COMMENT: No more Green ‘Uns, Pink ‘Uns, Football Posts or Echos, and now no more Sports Mails – the end of an era for a paper which once sold 40,000 a week (and that’s when Portsmouth were relegated!)

In your hands, dear reader, you are holding a collector’s item: the last-ever Sports Mail, the final weekend sports paper ever likely to be produced by a regional daily newspaper.

End of an era? Without a shadow of a doubt.

Once upon a time, there were Green ‘Uns, Pink ‘Uns, Football Echos and Sports Posts in virtually every major town and city in England, Scotland and Wales. On occasions, they sold upwards of 70,000 copies EVERY WEEK. And I haven’t used capital letters for hyperbole, just to hammer home the fact that these papers mattered. A lot.

Generations of supporters waited impatiently to buy one, sometimes less than an hour after the game they had just watched had finished, to read about the game they had just watched; that, and to pore over the scores from elsewhere in the Football League and the bang-up-to-date tables. No internet back then, no mobile phones, no rolling sports news channels, no Jeff Stelling.

Dads would queue for a copy, or send their children - probably their sons, and that’s not being sexist, just factual - to buy one instead. In that way, how many thousands of youngsters were helped to fall in love with the beautiful game?

That was back then, however - way back then, now I come to think of it - and this is now. Back in the day, Saturday evening sports papers were an institution. Now technology has killed them off. Killed them all off.

Back in December 2017, in a former working life, I was the sports editor of the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton when we published the final Sports Pink. First printed in 1898, it went down in history as the longest-running Saturday evening sports paper in Britain.

After the Pink’s demise, only the Sports Mail remained, but that wasn’t available in the shops until a Sunday morning. Just a few hours difference, granted, but that mattered.

While the Sports Pink ran for 119 years, the Sports Mail enjoyed a 109-year existence - after first hitting the streets in 1903 - until it was axed at the end of 2011/12. Returning, phoenix-like, at the start of the 2013/14 season with Pompey under fan ownership and a feelgood factor back at Fratton Park, the Mail’s second incarnation took in another nine Portsmouth FC seasons.

To start with, following the Sports Mail’s return, 10p of the 60p cover price was donated to the football club, and in its first two seasons back around £27,000 was donated to Pompey’s academy from an average sale of around 5,000 a week.

As of 2016, the weekly sale had dipped to around 3,700 - a far cry indeed from the 41,000 average in September 1960 (and that was the season Pompey were relegated from the old Second Division!)

You will not be surprised to know that sales of the Sports Mail have continued to fall since then; the fact this is the last ever edition tells you all you need to know. The Mail does not attract bespoke advertising. You don’t have to be the greatest accountant to know the figures weren’t adding up. Let’s be honest, you don’t even have to be an accountant …

To be brutally honest, I was surprised the Echo’s Sports Pin k lasted as long as it did. Ditto the Sports Mail. I was always a realistic sports editor and, looking around the country, realism bit - and it bit hard. All those towns and cities with a bigger footballing history than Southampton - Birmingham (Sports Argus, final edition 2006), Newcastle (Pink, 2005), Liverpool, Manchester (Pink, 2007), Sheffield (Green ‘Un, 2013), Nottingham, Derby, Wolverhampton (Sporting Star, 2009), Edinburgh (Pink) - now all yoked together as places which had long since lost its Saturday evening sports paper. Manchester’s Pink had moved from a Saturday evening slot to a Sunday morning one in 2000, and struggled on for another seven years.

So many others - Leicester (Sports Mercury, 2007), Hull (Green, 2005), Coventry (The Pink, 2004), Aberdeen (Green, 2002), Middlesbrough (Pink, 2008), Bristol (Green ‘Un, 2006), Cardiff (Sports Echo, 2006), Stoke, Ipswich, Norwich (Pink, 2009), Brighton. All gone, never to return.

