Veterans League / Memories
When I was a teenager and had an obsession with football I used to have a weekly bet on a Fixed Odds coupon. Do you remember them? They were an alternative to the pools coupons with the big money prizes for selecting eight score draws to hit the jackpot prizes. Betting shops were relatively new and you could get a fixed odds coupon from them produced by the big betting firms such as Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters at that time. There would be grand odds for accumulator bets to entice you in with the sole intention of separating you from your hard-earned dosh.
You would then select the teams you wanted to bet on, fill in the coupon and return it along with your stake money. You could do this by post if you wanted along with a postal order for the correct amount. Then on Mondays when the betting shops reopened (no Sunday betting allowed in those days) you could go along and claim any winnings you might have won.
That has all been overtaken by online betting now of course although I believe that you can still get such coupons from your neighbourhood betting shop but you don't get the backup service from daily newspapers that you could rely on in the 1960's. The national newspapers used to produce their best tips for these Fixed Odds matches and support the interest of the avid punter with tables of statistics to help them make their own selections. These used to appear on the same day each week, usually Wednesdays, in advance of the Saturday matches. I used to look for the stats on the best recent form to assist my betting knowledge.
I thought it might be interesting to apply that practice to produce a form guide for a local bowling league. So that is what I have done, just for fun, no coupons to fill in, no stake to raise and I applied it to the Veterans 10-Man League. Two tables are below reflecting the current form of teams in all five divisions.
The newspaper football statistics of the 1960's would cover a wide range of figures and split them down to home and away records separately. I have kept it simple in my bowling version.
One table shows the teams with the longest current unbeaten runs (home and away combined) and one showing the longest current losing runs. I restricted the runs to teams with three matches of more in both tables. Just for fun of course. Maybe I will do the 6-Man League as well.
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The true "fixed odds" or "Individual odds" as bookies liked to call them appeared after the legalisaton of betting shops in 1961 & have been put down to the Stein brothers who ran Ladbrokes at the time. Very popular in Scotland and called a "line", bookies would take 100's if not 1000's over a weekend and managers often took them home to settle hoping for a shortie to get beaten.
In 1988 in Sheffield, I was on antibiotics on Grand National day so in the pub afterwards, offered a service to managers to settle their football for a few quid, I had 3 takers IIRC. I had been shrewd enough to realise a 1/2 favourite had been beaten so easy…