the steel to succeed where the others had failed. I thought he was more talented than Brock, Thomas, Allen and even Beauchamp. He completed the trinity of mid-90s Oxford-born wingers. It's very rare that a player changes games on his own, Powell could do just that. Not only did he win balls and beat players, he scored too. None of the others were that complete. I thought he'd play for England. 

With the club teetering on the edge of collapse, Powell represented a beacon for our survival. If he stayed, he'd play to get us out of trouble, if he went, with the money madness ramping up in the Premier League, he'd pay for it. During a late season revival under Malcolm Shotton in 1998 Powell joined Simon Marsh in an England Under 21 squad which he eventually had to pull out of. His problem was fitness, much of it apparently self-inflicted. His career was already on the wane when he got a bad injury against Luton. Although he returned and had the honour of scoring the first goal at the Kassam, he was never the same again.

Wingers Week Part 1: The rise and fall of The Glory Years

Sometimes we do things without knowing why. Why are we loyal to friends? We just are. Why do people fight for their country? They just do. These are things we take for granted. They are embedded deep within our psyche. Some Oxford fans will be wondering why they are feeling so keenly the news that Alfie Potter will be out for the rest of the season. The answer is simple; the Oxford fans' love of a winger is deep within their DNA.

Many clubs have built mythologies around particular shirt numbers or positions; Manchester United's number 7, Newcastle's number 9, Brazil's number 10. Although we've never seemed to make much of it, Oxford fans just cannot get enough of a man marauding down the wing with a trick or two down his shorts.

'Chicken' George Lawrence arrived from Southampton with Trevor Hebberd in 1982. George was a homoerotic dream, his shorts were like underpants, his enormous thighs, greased up, were like beacons, particularly under The Manor's floodlights. He was like a young Emile Heskey, those of you who only know the old Emile Heskey may not consider this a compliment. But George, like Emile, was quick, muscular and unpredictable.

When he first arrived at The Manor he outshone the more subtle Hebberd, who eventually established his legend in a man-of-the-match performance in the Milk Cup Final. In a sense, Lawrence's unpredictability was his undoing. Initially it was a weapon that defenders couldn't deal with, however, better players learnt to back off him a little and give him the space to make a mistake. He never made the top grade with Oxford, but was very much part of The Glory Years' story.

Kevin Brock had much of what Lawrence lacked; guile, craft and a metronomic ability to get the ball in the box. When I first started watching Oxford I thought every club had a Brock, and an Andy Thomas - local players with bags of class and ability. I assumed that was how it worked. 

Brock will be most remembered for a back-pass which allowed Everton a League Cup equaliser triggering for them a period of sustained success which included the League title, FA Cup and Cup Winners' Cup. But, his ignominious legacy overshadows the fact he was was an England Under-21 that won the 1984 European Championships. Plus, of course, he wore the number 11 in the Milk Cup Final. He even played in the Premier League with Newcastle in 1994 having been signed by Jim Smith. I only mention this because it surprised me.

Brock followed Jim Smith to QPR in 1987. Suddenly Oxford were without a regular winger, Peter Rhodes-Brown picked up the baton briefly, but dropped it on his foot forcing him into another 6 months on the sidelines. Rosie's last goal for the club was in a massive goal-burp 4-4 draw against Chelsea. After that he disappeared never to be seen again.

Following our inevitable relegation from Division 1, the deluded yellows started rebuilding for a second crack at The Glory Years. It was never going to be the same. One of the champagne signings designed to catapult us back into the big time was Paul Simpson. His arrival coincided with my Ambivalence Years, where a lack of money, transport and better things to do meant my visits to the Manor were relatively few. Simpson scored a goal every three games over three years and was, y'know, good.

In defence of the Kassam Stadium

Last year I went to the Pirelli Stadium for the cup game with Sunday's opponents Burton. I was born in Burton and have followed them with a mildly diverting interest. By reputation, they seem the model of a non-league club done good. I was anticipating a well-run, neat, atmospheric stadium but, as much as we like to romanticise non-league grounds and their warm homeliness the reality was quite different.

Our ground comes under constant attack; its missing stand, its location in a soulless out of town entertainment complex. It's been a favourite topic of Swindon fans in the last week or so. A counter to our moral victory over Constableageddon. So, perhaps its time to defend the Kassam Stadium.

So, let’s deal with the most obvious point first. It’s only got three sides. We know. It’s not like we’ve just noticed, slapping our foreheads in disbelief in the realisation that, in fact, a whole side of the ground is missing.

We know it's not ideal, three sided stadium design never really caught on. But let’s understand why we have three sides. Firoz Kassam took over the club and the carcass of three stands built during the Robin Herd years. The ground has ample capacity for a side in the bottom tier and is, in fact, still amongst the biggest in the division. Quite simply, there has never been a good reason to build a fourth stand with crowds exceeding 12,000 on only two occasions in the last decade.

The claim from some Swindon fans that we should have foreseen the need for a fourth stand in order to cater for their needs on the 3rd March. The decision for a fourth stand should was based on the financial rewards such an iniative offers, not the so-called rights of other clubs' fans.

Without the prospect of a three sided, half built stadium to move to, we probably wouldn’t have been taken over by Firoz Kassam. Good, say many, but that means we may not have survived the financial crisis we were in at the time. Either way, if we had we stayed at the Manor without Kassam’s money, chances are we would have fallen into decline comparable to someone like, say, Cambridge United. The idea that we would have attracted the kind of ownership also seems unlikely. We would have been stuck in the bog. Perhaps, then, we should consider the missing side a scar that is a constant reminder of our survival.

The stadium lacks atmosphere. Modern stadiums do, not just the three sided ones. They’re highly rationalised like they’ve been built to a kit. That’s because they’re designed specifically for mature professional sporting institutions. The previous era of stadia evolved as teams grew from their traditional roots – no stands became small stands, small stands became big stands, big terraces got seats. Stadia developed in a piecemeal fashion. You could read a stadium as a historical document. Now they’re finished when they start.

We have romantic notions of old stadia – The Manor had its sloping pitch and baying London Road End. But it wasn’t always like that. It was great when it was good. When Manchester United or Arsenal came, or when we beat Peterborough to go up in 1996. The Glory Years. But I can tell you that when it was awful, it was truly awful. Standing on a cold, empty terrace watching us getting tanked is as bad as sitting in an new three sided stadium getting tanked. So please don't pretend that the Manor or any other stadium is the nirvana that some claim.

It’s all so soulless. It certainly is if you come for a one off humdrum league game. But football is a game of boredom punctuated by moments of magic. If you stick around you'll come across lots of magic - beating Swindon in the cup, Yemi's second goal against Dagenham, James Constable's last minute winner against Wrexham, last minutes against York, the play-off semi-final,Tom Craddock's last minute goal against Port Vale, Peter Leven's goal from the half-way line, even the relegation game against Orient - a fourth stand couldn't have enhanced the atmosphere on that game. Each additional memory adds to the soul of the place. Stick around long enough and you'll begin to love it.

Above all, reading The Boys From Up The Hill my first game series, it becomes abundantly clear that, for a huge number of people, The Manor is no more than a faded historical memory. The Kassam Stadium, therefore, should be cherished because it's just about the only place that many have known as our home.