The aim of this series has been to reflect what was happening in wider society at the time, including the effect of global conflict on football such as the final days before both World War One and World War Two and the resumption of the league calendar in 1946.
Outside of wartime we’ve covered Victorian life in London and Manchester, the early years of flight over the capital and attitudes to women’s football in the 1920s, the Great Smog of 1952, the arrival of Bond and the Beatles in the early 1960s, giants of football and music in the early 1980s, the Britpop era of the mid-1990s and the transformational effect of money poured into Chelsea and Manchester City in the 2000s.
For our final trip, we’re heading to the south coast in 1990. And football in 1990 meant two things: hooliganism and the greatest World Cup of all time.
**Leicester first played against the team then known as Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic in a League Cup tie in 1969.** Peter Shilton kept a clean sheet and goals from Rodney Fern and Malcolm Manley secured a 2-0 win for the Foxes.
Bournemouth didn’t even play second division football until 1987, when Leicester won 3-2 at Dean Court. A bizarre quirk of the fixture computer saw Bournemouth travel to Filbert Street on three successive Boxing Days from 1987 to 1989 – the first two games were won 1-0 by the visitors before Kevin Campbell and Gary Mills goals helped Leicester to a 2-1 win in the third festive meeting. The following April, 14th-placed Leicester visited a Bournemouth side third from bottom with four games remaining.
Madonna’s Vogue was top of the charts, preceded by Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinead O’Connor, Dub Be Good To Me by Beats International and The Power by Snap! It was knocked off number one by Adamski’s Killer which gave way to World in Motion. In short, it was a great time for music.
**This was my first season following Leicester City.** I was 5 years old so I don’t know what my first game was but I vividly remember the 5-2 defeat to Sheffield United at Filbert Street on the final day of the season.
Victory at Bournemouth was one of only two away wins since New Year’s Day. The team was: Hodge, Mauchlen, James, Walsh, Ramsey, Paris, North, Reid, Oldfield, McAllister, Wright.
It wasn’t a vintage Leicester side but it was absolutely packed with character. Footballers didn’t come any tougher than Mauchlen, Walsh and Ramsey. Gary McAllister was a classy midfielder who would go on to achieve great things in the game and it was Tommy Wright who kickstarted my lifelong love of flying wingers.
Bournemouth were managed by Harry Redknapp. Up front was Luther Blissett in one of two spells away from Vicarage Road in the midst of 503 appearances for Watford. The first came for AC Milan seven years earlier. This game was one of Bournemouth’s final outings in an all-red home shirt before returning to the red and black stripes they first wore in homage to AC Milan in 1970. It’s a familiar look to modern-day Premier League supporters. After periods with less black on their shirts, they’ve looked much like the Rossoneri since 2011.
Redknapp’s midfield contained future Cherries manager Sean O’Driscoll and Gavin Peacock, who would go on to play for Chelsea, Newcastle and QPR before his current status as a Christian pastor holding forth about submissive wives on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
**Biblical rain lashed down on the south coast, forming a large puddle in the goalmouth at one end of the pitch.** Marc North opened the scoring for Leicester with a close-range finish after McAllister fed Wright down the left. David Oldfield soon made it two in front of a jubilant, if slightly damp, away end. Peacock narrowed the deficit with a low left foot shot from outside the box, but Paul Reid restored Leicester’s two-goal advantage before half time.
Bournemouth substitute Trevor Aylott headed the home side’s second goal of the game but, despite Alan Paris being sent off for Leicester in the closing stages, they couldn’t find an equaliser.
In his post-match interview, Redknapp bemoaned Bournemouth’s injury problems.
“I’ve got 11 pros to choose from and two loan players,” said Redknapp. I haven’t got any back four players. I’m back to YTS kids again. It’s a difficult situation for a second division club to be in, obviously.
“We’re playing Leicester tonight who have spent a couple of million pounds probably in the transfer market. And we’re supposed to play against them with a team of patched-up, non-league, reserve team type players. But we matched them and I felt we were the better side, we just didn’t get the breaks.”
**A couple of weeks later, Leeds United fans descended on Bournemouth for a crucial game which Leeds needed to win to go up while Redknapp’s side needed to win to stay up.**
As recently as three years ago, Bournemouth fans still had events that day on their minds.
“The 1990 invasion of Bournemouth by the Leeds so-called football supporters was a weekend I will never forget or forgive,” wrote Bournemouth Echo reader Alan Burden. “Back in 1990 the police were well aware that serious trouble was brewing and requested the Football League to move the fixture to the following midweek but they would have none of it.
“What followed was a mass invasion by upwards of 10,000 Leeds followers who started arriving on the Friday with the match being played on the Saturday leaving Sunday and the Bank Holiday Monday free for the town to be wrecked.”
**This was a particularly violent example of a recurring issue at the time.** With the World Cup approaching, Margaret Thatcher’s government briefly considered withdrawing the England team from the tournament in response to the Hillsborough tragedy of the previous year. The deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe had written that “the likelihood is that the determined hooligans will make their way to Italy and find a different cause to champion.”
In an early premonition of the current move to digital ticketing, the BBC reports that Thatcher had “wanted to introduce an ID card system that would have meant only registered fans could attend matches.”
Middle-class interest in football grew at the outset of the 1990s. “Italia ’90 came at an opportune moment for change, along with the Taylor Report, which was quite a radical report and said football clubs had to treat their fan base as customers,” said Professor Matt Taylor from De Montfort University’s International Centre for Sports History and Culture when interviewed by the BBC in 2018. “It was one of a number of things that helped to position football at the forefront of English cultural life. Football, amazingly, was seen as cool and that wasn’t likely to happen five or six years prior to that.”
Within two years, the Premier League had replaced the First Division and football, infamously, truly began for many. By the end of the decade, Leicester City would be back in the top flight having visited Wembley six times and won a League Cup with another just weeks away.
**For now, it’s back to the old Division Two for our beloved Foxes.** And who knows what the rest of the 2020s will bring?