Robin's reams of West Brom programme notes

A lifelong Albion fan who's been going to The Hawthorns for 62 years, the 70-year-old from Featherstone, near Wolverhampton, has one of the most extensive collections of Baggies programmes around.

He's got every home edition since 1954 apart from one, and every away one since 1970 bar three.

His collection tops 5,000, and what's more, he's got a newspaper cutting of every single Baggies match report since the late 1950s.

A die-hard home and away fan for decades, age has now stopped him going to every game, but his son who sits in the East Stand still picks him up a programme.

So why keep it up? Tradition for one, but also to recapture that childhood sense of excitement.

"It's the sort of thing you do at 12-years-old isn't it?" he said. "I've just never stopped doing it!"

Slowly but surely he has filled the gaps in his collection by hunting down missing programmes online. But those are not as special as the ones he bought at the ground.

"A lot of programmes are my own personal ones," he said. "I was at the match and I've got my finger marks on. I can replace all of those but I don't want to. I've even got the half-time results written in a lot of them."

A retired council worker who now has eight grandchildren, Robin had a season ticket in Halfords Lane for more than 40 years, and was first taken to The Hawthorns at the age of eight by his father Ernest, who started supporting the Baggies in the mid 1920s.

"My father went until he died in 1971 and now my son's taken over from me, so that's about 100 years of Albion support," he said.

Although most fans would be proud to own a Cup final programme, they don't interest Robin as much as rare specimens from a wet midweek game.

"The favourite ones are Cup finals of course, but there's millions of those about so they're not important in terms of scarcity value," he said. And anyway, he was at the 1968 FA Cup final himself.

"My father treated all the family to the best seats in the house which was pretty close to the royal box," he said. "I was sitting near (former Prime Minister) Harold Wilson, I was on the seat right next to that bit when they walked down and I touched the cup. But I can't remember much of the match, it wasn't a very good one!"

So what about that magical home programme that still eludes him?

"It was Chelsea at home on a Wednesday afternoon in the 1954/55 season. The crowd was just 7,000.

"It was pouring down with rain, there were less than 2,000 produced, and that's why it's so scarce. The ironic thing is, I was there, I remember it! We'd just got knocked out of the cup. I'm still hoping."

Despite his extensive collection, Robin doesn't reckon he's got the best. "I'm sure there is somebody else with more," he said. "Lots of people collect them don't they.

"The club themselves must have every home programme, they'll have every one since the first issue in 1905."

But it's unlikely any personal collections can rival his.