Quote Originally Posted by tied_up_in_notts View Post
Just to add my tuppence worth . . . . Mike Barber's time at Notts came a couple of years before I started attending matches, but I can well remember my dad going on about what an exciting and promising player he was, and he always told me that his career ended after a brutal tackle by an OXFORD player who couldn't cope with him. My dad said he had been standing very close to the incident and it was one of the worst fouls he had ever witnessed, so much so that he held something of a grudge against Oxford United for many years afterwards.
That's interesting, thanks. I like to get these details right.

The problem with The Football Post was that the reports had to be phoned in well before the game finished so that they could get the paper out on to the streets and into the newsagents as fans were still making their way home, so if a game ended 2-0 with goals on 55 and 85 minutes, you'd get a full paragraph devoted to the first goal detailing every player involved in the build up, then one single line tagged on at the end simply adding "and Hateley added the 2nd with 5 minutes remaining."
As the Oxford sending off for the foul on Barber occurred late in the game, there isn't a description of what actually happened, unless it's been lost in the Optical character read process, but your dad's story makes sense.

From what I can gather after the Aldershot game, Barber simply had a re-occurrence of knee trouble either during that match or in training days later, but he was then able to regain match fitness in time for the visit of Oxford. Tragically for him and Notts, an Oxford player has gone straight for his problem area - enough to put his knee back in plaster - and finished him off once and for all.

Lunaspie has apparently done what we all do and conflated memories of two separate and closely related events into one, but it's all part of the process of getting down to the truth of the matter.