Now then.  Not a good weekend to be a Forest fan.  Some of us can remember playing the likes of Manchester United, week in, week out and occasionally filling their nets with goals. Now we lose 1-0 and have a player sent off against Plymouth.  Plymouth is in Devon, or at least it used to be and it’s a place famous for Francis Drake playing bowls as the armada approached.  He then casually sauntered off and murdered the lot of them.  Nowadays Plymouth is full of sailors.  It’s a bowls/water polo town so losing to them at football is shameful.  The place is full of tatoos and homosexuality and probably Nuclear submarines, although you won’t see those.  They hide them underwater.  I suppose that might be the whole point of a submarine.

Plymouth Argyle set me to thinking.  Firstly I wondered why Argyle and if there were other Argyles.  I think there is only one Forest and that is because our first ground was called the Forest.  Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.  It’s rare, but I have been known to be.  I think the original Forest was the site of the first Nottingham racecourse, which is the place where they now hold Goose Fair. Everyone expects it to be connected to Robin Hood and Sherwood forest but it is not.

The drive by shootings have put me and Mrs Duck off attending Goose Fair.  We used to love Mousetown, the world’s tallest man and the woman with three breasts.  I have no idea if these sideshows are still there.  If they are, then they are well worth a visit.  Although, the third breast was so obviously made of papier mache and stuck on, it was a great disappointment to us.

 I have been wondering about Argyles.  I can’t think of any other than in Plymouth.  I had a vague idea that there was a Scottish team also called Argyle something or something Argyle but I am far too hurt by arthritis tonight to Google.  Argyle United?  Did I dream that?

 Anyroads, Argyle played a big role in our 1938-39 season.  They beat Norwich relegating them to the third division, on a weekend, we won and just managed to stay up.  Take note, in the days when the divisions were numbered fairly - Premiership was Division 1, Championship was Division 2, League One was Division 3, etc -Forest did sometimes hover between Divisions 2 and 3.  We beat Plymouth 2-1 one week and lost to Norwich the next but avoided the drop as Plymouth beat Norwich in between.

 It all became meaningless when the domestic football programme was bought to an end due to the war.

I have no idea what colours Plymouth play in now.  I knew in the early 80′s due to Subbuteo.  Subbuteo was the table top football game.  You had a green baize pitch which you had to iron before each match.  There were two teams obviously, the goalkeepers were on long plastic stems.  To play the game well, you needed a decent sized table, otherwise you had a narrow pitch or goals on the edge of the goalkeepers area.

 To begin with, the players were cardboard cut-outs on a round base that could skillfully be flicked with the finger on to an outsized (according to scale) plastic ball.  At it’s peak there were world championships in this game and you could buy practically any club team strip, both home and away.  The Forest away strip of 1984 – yellow with a patch of vomit on the shoulder was available in Subbuteo.

 I had Plymouth Argyle as a subbuteo team.  They were green and black stipes with black socks on a green base.  I should put this into perspective, My son used to play the game with his friends.  When I proudly say that I had this team or that, I was a grown man, inspecting ditches at the time.  My son was the true owner of Subbuteo, which I used to buy for him.  For reasons that I have never really understood, Subbuteo is latin for falcon or something.  It has nothing to do with table football.

Most people started playing Subbuteo with a kit that contained a pitch, goals, a ball and two teams. Team 1 was red shirts, white shorts.  Team 2 was blue shirts, white shorts.  Plymouth were team 132.  My son bought team after team from Redmayne and Todd.  This was a hallowed sports shop where you could buy anything connected in any way to sport, on the corner of the road next to what is now, Fellows Morton and Clayton.  For reasons that I have never understood until this day, we had El Salvador as one of our teams.  The little plastic men were painted brown.

 So, during the early 1980′s Forest V El Salvador and Plymouth Argyle V El Salvador were regular fixtures in our house.  Unlike Forest yesterday, I must confess, El Salvador used to stuff  Plymouth on a regular basis.

I’ll see thee.

Me Duck