Six star performers on and off the pitch were inducted into the Cambridge United Hall of Fame during a celebratory dinner in the Abbey Lounge, home of the Supporters' Club, on Thursday, March 21.
 
Players Terry Eades, Steve Fallon and Tom Finney, manager Roy McFarland, commercial powerhouse Bill Cawdery and club historian Andrew Bennett joined their peers in the Hall of Fame, which is managed by 100 Years of Coconuts and recognises outstanding contributions to the story of the football club.
 
Eades, Fallon, Finney and McFarland were chosen by United supporters via online and paper voting, while Cawdery and Bennett were selected for induction by a Coconuts/ Cambridge Fans United electoral college.
 
‘The Cambridge United Hall of Fame recognises the work of people who have changed the history of the club significantly, one way or another,’ former Coconuts chair Pat Morgan told the press.

‘It doesn’t matter whether their contributions were on the pitch, in the dugout, in the boardroom, in the offices or on the terraces.

​'The Cambridge United team is not just 11 players on the park on a Saturday; it’s every character who has ever played a part in the never-ending story that unfolds each week.’
 
Three of the new Hall of Famers were present to receive their mementos of induction: defenders Eades and Fallon and striker/midfielder Finney.

Mark Cawdery received his late father’s memento and Sam Wilson accepted his uncle Andrew Bennett’s award, while diners were able to watch a recording of McFarland’s acceptance speech.
 
The new inductees joined the existing Hall of Famers who have been inducted since the launch of the scheme in 2016: commercial manager Dudley Arliss, player/supporter Russell Crane, players Alan Biley, Dion Dublin, Wilf Mannion, Rodney Slack and Paul Wanless, player/managers John Beck and John Taylor, team managers Bill Leivers and Richard Money, stadium manager Ian Darler and supporter extraordinaire Lil Harrison.
 
Bennett’s induction to the Hall of Fame also served as the inauguration of the annual Andrew Bennett Award, which is intended to recognise extraordinary inputs to the club and its community.
 
It was instituted in memory of the late honorary club historian, archivist, writer and author of the Celery & Coconuts history of Abbey United/Cambridge United, who died in February last year.

Cambridge United director of football Graham Daniels presided over the ceremony, which was also attended by many supporters and ex-players including Andy Beattie, Alan Biley, Derrick Christie, Sam Harris, Peter Hobbs, Keith Lockhart, Rodney Slack and John Taylor.

Visit photographer Simon Lankester's Flickr account to view full coverage of the evening.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Cambridge United matchday programme for the game against Stevenage on 5 January 2019.

Last Saturday’s sight of young Liam O’Neil lying motionless with his face in the Abbey turf brought back memories for some of us U's supporters of a certain vintage.

Was it really more than 50 years ago – was it 10 December 1966 to be exact – that we saw a near namesake of Liam’s knocked similarly unconscious on the field of play?

But it wasn’t a low-flying Imp that poleaxed the great U’s playmaker and net-bulger Alan O’Neill … the damage in the latter’s case was done when his bonce got in the way of a thunderously struck free kick.

Down he dropped and down he stayed, until judicious application of the magic sponge and a waft of the smelling salts brought him shakily to his feet. Sports medicine was a relatively primitive science in those days.

Get your heads round this, younger readers: United managers and coaches haven’t always been able to call on benches full of substitutes in their efforts to influence games.

The replacement of players was practised in public school matches as early as the mid-19th century, although only when those selected for a match didn’t turn up, probably because their nannies hadn’t woken them up in time.

And there was consternation at an 1889 Wales-Scotland fixture when home goalie Jim Trainer was absent without explanation. Surprised local amateur Alf Pugh was drafted in until the cavalry arrived in the form of the more experienced Sam Gillam.

This article appeared in edited form in the Cambridge United matchday programme for the game against Crawley Town on Wednesday, 26 December 2018.

We’re not announcing the results of the 2019 Cambridge United Hall of Fame vote yet – the process doesn’t even close until the year does – but it’s been interesting to see certain trends emerging.

Among the nominations for pre-1979 players and managers, there’s been a healthy number for the human brick wall that was Terry Eades, for Abbey United legend Harvey Cornwell and for the hugely talented inside forward Len Saward, among other star names.

Another popular nominee is Brian Moore, the Belfast-born forward who, across four seasons in black and amber from December 1956, made scoring goals look like child’s play.

Imagine watching someone score 113 goals in 161 U’s games, including 68 in one astonishing season. Now do your best to imagine that someone scoring all those goals while effectively blind in one eye.

Moore made light of a disability that would have finished most footballers’ careers before they had started. And when he’d finished at Newmarket Road, he crossed the river to become a hero at Cambridge City … and then at Wisbech Town, Boston United and Newmarket Town.

His career would have been very different had not fate, and a heavy leather football, intervened.

​As Andrew Bennett related in Risen from the Dust, Moore’s displays for Glentoran and Distillery had attracted big clubs’ attention in 1955, and his early showings for West Ham promised great things to come.

He was only 21 when he was hit in the face during a fixture at Middlesbrough. He managed to play on but it was found that the ball’s lace had so badly damaged the retina in his right eye that he was effectively blind on that side.

Moore, advised that another such blow could deprive him of sight altogether, stopped playing, even though a degree of blurred vision began to return to the damaged eye. Then along came Bert Johnson.

The United player-manager offered him incentives to return to the game in Cambridge that proved irresistible: a job with Pye Telecom and the chance to play for the U’s alongside the legendary Wilf Mannion.

It wasn’t long before he was thrilling supporters with goals and skills galore, with the help of teammates like Mannion and Ron Murchison calling to tell him when their passes were arriving on his 'blind' side.

