The terrible thing about getting older is that you gradually become more and more separated from the happy days of your youth. You start pushing all those nostalgia buttons at the back off your mind more and more regular and the greater our age, the more I yearn for times gone by.
Today my memory jumped out at me while picking up the morning papers and while checking out the football magazines I couldn’t see an old favourite of my youth the Shoot magazine. It seems that low demand as pushed it off the magazine shelves to an online publication. I remember always looking forward to this weekly football magazine targeting kids.
As I remember, the centre pages were always dedicated to a randomly chosen club with the middle pages a squad picture. If it were your team, it would be heading for a prime spot on your bedroom wall if not on you wall in a scrapbook, do kids do scrapbooks these days. From time to time, you would get a free gift the best of all was the ‘League Ladders’.
In a few issues before the start of a new season in your Shoot, you received a card with all four English league tables (as well as those for Scotland). Then over the next few weeks you would receive the required 'team tabs' on which were printed the names of all the teams that could be slotted into the relevant places in the tables. Every time a match was played, you would move the team tabs to their new positions on your League Ladders. It became an annual tradition that these days looks futile but in the early 70s what else was there to do.
It was our gateway into reading about football and facts about the game and it made us read which was a sneaky back door into being educated. I am sorry to find out Shoot the magazine is no more surely there is a market for a kids football magazine if there is not one already out there.
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