(Why, Bristol used to have TWO Saturday evening papers - the Pink Un, produced by the Evening World, and the Green ‘Un, produced by the Evening Post. That duopoly ended when the Post gobbled up the Evening World - great name for a paper, the Evening World! - in the early 1960s. Even more incredulously - in today’s internet world, anyway - was the fact the Echo paper in Cardiff used to print TWO editions of their sports paper. The first would be on the streets 20 minutes after the final whistle and include just the first half report from that day’s Bluebirds match. Imagine that now.

I used to say to my colleagues at the Daily Echo: ‘Were all those newspapers wrong to stop their sports papers. Are we right to carry on? Do we know something they all didn’t?’

Of course we didn’t. It was a ‘no’ to all three questions. The Pink was the last Saturday evening soldier remaining on a battlefield littered with many (more well known) casualties. Stretching the war analogy, I always knew we were just one bullet away from suffering the same fate.

Back in the day, numerous bodies ensured Saturday evening papers were rushed out before some fans had made it back to their homes. And, for some, that ‘day’ wasn’t too long ago, not really.

As recently as 2002, I worked on the Bristol Evening Post’s Green ‘Un. Most weekends during a football season we had an office-based staff of around 20 people working on it - plus reporters and photographers at games and ladies - always ladies - taking the running copy from the journalists covering City and Rovers, plus Bristol and Bath rugby.

Compare that with the final weeks of The Pink in Southampton, where there were only two office-based staff, one copy-taker - who wasn’t always needed if the Wi-fi at a non-league ground was working - and just three reporters (two at a Saints game and one at a non-league fixture). Due to cutbacks, quite often the Saints pictures would be taken by a freelance. Taking all that into account, The Pink did well - extraordinarily well - to last as long as it did before taking the fatal bullet.

Here at The News, last season’s Sports Mails saw one person (working from home) involved in the production side of things on a Saturday afternoon - plus Neil Allen writing on that day’s Pompey game with pictures taken by a freelance. Again, compare that to my experiences just 20 years earlier.

Still, as the Yorkshiremen in the Monty Python sketch would tell me, I had it easy in my weekend sports paper production days. When I reported on Nottingham Forest and Notts County for the Green ‘Un in Derby, I had my own dedicated copytaker. And when in the office, computers made things quicker and easier (most of the time). Of course, it wasn’t always like this. Let’s go back further, much further, in time: back to the first decade of the 20th century when Bill Evans took two carrier pigeons with him to cover non-league games in the Plymouth area for the Saturday evening Western Daily Mercury - now the Western Morning News - sports paper. At the end of each half, he would fold up his written report, attach it to one of the pigeons and release it into the sky - hoping it would fly back to the Mercury office. I’d very much like to have seen Neil Allen try that last season, racking up at Pompey games with a basket containing two pigeons and his fingers perennially crossed.

Growing up in the 1980s as an Exeter fan, I still remember stopping off from long away coach trips to the north to buy the Birmingham Sports Argus, the daddy of all Saturday results papers, at a motorway service station. For many of us - those without a radio - this was the first time we could find out scores from other games. Writing that now, it seems like I’m describing a period in the 1930s or 1950s, rather than the mid-80s.

My, how I loved the Sports Argus. For years, it was the largest-selling sports newspaper in Britain. In 2005 it was still selling 10,000 copies a week, but it was still mothballed 12 months later due to losing £100,000 a year. It had lived to the ripe age of 109, but society had long since changed since it first appeared in 1897 with the strapline ‘A journal of all manly pastimes’. Be interesting to see the reaction on Twitter if any publication dared bring that back!

Back in the mid-80s, I was always impressed how action pictures from that afternoon’s games could be included in the Sports Argus. Later, when I worked on my first such publication - the Derby Telegraph’s Green ‘Un in 1994 - I was even more impressed when I was told how it happened - often a photographer giving a reel of film to a ‘gopher’ who would then rush back to the office to develop the images. Compare that to today’s technology, where action pictures from that day’s Pompey game could be on a page within minutes of kick off. Today’s technology IS amazing; it’s just a crying shame it’s helped kill off publications which gave so much pleasure to so many.

