Saturday 5th September 1981
Chatham Town v Hastings United
FA Cup Preliminary Round
Programme Price: 15p
Like many of my other reviews in the past, this programme has been selected completely at random from my collection. It is eight pages in length and whilst compared to other programmes it is quite short in terms of quantity, it does not detract from my enjoyment of reading and reviewing it.
With Page 1 being the front cover, page 2 provides some information on Chatham Town FC. The club was founded in 1882 and back in 1981, the chairman of the club was Guy Swayland. Another piece of information on the page that I found very interesting was that the club were FA Cup Quarter Finalists in the 1888/1889 season.
Page 3 is titled ‘Club Notes, Gossip and Chat’ and firstly welcomes the directors, players, officials and supporters of Hastings United to the game. The club also welcomes Chatham’s new sponsors, Leisure Investments to the game which ironically was their first ever visit to the club. The article goes on to say that the club had made an impressive start to the season on the pitch, winning nine points out of a possible ten.
Page 4 provides the team line up’s for the game with the referee named as Mr V. Roberts from London.
Page 5 shows the Kent League Division One table and at the time of writing, Chatham were sitting at the top of the division, one point clear of Crockenhill in second place.
Page 6 provides two pieces of information. Firstly the club report on the success of their lottery and secondly there is news on forthcoming fixtures for teams at Chatham Town FC. The reserves would be away at Welling on Tuesday 15th September whilst the first XI would have a home league game against Sheppey on Saturday 26th September.
The final two pages of the programme contain several adverts which complete this nice little issue.
For the record, Hastings United won this FA Cup Preliminary Round encounter by 4 goals to 1. They then went on an amazing run all the way to the First Round proper where they lost 2-0 at Enfield.
