Richard Banyard at Swindon-Town-FC.co.uk has a bit of an early Christmas present for you all…

In 2008, after an eBay purchase of a batch of VHS tapes with STFC footage from 1981-1993, I uploaded a batch of old match clips to YouTube. At the time, that prompted quite a bit of interaction from a number of Town fans, who got in touch with me to share footage – all of which was converted to DVD – my own collection now stands at well over 300 discs.

Those of you that follow me on Twitter will know that I’ve slowly been adding to the collection available on YouTube, I started with a ‘Video of the Week’ feature (that I wasn’t very good at remembering to post), and more recently, posting videos from ‘On This Day’ in history. As of 5th December, the total number of videos available on the site was 426.

Those features were all well and good when there was interesting footage to post… like “on this day, we beat Oxford 4-1”, or even “we lost 6-0 at home to Ipswich”… but with so many videos available now, those interesting videos were getting few and far between… “on this day, we lost 1-0 at Grimsby” or “we beat Barnet 2-1” isn’t always all that exciting.

And so – for the sake of completeness, I have been working for the past year or so to make ready and upload my entire collection of STFC footage to the site, up to the end of the 2009/10 season. As you can imagine, this has been quite painstaking at times – cutting all those DVD’s into individual matches, sorting out the duplicate and best footage available, and uploading it all to YouTube, with associated title and descriptions… my PC has been uploading almost constantly for virtually the last six months… but now, it’s ready – and this morning I have made available another 1,299 videos on the YouTube channel – bringing the total number available to a not insignificant 1,725, including 110 that are complete matches. So if you want to relive that night at the Valley in full, or are some sort of masochist that wants to go back to our first visit to the Kassam in 2002 – it’s all now there for you to see.

You can get to it all via the Video Library on the site here:
http://www.swindon-town-fc.co.uk/MediaPlayerSelect.asp

or, of course, via the Swindon-Town-FC.co.uk YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/SwindonTownFCcouk

… the videos are also available through the Match Centre page for each match.

Big thanks go to all those that have supplied and swapped footage – the major contributors being John Cosh, Clive Eckersall, Matthew Kilford, Dave Wallis, Mark Woolhouse, Terry James, Sam Eddolls, Paul Powney and Steve Leonard (I hope I remembered you all, apologies if I missed anyone) – special thanks in particular go to Simon Bayliss for his huge contributions over the past few years.

And finally, a plea for help! Though most seasons back to 1989 are pretty much covered, there are one or two games here and there that are missing, including many around the turn of the century, and those from 2002-2005 are not great quality (in fact, some are awful). If you do happen to have any of this footage, PLEASE get in touch – ask your mates if they’ve got club videos for the teams they support – anything! I would love to get these seasons completed if we can.

Enjoy!
Richard