Subbuteo

I had Subbuteo Cricket (Test Match Edition) as well as Football. The bat had a handle to operate between your thumb and finger,with the batsman figure placed just behind the bat to bring lbw into play. The bowling figure had a wire gadget at the back of its round plinth to place the ball in,and by cracking down on the back of his head the ball was propelled towards the stumps at the batsman's end. The wicketkeeper,slip fielders and outfield all had a marbles like hole in the front of their stands and if the ball stuck in there it was a catch. When the ball rolled to a stop on the green beize outfield you measured with a gauge with the distance between bat and ball and proximity of ball to a fielder deciding how many runs you could have. Hitting a four all the way to the boundary was quite common but whacking a six "into the confectionary stall and out again" was virtually impossible!
With operating the scoreboard and ticking everything into the scorebook a day's play usually took nearly as long as the real thing. A shorter limited overs game could be adopted!
I perfected a pretty good impersonation of Richie Benaud running commentaries and I had the old couple in deckchairs figures to mime vicious arguments between overs!
 
The family down the street had it but my goldfish attention span wouldn’t stretch to it. I wish I could go back and sit in a deck chair to watch them play (as long as I could drink cider and smoke the free fags the promotional girls with the silk sashes used to bring round).
 
.........I had to plead for a whole week to my Mother,before she relented to machine wash the beize pitch,after I had foolishly painted "George Davis is Innocent" on it!
 
If I remember correctly, an old friend of mine had Football, Test Match cricket and Rugby Union.
Bit of a posh bugger he were.
 
Am i right in thinking that during the 50s and sixties a good number of working mens clubs ,pubs etc played in Subbuteo leagues ,with the results and league placings appearing in the Mercury mid week ?
 
I’ll join the ranks of the Subbutteo lovers. Played in a league in High School for a couple of years in London. Very competitive!
 
My company used to make the Subbuteo Astro pitch base material for Waddington Games. Waddington's would order thirty kilometers of the stuff annually, sometimes more. 30,000 meters would make 20,000 pitches and they ordered year in year out. The Astro pitch was the serious player's Subbuteo surface as the ball rolled true due to the artificial grass technology and the layflat property of the substrate and no comparison to the permanently wrinkled fabric pitch that came with the starter boxes. Astro was adopted by the Federation International Sports Table Football - FISTF. (No sniggering at the UK branch acronym). In the mid nineties an American company, Hasbro, bought Waddingtons. They rationalised the product range seemingly not understanding why there were two playing surfaces a catalogue of minor teams, away kits and accessories. They consequently dropped our product in favour of the cheaper green fabric. This left the organised table football world with a limited number of quality championship pitches in circulation and they soon became highly prized. We stopped making the base material as Hasbro technically owned the intellectual property rights which meant no one dare develop an Astro style pitch and more importantly for us, order sensible quantities for the serious gamers. We eventually replaced the lost work and moved on.

We turned the Astro Grouse Moor down on account of Aylestone not being very big and the Duke of Sutherland requested no creases.
 
Fascinating, and very seasonal. Hasbro the American Ghost Of Christmas Past, and Project Big Six the Yankee Ghost of Christmas Future.
 
I had mine around 66 World Cup, got my mum to buy me the Brazil and another South American team, anyway they came with black faces which for some reason I didn’t like so I painted them white😳 I expect if I’d done it now I’d be locked up. (I was eleven at the time) sold it in 1968 to fund a trip to watch City play Spurs at White Hart Lane, Jimmy Greaves scored b dribbling round about half of the Leicester team and then round Shilton! He scored a hat trick that day and we lost 3-2
 
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