Sheffield United vs Coventry City

UTB 37
of silence and armbands by way of tribute
were observed. We travelled to Swansea
Town that night losing 3-1 and met Leeds
at Bramall Lane on the 16th, winning the
Yorkshire Derby 1-0
The Coronation of Elizabeth came the
following year at Westminster Abbey on
June 2nd, a few short weeks after we
added the Second Division Championship
to our honours board in a season that saw
all the forward line get into double figures.
The changes over the last 70 years
in life alone have been truly incredible.
When you stop for a minute and think of
what has changed in the world full stop
it’s nothing short of amazing. It’s also
sadly sobering in terms of how society
has changed, and not for the better.
Elizabeth inherited the last days of the
Empire to a certain extent. When she
ascended, it’s astounding to understand
that she was monarch to over a quarter
of the planet’s land mass and also over a
quarter of its population.
I said earlier that, in my young mind,
that magazine cover from the day she was
crowned seemed to have signalled the
change from black and white to colour
and, as the ‘60s arrived, it exploded into
life and this country became the epicenter
of all that was cool, all that was important,
and all the world turned its eyes once
again to Britain.
Queen Elizabeth was there to see
arguably the greatest day in English
football history as Bobby Moore lifted the
World Cup for what is, so far, the only time
we have achieved the accolade. In fact,
the 1953 ‘Matthews Final’ - regarded as
the first with a huge televised audience
had the figures attributed to the fact many
households had rented sets to watch her
Coronation a few weeks later. Her last
final for many years was in 1976, but she
returned for the first game at a re-vamped
stadium when it re-opened.
As said, my parents were huge
supporters of the Royal Family, but in her
lifetime and indeed mine, I never got near
her. We weren’t the wealthiest of families,
so trips to London were fairly non- existent,
so to me Buckingham Palace was like
some far away mansion of fiction. I recall
a visit to Sheffield during her Jubilee year
in 1977, and that was to Hillsborough Park
as part of the celebrations. I was taken
along by Mum to see if a glimpse could
be caught and, to be honest, there were
so many there that I didn’t see her, but it
sticks out in my mind as a show of how
that generation held her in such esteem.
Every child in the country received a
commemorative spoon too, as I recall.
It would be fair to say that our highs and
lows were many over that 70-year reign.
The Championship won in the year of
her Coronation would prove to be one of
a limited number of highlights over that
▲ Derek Hawksworth was the last player to pass away who
played in the United side just after the death of King George
SHEFFIELD UNITED vs COVENTRY CITY