Coming up: Notts County

The drop

There are typically two reactions to relegation; the first is the development of a sense of entitlement to return from where you've dropped. A few good results early in the season and it's easy to get into a rhythm that drives you to a successful season. We've seen this with teams like Chesterfield, Shrewsbury and Swindon in recent years. The other is the sudden panic that 'the drop' doesn't actually mean 'to the bottom' and that there is much further to fall. Bristol Rovers, Carlisle, Portsmouth and Hartlepool have all experienced that.

Early season form is an important factor in determining which type of team you'll be. It's easy to become optimistic during close season and believe that you're about to face a wad of inferior teams. But the differences between top and bottom are far smaller than you expect. County are probably still working out how things are; their opening win over Stevenage will have given them confidence, but their defeat to new derby bedfellows Mansfield will have been a shock on a number of levels. It's a bit like our constant denial that Wycombe isn't a derby; to some extent to admit it is to admit how far we've fallen. To be beaten at home by them is a deeper pain still.

So this is important for a number of reasons. We need a win, of course. We also need to give a potential promotion rival a bloody nose to knock them off of their stride before they get into it. 

Old game of the day

We haven't played County for nine years, so not a lot to choose from in the archive. I'm going with this from 1994, a time that football kit design forgot. This was our last game of the season and the day we went down after a decade in the top two divisions. Mathematically it was still possible to stay up, but nobody in their right mind relies on maths.

But, it was also notable for a moment of Joey Beauchamp magic in his last game before moving to the Premier League where he would go on to play for England and win the World Cu... oh.

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

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.