OTD: RELEGATED '85

On this day in 1985, our beloved club had its fourth relegation from the top flight confirmed. Sorry, but history exists and makes us what we are today, so, as much as we’d like to, we can’t whitewash it out of the records. Don’t shoot the messenger!

The ’84-’85 Canon League Division One season had started with so much promise – manager Len Ashurst, appointed towards the end of the previous season after the impatient sacking of Alan Durban, had signed players that people had actually heard of, such as Howard Gayle, David Hodgson, and Clive Walker, and brought in Ian Wallace in the new year. Oh, and a relative unknown by the name of Gary Bennett arrived from Cardiff. Add these to established Lads like Nick Pickering, Barry Venison, Gordon Chisholm, Chris Turner, Mark Proctor, and Shaun Elliott and we had good right to be optimistic when things kicked off, especially when Benno’s opening day debut was marked with a 2nd minute goal past Peter Shilton as we beat Southampton 3-1 at Roker. However, we quickly settled into mid-table and below as results turned a bit dodgy, but were masked somewhat by a rip-roaring League Cup run that took us past Palace, Forest, Spurs, Watford, and Chelsea with replays, spectacular goals, penalty saves, and a pitch invasion at the Bridge that saw Colin West score despite the obvious hindrance of having to avoid a police horse on his way to the goal.

In the league, we were sitting just above the relegation zone when we took on Norwich in the final, which is when things really started to unravel. Len Ashurst had been a fabulous servant to the club during his decade-long fullback partnership with Cec Irwin, and had showed great promise as a manager, but it didn’t quite work for him at Roker. For the final, he selected Ian Wallace ahead of Colin West, when the young centre forward had been banging in a few goals and Wallace hadn’t – look, if the Scotsman had been performing at anything like his normal level, his inclusion would have been the right choice – but he wasn’t, it wasn’t, and his appearance caused someone to write “unfortunately, Len was mad.”

We lost the final, Westy was understandably upset and moved to Watford (no transfer window in 1985) and duly scored more goals (7) in the rest of the season than the entire Sunderland team (5). In fact, after beating Norwich in the league the week before the final, the only game we won was thanks to John Moore’s goal at Coventry.

The penultimate game was a six-pointer at Filbert Street, with the home side (that’s Leicester for you young’uns) not that far above us, and we lined up:

Chris Turner

Barry Venison, Gary Bennett, Gordon Chisholm, Nick Pickering

Steve Berry, Paul Lemon, Gordon Armstrong

David Hodgson, Ian Wallace, Clive Walker

... and Paul Atkinson all by himself on the bench.

It only took Gary Lineker (him off the crisp adverts) a quarter of an hour to open the scoring, as he and centre forward Alan Smith gave our defence a hard time. It was virtually all over seven minutes later when Lineker got his second, and the only thing of note after that, apart from the 68th minute introduction of Paul Atkinson in place of Walker to add a bit of youthful enthusiasm and pace, was Chris Turner saving Mr Crisps’ 75th minute penalty (he was quite good at saving penners) and thus preventing him completing his hat-trick. However, the result meant that we couldn’t catch them.

Meanwhile, West Ham’s win over Norwich meant we couldn’t catch them either... or Norwich, QPR, Ipswich, or Coventry, so we were condemned to Division Two, making the final game, at home to Ipswich, a pretty pointless affair. In every sense of the word, which is probably only 9,398 of us turned up to witness the debut of John Cornforth and the return of Shaun Elliott, with visitors Ipswich featuring future Lads George Burley (OK), Eric Gates (very good), and Terry Butcher (now there’s a man who really was mad). Despite a rare Wallace goal, the Tractors scored a last-minute winner and the season ended miserably as, despite finishing with forty points, thirteen ahead of bottom-placed Stoke, we were nine adrift of Norwich. That meant that both finalists from the League Cup were going down – I think it's the only time that’s happened.

Len got the boot, and in came Lawrie Mackemenemy, and the rest, unfortunately, is history – which, unfortunately, we can’t whitewash out of the records.