Never understood why such as the Central League etc for reserve teams..

I say I can't believe it because I've never been what you might call a "loud" person. It just seems odd to remember that at the age of 12 or 13 I would be able to make myself heard by shouting in the streets. I never had a problem selling my stash, and even went in the Junction Inn to sell a few. It was a different world then of course. Nowadays I would get mugged, or just beaten up for no good reason!

 

No, the Northern Intermediate was the one the Juniors played in. Back in those pre-Academy days we had a first team, reserves and juniors. Maybe the club ran other age group teams as well but I don't recall that.

 

I'm not doubting we played in the Central League prior to the era I'm referring to. However, at some point we played in the North Midlands league and then moved to the Central League. I thought it may have been later than 80s when we moved, but we definitely left the North Midlands league to join the Central League at some point in my adult life which is basically 1980 onwards. Yes the Northern Intermediate league was the juniors as I've said earlier in this thread I used to get appointments for some of the home games. I'll have to see if I can dig some old programmes out.

 

I've just been having a read on that worthy site of reference (Wiki ) and it looks like we will both be right. As I said, during the 60s we played the big boys in the Central League, taking regular beatings but at least you had the novelty of seeing First Division players (or even Internationals) playing a Barnsley side, and they used to draw decent crowds if I remember rightly. We then went to the North Midlands, playing teams at our lowly level. There have been so many reorganisations of things over the years so it is quite likely that we ended up in some form of the Central League, or Central Midlands League, at some point.

It's not really worth the bother of climbing up to my loft (or yours!) to prove any of this. We all have memories. I definitely recall playing Man Utd reserves with great players like David Herd in their side. There was one season where we really did well - beating the likes of Everton, Wolves and maybe even Man Utd. There seemed to be a whole string of big wins against the "giants" of the football league. It didn't last though