Heroes & Villains – Newport County
Heroes – The European Cup Winners Cup team of 1980/81
Newport County reached the First Round of the FA Cup, the Second Round of the League Cup and finished 12th in the Third Division. This will not be what their fans will remember from this season though.
The club reached the Quarter Finals of the European Cup Winners Cup in a time where winners of the Welsh FA Cup entered the competition.
Crusaders of Northern Ireland were the first opponents and they won 4-0 aggregate after a 4-0 win in the first leg at home.
Norway’s FC Haugar were the Second Round opponents and after a goalless draw in Norway, Newport smashed six past them without reply.
Newport crossed into East Germany to play Carl Zeiss Jena in the Quarter Final and earned a very credible 2-2 thanks to two goals from Tommy Tynan. Despite dominating the second leg at Somerton Park, they went down 1-0 and narrowly missed out on a Semi Final with Benfica. The highlights from the game can be seen above.
Villain – Jerry Sherman
Millionaire Sherman arrived at Somerton Park in 1986 as a complete unknown and left the club bankrupt three years later.
In the first full season with Sherman as chairman, County were relegated from the Third Division and finished bottom of the Fourth Division the year after that. After only amassing 25 points from 46 games, they dropped out of the Football League for the first time in 60 years.
Things got even worse for Newport County’s fans in the 1988/89 season as the club went out of business on 27th February 1989 with debts of over £300,000. It would be difficult to say that the sorry state of affairs were entirely of Sherman’s doing, but the two relegations and subsequent bankruptcy under his tenure does make grim reading.
The winding-up of the club featured on an episode of BBC Wales’ ‘Week In Week Out’. You can watch the episode of the show by clicking here.
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