With the culmination last Sunday of
Line of Duty (with the long-awaited revelation of the identity of 'H' as the ineffectual Brummie Ian Buckells)
fans of the show will no doubt be bereft tonight at 9pm with no suspects left to argue over and family quarrels about the identity of 'H' left to fester - after all, Buckells -really!!!!
Fear not, because at nine-o-clock tonight we will reveal the identity of 'B' (or more precisely goalkeeper 'B') who appears below in this shaky b/w photo taken by an amateur at a game at The Valley in season 1972-73. If you want to have a stab at it before 9pm then please do so.
There are 23 League games and 3 Cup ties to choose from but there are further clues in the two
What I did during Lockdown posts on Page 2 of CL. Peta Balac (Plymouth) and Jim Brown (Chesterfield) have already been ruled out, as has Charlie Wright our ex-stopper (and therefore instantly recognisable), who played for Bolton in both the league and cup games at The Valley that season. Final clue: LoD H was not H and similarly Goalie B is not B.
Comments
Based on your previous clues, I believe the goalkeeper is Jim Eadie of Bristol Rovers on 24 April 1973.
According to Colin Cameron’s book, Mike Flanagan’s goal was scored on 20 minutes. Therefore, although it was a night game, it would have still been light at around 19:50.
Bristol Rovers kit at the time was blue shirts, white shorts and white socks. They had temporarily dispensed with their more familiar quarter block design. This matches the earlier picture showing Flanagan shooting.
you could well be onto something here and very astute deduction
But are you suggesting that the 20th minute Mike Flannagan goal in the game v Bristol Rovers was the one in the picture (see below)?
but couldn't do this last week in absence of LoD because of the Hull game.
Giving your age away with Yashin !- BTW his life story is amazing.
Keep the faith - the identification will not be100 percent but 99.9 percent accurate and is backed up by another player who played in the game.
But let's narrow down the suspects a bit more - we initially discounted all evening/floodlight games because the two photos (which are from the same game) were taken in daylight but, as @Valley_Stroller has pointed out - the photos could be from the first half of a Spring-time game before the floodlights were switched on and the evening game v Bristol Rovers on 24th April 1973 had a 7.30 kick off and thanks to William Willett (the inventor, for want of a better word) of British Summer Time (BST) which, by dint of the clocks being put forward by one hour, gives us to this day an extra hour of evening light during summer
If it was this game then @V_S has also told us that only one goal was scored in the first half and that was by Mike Flanagan in the 20th minute (according to Colin Cameron's book).
We can state that the photo of Flanagan (see above) does not show him scoring v Bristol Rovers - doesn't mean to say that it's not that game but the photographer would have been unlucky to have missed the Flanagan goal but capture instead one that he missed when one-on-one with the keeper. It is inconceivable though that the photos are from the second half of that game which would not have started until maybe 8.25pm.
Which leaves Jim Eadie still firmly in the frame perhaps but take a look at the crowd if it's clear enough on the photos - the attendance for the Bristol Rovers game is given by CC as a paltry 4,741 - the 1 being @V-S who was at the game - but the bank to the south (left) of the West Stand looks well-populated if this is the case, as does the Covered end!
We can reveal that the major breakthough in the identification came via the Chesterfield FC equivalent of CL but surprisingly they ruled out their own keeper Jim Brown who played in The Valley game on 3rd Feb 1973 - despite the name he isn't 'B'.
We played QPR ... so it's Phil Parkes.
The strongest case so far for a evening game though is that put forward by @Valley_Stroller v Bristol Rovers at the other end of the season,
It's getting close for the reveal - so any more for any more - the final pieces of the puzzle which helped us to solve this arrived from Chesterfield, Port Vale and then the Charlton Museum.
With Plymouth’s Peta Balac having been ruled out as the opposition keeper in the two photos under investigation where could we go? Much of our work had so far had been based on the assumption that the Flanagan photo shows him in the process of scoring; what if he missed or the keeper saved? Alan Dryland had already cautioned that this might be the case and had provided a list of those home games (11 in all) where Flanagan didn’t find the net. However, we now had the kit card to play and very quickly we can home in on Chesterfield and the 2-2 draw played at The Valley on 3rd February 1973. The Chesterfield kit works beautifully well with a royal blue shirt, white shorts and white socks. Once again back to Colin Cameron and this time we get the name Jim Brown. Hey, could he be Goalkeeper B – not Balac but Brown.
