The Play-Offs: A modern football success story

Daniel Storey

The following is an extract looking at the early years of the Play-Offs from ‘The Agony & The Ecstasy: A Comprehensive history of the Football League Play-Offs’ by Richard Foster, available now from Ockley Books

 

The Play-Offs had well and truly arrived. It would be hard to envisage how to improve on the manner in which this first series of matches panned out. As an introduction, the matches grabbed the lapels of the watching public and shook them until they begged for mercy. They were very much in your face and everyone was thrust full pelt on to the breathless helter-skelter with which the Play-Offs are now associated.

There is no other facet of English football that has sparked into life in quite this way; most new competitions take a little time to settle down before finding their feet. This was palpably not the case with the Play-Offs, as they began with a most audible bang. Maybe partly because there was no great fanfare about their arrival or any fuss made at their introduction, the Play-Offs generated their own momentum.

Through the far-reaching implications and their overall impact on English football, the Play-Offs deserve consideration as one of the key aspects of the modern game. Together the fans, players and clubs were instrumental in building a colourful, action-packed history over this critical period. They have encapsulated more drama and entertainment than many other longer-established, more traditional competitions. The early years of the Play-Offs were a period of rapid change, of seismic shifts in the landscape of English football to the point at which it could be argued that even the venerable FA Cup, which is now over 140 years old and pre-dates the league by more than ten years, was replaced as the true climax to the season.

This may seem like heresy to traditionalists but the modern game has moved on so quickly that it has unpicked the tapestry that had lasted for so long and has changed people’s perception of what is important. Consider that for most clubs a run in the FA Cup is now often treated as a lower priority than securing promotion, to the extent that shadow teams are often fielded in order to rest the club’s leading players for the league campaign. A berth in the Play-Offs is regarded as a more valuable and ultimately more realistic prize than FA Cup glory by a swathe of clubs outside the top tier.

From the outset the Play-Offs were on a different level to other matches. They have risen in prominence and their star shines as brightly as ever today, which is a notable achievement considering the darkness in which they were launched. English football had heaped calumny and shame on itself for the best part of a decade and for a nation that had long been considered to be the founder of the modern game there was a serious threat of its progeny moving on elsewhere to find a more suitable home. In charting the Play-Offs’ development from a low-key, understated component of a practical solution into a platform for some of the highest-profile and most keenly anticipated matches in the football calendar, this is a fascinating journey of long-lasting transformation.

Amidst the prevailing doom and gloom, at last there was something positive on which to focus and this had a galvanising effect on the game. There was a raw intensity about this first series of matches that immediately grabbed the attention of the football fraternity, and the ensuing excitement has continued pretty much unabated throughout the next twenty-seven years. There is hardly a year that goes by without some outstanding Play-Offs moment, where the sharp vicissitudes of the clubs involved make for an ever-entertaining canvas against which the key issues of the last promotion slots are decided. Crowds bounced back as hundreds of thousands returned to the national game, their faith and appetite restored.

No other aspect of the domestic calendar can match the Play-Offs for their inherent sense of theatre combined with the weighty significance of the outcome. The ever-quotable Iain Dowie once described them as having “something of the circus about them” and indeed there are plenty of parallels with the world of high wires, juggling, lion taming and even the odd act of clowning thrown in for good measure.

The second year of the Play-Offs had to go some to live up to the heady momentum built up in the first year. There was little to fear though as, just as in 1987, a mixture of teams were thrown into the deep end, reflecting different pedigrees and contrasting fortunes, leading to as many dramatic games and as much heady excitement as had been enjoyed in the inaugural season. Again all three divisions generated their own intriguing stories, matching each other for the spectacular and the surprising, the weird and the wonderful, the sublime and the ridiculous. The Play-Offs etched their place in football’s map at every turn.