Wednesday 21 January 2009

A LOOK AT THE OLD SCOREBOARD

Back in the days when Dundee did know how to score, most of the football grounds didn't offer much in the way of scoreboards. Before electronic visual display units were invented, the majority of grounds only had metallic grid frames installed, where letters of the alphabet were used to represent a particular game that then required referring to the match-day programme to discover which letter was who. Even then it was only used for half-time scores. All this had to be done by hand, with a guy slotting in the numbers (scores) alongside the corresponding letters (teams), each digit on a seperate metal panel.
When Dundee played Anderlecht in 1963 over in Belgium, the Heysel Stadium had a huge scoreboard display. This one wasn't for half-time scores, they used it during the game that was being played. Again, theirs still had to be operated manually, but because it was so large, each individual panel was about 4 ft square, and the guy would have to keep removing then replacing a panel every time a goal was scored. I can just imagine the poor bloke cursing Dundee when we met in the European Cup Quarter Final, and banged in 4..!!
The TV cameras caught the busy scoreboard action on the night, as you can see in the photo.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

good wee piece there like it!, keep up the good work, yer doing a quality job