Football and Music

You know it’s amazing these journeys I end up taking. This time it is with the original “flicker” :

I found a couple of articles about the beautiful (finger) game. One was about the son of the inventor (Peter Adolph ) of the game with his memories . Mark Adolph wrote a book about it: Growing Up with Subbuteo: My Dad Invented the World’s Greatest Football Game.

– The other article via the Guardian which again is about another book done on the subject of Subbuteo, but also interviews a couple of famous fans. One of them was Graham Taylor and the other was David Baddiel. In the piece he talks about playing the game with his brother:

…”The two of us would lay out the pitch in the room where the carpet was least rucked-up. That’s where our parents kept their music centre. We’d use it for playing a 45 record called “The Subbuteo Sound”. Sadly, I don’t still have it. If I remember rightly, the artist was listed as “Subbuteo” and side one consisted of a crowd chanting, “Suboo-tee-oh!” There were also general crowd noises.

On side two there was a song about Subbuteo, but I can’t recall how that went. We used to listen to side one while we were playing. The crowd would make “oohs” and “ahs” at completely the wrong moments. I have a vague memory of the crowd noises being topped and tailed by a bit of commentary that covered all bases and didn’t quite make sense: something a long the lines of “It’s such a shame that one team had to lose – or draw.…” Since a good game of Subbuteo takes at least 20 minutes, we’d have to keep getting up and putting the record back on again…

» Full article

Well guess what David, I hope you Google yourself because I found the sounds.
I don’t know if his memory is faulty or if the originator of the mp3’s mislabeled them… because the stuff he talks about on Side 1 is on Side 2 and on Side 2 is…etc, etc. But he is accurate with the description:

Bonus Download: For anybody who still has the game or if you want to have a mess around I also found a flash-powered soundboard of Subbuteo match sound effects. Which includes crowd chanting, the ref’s whistle and everything else you need to recreate the atmosphere. You can d/load it in a .zipped file by right-clicking and Save Target/Link As…here.

Go on your own Subbuteo journey with the links below:

• Subbuteo365.com
• Subbuteo World – Table Football
• Subbuteo – www.littleplasticmen.co.uk
• Photobucket Images – Subbuteo

Extra Time – A tune which features a Subbuteo player on the cover plus it gets a mention in the song: