The Dark Art Of Polishing

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 the senior players with their cardboard cut-outs”.

Dave’s Principle

His idea was, if he could make the figures slide without falling over, long range shooting would be possible, and blocking could be improved to impede the dominance of the flats. Well that was his theory, and his efforts were solely built on that principle.

Early Experiments

He started with some home-brew varnish, developed by his father, who was renown for being a tight arsed individual, who was always insistent that the mass production alternatives were not in the same league as his home-brew concoctions. As a side note here Dave’s father made his own wood preservative, which was applied to a garden fence, which to be fair worked, but had the slight drawback of, get it on your skin and you’d probably end up in A&E with 3rd degree burns. It made Creosote seem safe.

Anyway I digress, Dave liberally coated the base of a figure with his father’s varnish which added very little value. In fact if the truth be known it made it worse, it increased the friction between baize and figure causing it to topple over rather than slide. Dave would have actually introduced diving into the game if he persevered down this route.

Next up was Brasso, basically a metal polish older than probably anyone reading this. Brasso is a liquid that is used to polish primarily metal, but was just as capable on other surfaces especially in scratch removal. So another figure was worked on, and to be fair to our teenage "Alchemist" did improve matters slightly. Not greatly I hasten to add, slightly and I use the word liberally here. He then experimented with various metal polishing pastes, even toothpaste, all with varying degrees of success, from why bother, to maybe just give up.

 

The Penny Dropped

One day Dave was watching his gran polishing her dining room table with Lavendo, which was a furniture polish that came in a tin, and had the consistency of boot polish. When applied and worked into furniture it left it shiny and smelling of lavender, (If you ever wondered why us old folk smell of lavender now you know). It was at this point in time that Dave had his “Eureka” moment, some would say “Senior” moment, but Dave thought this could work.

I vaguely remember at school the next day he told us about his brainwave and one of our number just said, “So what are you going to do polish the pitch?”.

Undeterred by our derision, after school he went to his grandparents house as usual, to wait for his mother to finish work and collect him. At a convenient moment he rummaged around under his gran’s kitchen sink to find the tin of Lavendo and a duster for experimentation later that day.

The next day at school he invited Warren, Andy and myself around to his that evening, to show us his efforts. We were all absolutely amazed just how far a heavyweight could be flicked in a straight line, nothing like today’s standards but a great improvement in the early 70’s.

But

There’s always a but isn’t there, I noticed from flicking the polished players that their ability to swerve had been greatly reduced. They were great in straight lines, try to swerve them and they were more likely to spin around like an ice skater than gracefully go around an opponent and retain possession.

Things didn’t go well for Dave for a while after this. His mother found his gran’s polish next day, and he was grounded for a few days. His gran wasn’t happy either, making Dave polish her house from top to bottom, she thought he obviously needed to be shown what the polish was actually for. After this his gran gave him the tin of polish, (go figure that one), and said now you have your own don’t nick mine again.

Wrath Of His Peers

At the next club meeting Dave turned up with his “Super Team”, all polished and raring to go, but soon fell foul of the more senior players. They questioned Dave about his teams super powers. Dave just simply said I’ve polished them. Well you’d have thought Dave had suddenly turned into the UK’s most wanted by the reaction from the senior members. He was accused of cheating and heresy. Then this mildly mannered, if somewhat eccentric 13 year old, simply asked, "What rules have I broken then?".

In fact he hadn’t, nowhere in the Subbuteo commandments at that time did it state “Thou shall not polish your bases”. Modification of the bases was frowned upon but went on, as players added a little extra weight inside the base, (I may cover this at a later date). As long as the base remained the same shape and size very little was said, but polish the darn thing and it caused uproar.

Polishing actually helped Dave, it improved his abilities by courtesy of using different tactics which he couldn’t use to such great effect without polish. He didn’t become a world beater overnight, but his results slightly improved more so against the flat playing seniors.

Like all things there are pros and cons with polishing, tight swerves were almost non existent. Heavyweights weren’t brilliant to begin with anyway, but you could with practice block with more precision, and slide in to kiss the ball with a little more accuracy, as well as long range flicks and get a shot away.

My Personal Preference

I personally didn’t like the cons, and preferred far more compromise. I used newspaper to clean my bases. Now newspaper at that time was a little different from today, very rarely these days do we handle a newspaper and get the black ink over our hands, but we often did back in the day. My gran used to clean her windows with newspaper, it was great for making them sparkle as well as grease and smear free. She even committed the cardinal sin of using that days paper, which grandad considered grounds for divorce.

I used to rub my players on an old newspaper, it was nowhere near as good or as bad as polish depending on your viewpoint. But it gave them a little extra zip, and didn’t restrict a tighter swerve like using a “Proper” polish. I was more than happy with that.

Nowadays I just use a lens cloth mainly to keep the bases clean, which removes any handling residue that has accumulated. That’s enough for me to keep my heavyweights lets say, just the way I like them.

Professional Polish

There are many cremes, pastes, and liquids out there, that make exuberant claims and charge for the privilege of ownership. I have no idea why such claims are made, or why one is purported to be better than another. I do know however that any silicone based polish will suffice, at a fraction of the cost. Whether a supermarket’s home-brand, multi-purpose spray polish, is in the same league as the Pro polishes I’ll let you decide, because I have no intention of investigating further. As long as my bases are clean, I’m more than happy, The same as Dave was with his gran’s tin of “Lavendo”.

So there you have it. The Italians may well have brought the dark art into the competitive game, but just take a minute or so to admire the efforts of the club players at the turn of the 70’s. I’m sure Dave probably wasn’t the first to polish his bases, but he had the forethought and ingenuity to realise it’s potential. Dave himself never became a top player through his efforts, but he may well have started something that is still relevant today.

Keep On Flicking

Ian