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The Dark Art Of Polishing

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Firstly apologies for such a long time between posts, I’ve had a few personal things to attend to over the last few months which have prevented me from being as active and engaging with the game as I had planned for. That’s behind me now and I’ve started up my solo league again, after almost a season away. So without further ado lets get into this. The Italian’s? It’s well documented in certain quarters that the polishing of bases was down to the Italians in the late 70’s early 80’s, but I’m about to blow that myth out of the water, and say polishing of bases was down to one teenage lad from the West Midlands in the early 70’s. Dave Harris, a couple of years older than myself was a lad who tried everything to gain an advantage on the table. His playing abilities were average at best, but that didn’t stop him trying to discover ways to make Subbuteo heavyweight figures glide along the pitch and in his words, “Wipe that smug look off th
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Breaking The Mould

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  I’m probably a kind of traditionalist when it comes to Subbuteo, especially when it comes to equipment and rules. We probably all have our favourite player types, and would rather play to rules from a certain era of their evolution. For me that was and still is the late 60’s until the early 80’s. There were 3 main player types each requiring their own particular technique to play to the generally accepted rules of that time. Box set rules at the beginning of that era differed to the competitive scene, but by the end of it they more or less mirrored each other. Solo Players Use What They Know When it comes to solo none of us are tied to any kind of convention, we probably all have our favourite equipment , and have adapted familiar rules to suit our needs. I’ll go as far here as to say that we are all probably traditionalists in our own right. Subbuteo in all it’s forms has what can be described as a core set of rules that are the backbone of all
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Some Thoughts On Home Advantage

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I’ve just completed another season of my Solo League. Two 8 team divisions, with promotion, relegation, play-offs, a cup competition, as well as a non league element for good measure. 144 games all played throughout the actual football season. All played without any form of advantage, except in some cup games which I’ll touch on later. I’ ve posted in the past about a system, that I worked on with Phil Marsden the owner of the Alive and Flicking Facebook group for assessing, and applying an advantage to each game without changing any in - match rules. A system he seemed to be satisfied with at the time, as it went some way to suiting his immediate needs. He’s now looking to expand on the system in other ways, and I wish him, and anyone else that is looking to add such things into their solo games luck in formulating a system th at suits them . I however have no intention personally to add such things into my League, or any other league competitions I run, and
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Small Players and Big Balls

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The title itself is enough to put you off your dinner, I apologise for that but it had to be said. When I opened my first box set on Christmas morning 1969 I was confronted with that statement in all it’s glory . The poor guys in their pristine(??) red and blue kits with big brown balls that came up to their chest. The game was advertised as the replica of Association Football, and included the immortal phrase of “Reproducing all the thrills of real football by FINGER TIP CONTROL”, printed on the box. So when was the last time any of us saw the “Real” game played with balls this size which if to scale would have been around 1.5m in diameter, I suppose it would make goalkeeping easier, and the amount of 0-0 scorelines would become the rule rather than any kind of exception. But as we know it wasn’t the scale of things that fascinated us back then, it was the fact that we were in control, we scored the goals, we saved the shot s, and we won the trophies, no one cared the ball
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