Mike's 'Selfie'League
Mike Bradbury has played a 'Selfie ' League, usually with 14 teams for over forty years.
Most of those years, the teams were his favourite Old Boys and leading teams from the Victorian era,all painted up to the correct colours,many of which he had researched himself. teams like The Wanderers, Royal Engineers, The Swifts, Corinthians, Old Etonians and dozens more, enabled Mike to enjoy painting each one to their authentic colours, now numbering almost 100. Many have bizzare colours, such as purple and black hoops, pink and white halves and so on, but researching those Victorian colours has led to Mike publishing several books on the histories of nearly 300 extinct clubs who were all of a good enough level to have played in the FA Cup.
Italian teams were the basis for the selfie league during the early 1990s,when Channel 4 started to show Serie A games,and his favourites were AC Milan, Napoli and Fiorentina.many teams thus got repainted, over and over again, and some got so many coats that the gap under their arms almost got filled up!
Currently,however,the selfie league is comprised of his favourite 16 clubs from the Victorian Midlands, like Aston Unity, Walsall Swifts, Wednesbury Old Athletic, Stafford Road, Notts Rangers, Derby Junction and Derby Midlands,to compliment his epic reference book "Lost Teams Of The Midlands", available from Amazon,Waterstones,Black Hill Books(Clun) or the Black Country Bugle bookshop,or direct from Mike.
Founder Guy N Smith played a selfie league for even longer. All his teams were original flat card or cellulloid teams, and were the top First Division sides of the day- Tottenham, Burnley, Wolves, Man Utd, Arsenal and so on. But he also included his favourite teams from his beloved comics- Roy of The Rovers, the Dazzlers FC, and Melchester Rovers. Guy retained his child-like fascination with Subbuteo all his life, and on meeting Mike, would always say "We must keep this game going, it's our duty".
Starting playing at Christmas 1968 when he was 14, Mike returned to grammar school in the new year and immediately started up a club, at first called the Cannock Chase club. As membership rapidly swelled with applicants from all over the county, the name became the Mercian Club (Anglo-Saxon for the Midlands) before settling back as the South Staffs Club. Mike had organised three main competitions every year since-the County League, the Staffordshire Cup and since 1975, the Mercian Cup.That's an astonishing 56x3 = 168 competitions ! Additionally Mike has organised dozens of other annual events such as the Staffordshire Opens (1980s-1990s), has started up, helped to organise and otherwise guide well over twenty clubs in the Midlands. Two major undertakings include his 1999 UK Clubs championships at Bescot Stadium in Walsall which had the biggest ever turn out of 48 teams and over a hundred spectators; organising the highly successful Midlands Inter-Club League throughout the 1990s (14 clubs); also finding time to be the UKSA Midland then national organiser for about thirty years, only handing over the reins to Tom Taylor in 2002 (but picking them back up in the 2010s when Tom moved to Knighton); Mike has taught and improved many who went on to play for England or Wales over the decades, such as Mike Hammonds, Tom Taylor, Sue Taylor, Matt Lampitt, Mike Murphy, Steve Davis, Dean Whttaker and Anthony Beddows to name but a few. He was also the mentor behind the Lichfield and Wolverhampton clubs in the 1990s, the 44 player Burton club in the 1970s, and guided the Hall green, Brownhills, Wednesbury, Wolves Falcons, Knighton Vampires, Stoke Potters, Walsall Mayfield, North Staffs (Andy Bowler) and early Wolverhampton clubs over many decades. Yet recently, some wag who wasn't even born when Mike retained his UKSA West Midlands regional title in 1991, proclaimed "Mike Bradbury- what's he ever done for the game?".