In his annus mirabilis of 1957/58 he just couldn’t help scoring: he’d racked up 30 goals in all competitions before Christmas and reached 68 in a mere 52 games.

New manager, new rules: for the 1960/61 season his namesake gaffer Alan Moore, who had followed Johnson and Bill Craig, decreed that his squad would all be full-time footballers, placing his star striker in a quandary.

​Not wanting to lose his job at Pye’s, he left for Milton Road and a new chapter in an amazing career.

Cheerio
Harry

An edited version of this article appeared in the Cambridge United match day programme for the game against Crawley Town on 30 March 2018.

If you find sleep difficult to come by, the FA Guide to Floodlighting: Building, Protecting and Enhancing Sustainable Football Facilities is just the thing you need.

A page or two of this puzzling volume, with its talk of lux and lumens, will flood the most wide-awake brain with snooze-inducing endorphins and grant a good eight hours of blissful slumber.

But lighting football pitches has not always been such a baffling science. When Blackburn played Accrington in November 1878, the match was illuminated by two lights attached to 40ft scaffolds.

They provided light equivalent to 6,000 candles – many more than the traditional four – but it was still found necessary to paint the ball white so that players and spectators could see it.

Modern floodlighting systems began to appear in English grounds in the early 1950s, but the need for lights was evident to Abbey United as early as 1949/50: fading light hid the identity of the final scorer from officials and the press in a U’s v Harwich match.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Cambridge United matchday programme for the game against Bury on 24 November 2018.

There are times when, if you’re a United supporter and especially if you inhabit the Habbin, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But we’re lucky in that we’ve always had people who have helped to make the decision easy. Some players take it as read that their job is to entertain as well as to win matches.

Larger-than-life characters have always stalked the Abbey’s corridors, and there was none larger than player-turned-manager Chris Turner. As far as Turns was concerned every day was April Fool’s Day, but we’re leaving the reporting of his exploits to Ian Darler: the butt of more than one Turner prank, Ian is publishing his memoirs next autumn.

But for more tales of mirthful merrymaking, you need only turn to Celery & Coconuts, Andrew Bennett’s peerless history of our club. Volume two, Risen from the Dust, examines the case of ‘Gentleman’ Jim Sharkey in some detail.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Cambridge United matchday programme for the game against Notts County on 20 February 2018.

Half-close your eyes and squint at the fuzzy, poor-quality photograph on the right. There are some unforgettable faces there; award yourself five points if you can name them all.

Clue: you’re looking for the likes of John ‘Shaggy’ Taylor, Tom Youngs, Alex Russell, ‘Dancing’ Shaun Marshall, Paul ‘Captain Fantastic’ Wanless, Andy Duncan and Martin Butler.

There are several others; some of them achieved great things at United and elsewhere. It’s a talented group of young men and also, it appears, a happy bunch.

Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve obviously passed a fun half-hour in creating an imaginative backdrop and they’re grouped round one of England’s most respected players and managers of recent decades – a man who a few months later would lead them to promotion to Division Three.
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And Roy McFarland (for it is he) is showing off a rather handsome pot earned by the lads the previous season – the PFA Bobby Moore Fair Play Trophy for 1997/98 – topped by a black 'n' amber Father Christmas titfer.

Roy Mac, although proud of his charges for achieving the best disciplinary record in the Premier and Football Leagues, was at pains to stress the team’s fighting qualities when he spoke to reporters. ‘We are not a soft touch and not a lightweight side,’ he insisted.

It’s true that United, with battlers like Wanless, Duncan and Ian Ashbee in the side, could never have been accused of being softies. And the hefty presence up front of Trevor Benjamin ruled out any ‘lightweight’ jibes.
​
Indeed, the U’s claimed the award despite seeing two players – Messrs Wanless and Butler – make early use of the showers in one game. Then again, that match was the infamous FA Cup second round replay at Stevenage Borough in December 1997, when United were eliminated thanks to one of the most ridiculously inept refereeing performances ever seen in the Home Counties.

You can inspect the Fair Play Trophy at close quarters when you visit The Story of the U’s, our little museum in the Supporters’ Club. Write to 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com to arrange that visit.  (To answer the disappointed punter who wrote words to the effect of ‘is that it?’ in the visitors’ book: yes, we know it’s small, but it’s a start.)

The Coconuts gang was thrilled to be given a print of the photograph on the right, battered though it is, recently. Now we'd like to know what occasion it depicts.

It came from the collection of Mick Dunn and quite obviously shows a large group of U's supporters, Bill Pink and Roy Bishop among them, making their presence felt at an away game.

We reckon it's from the 1960s and we're told the match was an FA Cup tie. But which one, and when?

​Bury Town (United won 2-0) or Bedford Town (lost 2-1) in 1962? No, probably a bit later …

It's always a pleasure for 100 Years of Coconuts and Cambridge United Former Players' Association to welcome the families of ex-U's to the Abbey Stadium.

It's doubly delightful when the family is as lovely as that of the late Peter Leggett, the hugely talented winger who terrorised defences in the late 60s and early 70s.

​Peter's wife Margaret, daughter Michelle Hands and grandson Ethan were with us on Saturday for the Grimsby game, and they brought along Michelle's Mariners-supporting boyfriend, Jonathan Tabois.

It was wonderful to listen to Margaret's tales of the Leggetts' time in Cambridge, especially those from around the time that United were elected to the Football League in 1970.

After a quick tour of Coconuts' mini-museum, The Story of the U's, and a chat with fans' elected director Dave Matthew-Jones and former FED Colin Proctor – who remembers just about everyone who ever came through the Abbey gates – it was down to the serious stuff and that late Paul Lewis winner.

​We can't wait to see them all again.