Dubai Blue
Player Valuation: £8m
Hoping whoever takes the time to read this just appreciates it for what it is. It's just a nice story I wanted to share with you fellow blues.
As you may guess from my name I work out in Dubai. We have a lot of random nations crossing paths in our office, one of which is my ECD - a Serbian guy who supports Red Star Belgrade.
He frequently visits home and a few months ago on his last trip he picked me up a special edition shirt that was a replica of a time they won a major trophy (I can't recall right now).
After a while of chatting over beers (yes we have them here) we decided to check if we had ever played a game against each other. Straight on Google searching in both English and Serbian we finally found a reference to one in a ToffeeWeb blog of a game back in '57. A bit more investigating and found that they had pipped us 3-2!
(http://toffeeweb.com/season/15-16/comment/talkingpoints/30414.html)
Anyways - some time passed and I was re-reading the blog and searching for more info to see if we had ever had vengeance, and came across a match day program on eBay. It was a few dollars and looked in good condition. So straight away, snapped it up and waited patiently for it to traverse the sandy pathway to the Middle East.
I got it this morning, and handed it to him. He was made up and brought back a lot of memories as the players mentioned were his idols at the time for the national team of Yugoslavia.
It was a gift for him so didn't want to "borrow it" and just hand it off when I was finished, so instead I just took photos of it for me to look at instead.
Had a chance to read it tonight and it's quite amazing to see the difference of then and now. I was born in '89 so my first game was 95/96 season and the programs have barely changed since then (thick glossy things full of ads and punchy captions and copy), so taking a glimpse of the past was a real enjoyable experience for me. Seeing the night fixtures classed as "Floodlit Games" and reading about emergency protocol for what to do in a "mains failure" was quite amusing, or the archaic and highly vulnerable way to book a ticket for the derby for 5/-. It all makes me wonder what football was like back then.
Anyways - I thought you might like to take a peak so I have uploaded the images below for you to take a gander.
Enjoy!
As you may guess from my name I work out in Dubai. We have a lot of random nations crossing paths in our office, one of which is my ECD - a Serbian guy who supports Red Star Belgrade.
He frequently visits home and a few months ago on his last trip he picked me up a special edition shirt that was a replica of a time they won a major trophy (I can't recall right now).
After a while of chatting over beers (yes we have them here) we decided to check if we had ever played a game against each other. Straight on Google searching in both English and Serbian we finally found a reference to one in a ToffeeWeb blog of a game back in '57. A bit more investigating and found that they had pipped us 3-2!
(http://toffeeweb.com/season/15-16/comment/talkingpoints/30414.html)
Anyways - some time passed and I was re-reading the blog and searching for more info to see if we had ever had vengeance, and came across a match day program on eBay. It was a few dollars and looked in good condition. So straight away, snapped it up and waited patiently for it to traverse the sandy pathway to the Middle East.
I got it this morning, and handed it to him. He was made up and brought back a lot of memories as the players mentioned were his idols at the time for the national team of Yugoslavia.
It was a gift for him so didn't want to "borrow it" and just hand it off when I was finished, so instead I just took photos of it for me to look at instead.
Had a chance to read it tonight and it's quite amazing to see the difference of then and now. I was born in '89 so my first game was 95/96 season and the programs have barely changed since then (thick glossy things full of ads and punchy captions and copy), so taking a glimpse of the past was a real enjoyable experience for me. Seeing the night fixtures classed as "Floodlit Games" and reading about emergency protocol for what to do in a "mains failure" was quite amusing, or the archaic and highly vulnerable way to book a ticket for the derby for 5/-. It all makes me wonder what football was like back then.
Anyways - I thought you might like to take a peak so I have uploaded the images below for you to take a gander.
Enjoy!
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Good read that, cheers! 
