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Subbuteo Tribute Website. |
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The Best... and the Worst. |
Player Types - A very quick guide to heavyweights, lightweights, zombies and the rest.
The Team Colours Project (Ongoing illustrated team lists).
The Subbuteo Art Pages (page 1, page 2)- Quality home-painted teams.
The Top Ten Best Things about the Subbuteo playing of my youth...
It was just so easy to play and all my friends knew how.
You could actually field your favourite team, and if you numbered players you knew who had scored. This allowed you to keep sad records of player performances (come on- own up), and also blame individual figures for your own failings.
Brighton & Hove Albion could beat Brazil. (Certainly if I was playing Brazil).
If you lined up the little cameramen on both sides of the goal it made missing less painful, as a spray of plastic figures peppered your opponent.
Lifting the ball over the bases of the wall on a free kick. Sometimes the players would part and the ball would rocket into the net.
The Goalkeeping trainer. This was a large piece of yellow plastic covered with rubber bands and it worked surprisingly well if you were stuck by yourself. Using goal grips to free both hands, the ball could be flicked at the trainer with a finger (without a player), and it would bounce off at high speed into the back of the net (if your goalkeeping was like mine).
The Queen - my favourite of the pointless "collectable" extras which got in the way when playing, but looked great on a permanent display.
The whole pointless "stand around the pitch" figure range. These HO/OO figures were useful as civilians when I was wargaming. I imagine anyone with a model train set could use them too.
Subbuteo worker with a sense of humour. I have a Policeman from set C113 with "Help!" written in silver on the base. I guess painting countless tiny policemen could get to be a drag...
It has to be the dream of a glorious stadium - enclosing the whole pitch. A huge object of desire, but well out of range of my meagre resources as a child. Even doing one side of the ground proved impossible. It was the above picture from the 1981 catalogue that fuelled my desire.
The Throw-in figure instructions. Worse thing No. 2.
The pitch was too big to fit on most tables - so it became "Subbuteo Floor Soccer". Lots of crawling around on your knees.
The Throw-in figure. Neat idea - but my thumb and finger always created backspin so the ball ended up back out of play again.
Self Assembly goals. Came in a nice flat box - but the nets never seemed to want to fit properly.
Leeds Utd. My rogue Subbuteo team. One of the first four or five teams I owned - and one of only a couple of heavyweights - these had everything wrong with them. Their hair was a blob which had dripped onto their backs -ok so their were long haired players in the late '70's :-) Far worse was the glue used. Either the inner base wasn't glued properly to the outer base so they fell apart repeatedly, or the two base parts were superglued together, while the weight was weakly glued, resulting in players who rattled & fell over.
Goalkeepers on metal rods - or rather opponents who owned these old sets. The metal rod was longer than the newer plastic ones and could be used to sweep the whole penalty area clear of the ball, strikers, fingers....
Subbuteo player in the face - Your opponent has a clear shot on goal, he digs his finger into the turf to get extra power, but gets under the player, clearing the ball and the the crossbar... Ouch.
Chipping the ball. There may have been pictures showing how to do this in the rules, but could I get the ball off the ground? No. Unless I hit it with enough force to fire it into the next town.
Breakages. Crawling around on your knees in problem one above, resulted in sitting on players, goals, etc. Parents invading the pitch didn't help either. Balls broke in half, goalkeepers bent, throw-in figures arms fell off etc.
Losing all the time. Oh well.
Not being able to afford that stadium. Sigh.
Since reaching ten things, I've come up with another minor niggle - when Subbuteo make an away kit with exactly the same colour bases as the home kit - thus making it impossible to use the away kit when a colour clash has occurred.
Photograph your winning team with the cup, and get them to do a lap of honour. Okay, hands up everyone whose celebrations including grouping the players around the oversized FA Cup, with the captain/winning goal scorer sat in the top? That was my celebration. The other one was to take the small FA Cup from the Queen, and push it onto a player's arm for the lap of honour. No wonder the arms broke off my cup. Doh.
Record commentaries with a tape recorder. Actually, when I was a kid, my sister used to write plays for her friends and mine to perform on tape... and she's now a real life playwright. So I wonder if any real life commentators started out with a tape recorder and a Subbuteo match.
Keep a history of all your league and cup teams. Produce reams of statistics on each game.
Manage a team - having given your players names and numbers, and recorded the goals scored, and passes made, it's time to manage the side, and produce background info on your players, and have storylines running. The Subbuteo roleplaying game....
*With apologies to Half Man Half Biscuit.
A whole team of Liverpool players. Hey, I know there are some home kits in here, but you can see that I soon gave up on them. It was the away kits I continued to receive each
Christmas. Thanks to Jools for providing me with the earliest away kit.
Player Types - A very quick guide to heavyweights, lightweights, zombies and the rest.
The Team Colours Project (Ongoing illustrated team lists).
The Subbuteo Art Pages (page 1, page 2)- Quality home-painted teams.
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