This is my school team, circa 1948, judging from the members. I'm not there, I wasn't good enough. Note that we had football boots, not shoes. We had to give up clothing coupons for the boots and the rest of the gear.
From what I've seen of this year's world cup, and what I remember of our play, this team would have won the cup :lol:
They let kids play in the adult league I play in each week and frankly, I don't think it's a good idea unless it's one or two "star" players. We did this in the first league I played in here and it worked quite well as the kids got stronger and the adults filled in the gaps when needed.
On Wednesday though, my team (ages range from 22 to 35) pretty much obliterated a team made up of 15 and 16 year olds 16-2 as we needed the goal difference to go up to 2nd in the league. The rules in the league are that if one team has a seven goal advantage, the losing team gets an extra player so for about 45 minutes, we had to deal with an extra man, yet barely noticed it and bagged another nine goals.
Not sure it is a good learning experience for kids to get walloped and I'm unsure why the league doesn't just run something for their age group and experience.
That is a fascinating picture though - do you know what ground it was taken at Michael?
QPRr's ground, Loftus Road.
Normally, our school games were played at Wormwood Scrubs, so they may have been in the borough or district finals. The right winger always socialised with the opposing team before a game, and proceeded to demoralise them by telling them lies about how good some of our players were, how one played for London Schoolboys, another had a tryout for England schoolboys etc.
Any of the team go on to professional?
A couple of lads at my school got trials with clubs like West Ham and Portsmouth but never made it to YTS even.