Good though the photos were, however, it was always the headlines I loved about the halcyon days of Greens, Pinks and Sports Mails. ‘NON-STOP POMPEY IN WONDER WIN’ from a 1963 game against Leyton Orient, the Blues staging a sensational comeback. ‘Three down - score six goals during 34-minute burst’ ran the strapline.

‘SAINTS ALIVE! IT’S A POMPEY ‘DOUBLE’ screamed another Mail front page headline after a 3-2 win at The Dell in February 1964, the last time Pompey completed the double over their arch rivals.

‘20 SEC-GOAL MARKED ROAD TO THE CHAMPIONSHIP’ was the front page headline on May 6 1950 when a 5-1 Fratton Park thrashing of Aston Villa ensured Pompey retained the First Division title on goal average over Wolves. ‘Villa Foundations Shaken: Crowd Lift Roof’ ran the strapline. Brilliant. A different world, of course, but it’s still great to look back at how society used to be, how newspaper language used to be, when Pompey were the champions of England.

And it’s worth remembering that journalists didn’t have their names printed alongside reports and columns until the 1970s. In the last few years of the previous decade, for example, ‘Linesman’ reported on Pompey, ‘Janus’ on Southampton and ‘Watchman’ on Brighton. Locally, ‘Townsman’ reported on Fareham, ‘Collegiate’ on Gosport Borough. ‘The Turk’ wrote about the Gosport League, ‘Honsec’ covered the North End League, ‘The Scout’ was the font of all Portsmouth FA knowledge and - my favourite - the Dockyard League scribblings were written by ‘Matey’. Who were the real people behind those pseudonyms?

Looking back at the various Sports Mail front pages from down the years, I can’t help but glance down all the league tables and marvel at how clubs’ fortunes can ebb and flow. Take the edition of December 22, 1984, the day Alan Biley’s two late goals gave Alan Ball’s Pompey a dramatic Fratton Park win against Oxford United. Blues were now second in the old Second Division, with Oxford (the eventual champions) fourth. Leeds and Manchester City were fifth and sixth respectively. In the same division were Grimsby, Shrewsbury, Carlisle and Notts County - all of whom have since nosedived into non-league football. A fifth name, Oldham Athletic, will make their non-league bow in 2022/23.

Swansea, Bolton and Burnley - three clubs who have milked Murdoch’s Premier League cash cow - were involved in a Third Division relegation fight. York City, now in the sixth tier, were above current Premier League outfit Brentford. Darlington, Bury and Hereford - three clubs later to sink into oblivion - were among the top four in the fourth tier. What on earth will the footballing landscape look in 40 years time?

Writing this piece has, inevitably, rekindled memories - of papers where I have worked, of people I once called colleagues, of sitting in freezing cole press boxes phoning over copy (and none better than my very first one, a last-minute Notts County derby victory over Forest in February 1994. Look at the gulf between those clubs now). And memories of how newspapers were, when I began my journalistic career in the late 80s, and how they are today. A microcosm of society itself, a different world.

In December 2017, I oversaw the final 48-page Southern Daily Echo Sports Pink. It was, as I said at the start of this article, the end of an era. Now, in July 2022, I have overseen the final Portsmouth News Sports Mail, a bumper 56-page product I sincerely hope you enjoy reading. A paper I’d like to think you will want to keep. And, as previously mentioned, this really IS the end of an era now. The landscape is bare. No-one is left standing. No Greens, no Pinks, no Mails or Sports Echos printed on paper of any colour. Technology has won the war. No more letters pages. Just internet message boards and the often toxic nature of social media. A fair swap? I’ll let you decide.

I grew up eagerly scanning the pages of Saturday evening sports papers in the mid-80s; I was lucky enough to subsequently work on them for over 20 years. I feel privileged to have been involved in little pieces of English sporting social history, and I don’t use that phrase lightly. And at least I was there, right at the end of their lifespan, even if I know I missed out on the golden part of the era by several generations.