Region's sporting triumphs and tragedies – looking back over 90 years of Sporting Star
The Sporting Star, the pink paper football fans grabbed as they left grounds, ran for 90 years. We look back at its highlights.
"Don't forget to pick up your Pink on the way back from the game."
For 90 years, the Sporting Star was as much part of the match-day experience as steaming-hot Bovril at half-time.
Long before Grandstand and World of Sport, let alone smartphones and the internet, fans would pick up a paper as they left football grounds – and read a comprehensive match report about the game they had just seen.
The Sporting Star ran for 90 years, having been launched in 1919, a season that saw domestic club football dominated by West Bromwich Albion, who won the league title, and FA Cup winners Aston Villa. The paper finished in May 2009, at the end of another eventful season in the West Midlands, which saw Mick McCarthy's rejuvenated Wolves secure promotion back to the Premier League, and arch-rivals West Bromwich Albion heading in the opposite direction.
Producing comprehensive match reports within minutes of the final whistle remains a logistical challenge to this day, but 100 years ago it must have seemed like a work of genius. In the early days, match reporters would head to the nearest payphone with a pocketful of coins to post updates throughout the match. In later years, there would be telephone lines in the press box, where reporters could dictate their reports throughout the game to a team of highly skilled copy-takers back at the newsroom. The presses would start rolling the moment the final results were in, and the papers would be on the news stands almost as soon as the fans had got out of the grounds.
The rest of the paper would be filled with in-depth news, interviews and comment about a variety of different subjects.
Not everything stood the test of time. The 'Star Birds' feature of the 1980s – a bit like Page Three girls but usually in some form of sporting kit – seems more than a little outdated today. But the basic idea, of providing fans with all the latest results, tables and detailed commentaries straight after a game is as relevant today as it was in 1919 – only today's sports reporters do it on our website.
The Sporting Star was the last 'Pink' sports paper produced in the Midlands, having outlived a number of its old-established rivals. One of the factors behind the paper's demise was the growing number of sporting events – football matches in particular –which were no longer held on Saturday. This was not an entirely new phenomenon, and is why memorable sporting moments from Aston Villa's 1982 European Cup triumph, to the promotions of West Bromwich Albion in 2002 and Wolves in 2003 never made it onto the front of the Pink. However, by 2009 the tradition of football matches mostly being played at 3pm on a Saturday were all but over, meaning that the Pink was no longer viable.
For the Star's sports reporters, it simply meant that their match reports would be published online instead – and of course meant the end of the dash to print, and the vans racing out of the newspaper's printworks to get to the shops and street vendors in time.
But it also marked the end of an era, where young fans would compile scrapbooks of their team's ups and downs, and keep the Pink as a souvenir of the most memorable moments.
Here we look at some of the biggest stories the Sporting Star has covered.
April 10, 1920 – Albion win the title
Albion claimed the First Division championship with two weeks to spare as they cantered to a 3-1 win over Bradford.
It was the first and only time the Black Country side won the league title.
Jephcott put Albion ahead 10 minutes into the game, and created the second for Bentley a short while later. Bradford pulled one back before the interval, but Bowser put a penalty away in the second half.
Yet despite the historic occasion, it didn't make the front page where, instead, there was a cartoon bemoaning Wolves' disappointing Easter programme.
April 24, 1920 – Villa win the cup
The West Midlands well and truly owned the Beautiful Game that season, with Villa winning a record 6th FA Cup just 14 days after Albion claimed the league title.
The front-paged featured a cartoon of a Villa supporter who had missed the game anxiously telephoning to hear the result.
It took Villa until extra time to break the deadlock against, with Billy Kirton on the mark. It was the 45th FA Cup final and the first time the competition had been played since 1915. It was Villa's sixth FA Cup win, making them the most successful team in the competition since it was launched in 1871.
Albion also reached their hundredth goal of the season in a 1-1 draw at home to Liverpool.
April 24, 1954 – Wolves beat Albion to First Division title
This would be the first of three league titles Wolves won during the 1950s, unquestionably the greatest period in the club's history.
