After the first round of matches, the Canon League barely paused for breath as just two days later there was a limited programme of matches in the top two tiers of the Football League.  The results can be found in another blog, but for now I will focus on the programme for the match at Villa Park between Aston Villa and Sunderland.

The images I have shared in this post can be enlarged, simply by clicking on them.  

For Aston Villa, this was a second home match in two days, following on from their entertaining 4-3 victory over West Bromwich Albion on the opening day of the season.  Their opponents, Sunderland, had hosted Norwich City at Roker Park and were held to a 1-1 draw.

Villa’s rivalry with WBA, was the first of eight local derbies due to take place throughout 1983/84. Amazingly, there were nine Midlands clubs in Division One within a 50 mile radius. These clubs were listed on page 2 of the programme and include Villa, Birmingham City, Coventry City, Leicester City, Notts County, Nottingham Forest, Stoke City, WBA and Wolves.

The front cover of this afternoon’s matchday programme is dominated by John Taylor of Duran Duran who is sporting the latest Villa shirt, as created by Le Coq Sportif. 18,000 music fans had crammed in to Villa Park to enjoy a free concert by local band Duran Duran in aid of Mencap. There are a number pages in the programme that include pictures of adoring fans and the group in action.

Poor old Colin Gibson was shoved on the front cover, almost as after thought with his black and white image in stark contrast to the full colour shot of a rock’n roll heartthrob.

Collectors maybe interested to note that this issue would have set them back 40p.

A page of particular interest, that appeared in all of Football League programmes during the opening weeks of the season, was an introduction to the newly unveiled league sponsors – Canon. Don’t forget that you can make the text below larger simply by clicking on the image. You can then read all about how sponsorship first began to wheedle it’s way into the national game. It can be said that the trend had started prior to this with the Milk Marketing Board interfering with the Football League Cup.

It all seems very innocent and genteel, but it cannot be argued that Canon were sowing the seeds for what was to follow.

Aston Villa seemed to have thrown themselves headfirst into corporate sponsorship. Throughout the programme there are countless advertisements and photographs of players posing next to Austin Maestros. Apparently, Austin Rover had provided a fleet of Austin Maestros for officials and players to drive. Lucky buggers, but it seems apparent that sponsorship deals such as this have led to the unappetising rise of business conglomerates over increasingly irrelevant sporting  institutions. See below a picture of Nigel Spink fulfilling his contractual obligations.

The back page of the programme has a classic look, and includes the team line ups, other matches played that day, information about the officials of the day, match ball sponsors, club vouchers and bizarrely in these post-Jimmy Saville days, personal details and contact address of the match mascot.

A full results round-up from August 29th will be published in a separate blog shortly.

After writing this detailed review of Aston Villa v Sunderland programme from over 30 years ago, I suddenly realised that I need to rediscover a purpose to my life.  It is all well and good to have a genuine passion in life, but this cannot be all consuming. I just feel that I need to find that illustrious missing piece of my jigsaw of life, after I have enjoyed the video above that is…