Google him and we find he played 47 games for Chesterfield between 1972-73 before being transferred to Sheffield United. This was looking good. Off we went to join the Chesterfield equivalent of Charlton Life and the admins let us in without too much trouble – after all, we’re not Millwall. The photos go up on the Chesterfield site but no its not Jim Brown either, but then a stroke of luck, a Chesterfield fan who obviously knows his 1970s footballers conjures up the name of Jim Eadie the Bristol Rovers keeper. For the umpteenth time its back to Colin Cameron but the Rovers game was an evening game and had hitherto been discounted. Hang on though, distant memories come flooding back of being at evening games when the floodlights were switched on during the game or at half time. Could the photos be from the first half of the Bristol Rovers game which was played only one week before the start of May? It turns out that BST in 1973 came in on the 18th March so five whole weeks before the Rovers game and opening up the possibility that floodlights weren’t required for the first half. What about the kit? Well, amazingly it works. 1972-73 was the final season before Rovers reverted to their more well-known quarters but that particular season they wore instead a plain blue shirt, white shorts and white socks.
If it was indeed Jim Eadie in goal for Bristol Rovers in the first half then the Flanagan picture might show him in the act of scoring past Eadie in the 20th minute at the open end. The other two Charlton goals in the 3-3 draw were scored in the second half so if we assume that Flash did indeed score in the first half of that match then those other two goals must have been at the opposite Covered End and presumably after the floodlights had been switched on either at half-time or in the latter stages of the first half.
Well we now know that the Flanagan photo is not the one of him scoring against Bristol Rovers but, remarkably, the other one is ! Alan Dryland had enlisted the help of the Museum and they came up trumps. A scrap book of old newspaper cuttings reveals that in the 20th minute of the game v Bristol Rovers on 24th April, 1973, Mike Flanagan curled in a cross to the far post which…’Eadie came out to collect as graceful as you like, misjudged the flight completely and was left looking slightly foolish as the ball finished in the net’. The first photo shows Eadie back-peddling as the ball, captured seemingly high over the West Stand, is frozen on its way ultimately looping over Eadie’s head on its way into the net from the Flanagan cross whilst the other photo, which we thought must be the Flanagan goal, is more likely to be the incident described shortly afterwards in the cutting where: ‘clean through he (Flanagan)had the goalkeeper sprawling helplessly in front of him….but… side-footed the ball straight at the grateful goalkeeper’.
Someone on the Chesterfield site even claimed that it was probably the prematurely bald John Rudge who was the Rovers player to the left of Eadie on the Flanagan photo. Rudge certainly played in the game but surely not, how far could this go? Were we going to be able to move on and identify people in the crowd next (where were you standing @Valley_Stroller?). Nothing ventured, nothing gained and a letter dispatched to John Rudge, former manager and now president of Port Vale FC, brought the following response…..’He (Eadie) was a bit heavy and it shows in the photos but a good keeper’. Unfortunately, John Rudge makes no comment about his own putative appearance in the photo and we can forgive him for that because it seems that we do now have, if not conclusive, then as near as dammit, very good evidence that the photos, which have been lying unloved at the bottom of a box for decades, were taken by an amateur, at the Charlton v Bristol Rovers game on 24th April 1973 and that the opposition keeper (or keeper ‘B’ as he became known) was Jim Eadie.
So, it’s a Gold Star to @Valley_Stroller who picked up on the fact that it could be an evening game and picked up also on the fact that Bristol Rovers did not play in quarters that season.
We tried to put some doubt in his mind re the photo of Flanagan – stating that it was not a photo of him scoring against Bristol Rovers – which is of course true – the shot was saved.
We also commented upon the crowd which looks like it should total far more than 4,741 reported by Colin Cameron for the last game of the season v Bristol Rovers – how many were stood on the East Terrace – we can’t tell? That didn’t put off @V_S either so maybe it’s a double Gold Star for him.
Thanks to everyone who ran along with us on this thread either by viewing or commenting and thanks to whoever it was who suggested the Line of Duty analogy – I know we deserved a Whoosh but we decided instead to go with it and - Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey – it kind of worked !
Interesting stuff. I still can’t remember it though!
I would have been stood on the East Terrace with my dad and brother. I was 11 at the time.Eadie was known by the Gasheads of the 1970s as The Flying Pig.
The Flying Pig is warmly remembered for his part in Rovers promotion season of 1973-74.
He wanted to do a piece on a professional football game for a student newspaper. Exeter City would have been the obvious choice but as I owed him I wrote to Charlton requesting a press pass for a game and to my surprise, they sent one back (very little security in those days of course).
I can't remember much else (it was the 1970s and my life-style was shall we say Bohemian for want of a better description). I can't even remember getting the photos but they would have gone into a box at my parents' house in Sidcup in the mid-1970s where I kept all my Charlton progs and memorabilia and I don't think they saw the light of day again until the recent Lockdown.
I never had the money to get back from Devon to see many Charlton games during the 70s and only started going regularly again in the 80s and 90s when I was earning. Although I remembered the circs of the taking of the photos I had no clear recollection of what game it was when I discovered the photos at the bottom of the box after a gap of what - 45 years?