Roy of The Rovers - Plot

Plot

For more information on the fictional career of the Race family, see Melchester Rovers

The story followed Roy Race, a striker for the fictional football team Melchester Rovers, based in a town of the same name in an unspecified part of England, where Roy lived with his family. In the first episode, a teenaged Roy and his best friend, Blackie Gray, signed for the Rovers after being spotted playing for a youth club team. Eight months later, Roy and Blackie made their first-team debuts against Elbury Wanderers in a game that ended in a 3–3 draw, with Roy scoring twice. He soon became a star, leading the team to either the Football League title or a cup almost every season. In January 1975 he was made player-manager, a position he retained for most of the next 20 years. Although the strip followed the Rovers through nearly 40 seasons, Roy did not age at the same rate and appeared to be at most in his late thirties by the time the weekly comic ended. This unrealistic longevity was never remarked upon by the weekly comic, although the monthly comic attempted to address the anomaly by explaining that more than one Roy Race had played for Melchester over the years.

Roy won a number of trophies during his career with Rovers, including nine league titles, eight FA Cups, three League Cups, three European Cups, one UEFA Cup, and four Cup Winners' Cups, and he also made several appearances for England. He married club secretary Penny Laine at the end of the 1975–76 season, with whom he had three children: Roy Jr., Melinda, and Diana. In the early 1980s, Penny left Roy, in a high-profile storyline that was covered on national television news. The following year Roy was shot in his office by a mystery gunman, in an incident clearly mirroring the shooting of J. R. Ewing in the hit television series Dallas the previous year. Roy lay in a coma for several weeks. The culprit was eventually revealed to be Elton Blake, an actor who had been cast as Roy in a television series about the Rovers, but who blamed him for his dismissal. In early 1983 Roy swapped Melchester Rovers for ambitious London side Walford Rovers after a fallout with the Melchester directors, but his stint away was short-lived and he was back at his spiritual home by the end of the year. In July 1986 eight members of the Rovers team were killed during a club tour of the fictional middle-eastern country of Basran, when terrorists accidentally crashed a bomb-laden car into the team bus. Roy escaped with a dislocated shoulder.{{|Author Mick Collins has commented that "Even as youngsters, we knew that this certainly bordered on bad taste, and probably overstepped the mark."}}

The final incident of Roy's playing career came in the closing pages of the last weekly issue, in March 1993, when he lost control of his helicopter and crashed into a field. Thus the weekly strip ended its 39-year unbroken run on a downbeat and unresolved cliffhanger, as Roy was taken into hospital while fans, the media and his family awaited news on his condition. The mystery of whether or not Roy had survived his crash was unresolved until the first issue of the new Roy of the Rovers Monthly in September 1993, in which readers discovered that the accident had resulted in the amputation of his famous left foot, ending his playing career and resulting in his move to Italy as the manager of Serie A side AC Monza.

Reconciling the continuity of the monthly strip with the stories that preceded and followed it presented difficulties, forcing the story's writers to alter its history in a number of ways, a technique known as retroactive continuity. Significantly, the strip rewrote various parts of Melchester's history, and shortened Roy Sr.'s recorded playing career to a more realistic level.

By the time the strip ended in March 1995 Melchester were in dire straits, on the verge of bankruptcy, and their long-term future far from certain. When the strip returned in Match of the Day magazine in May 1997, much of the monthly comic's new continuity was ignored, although the basic thread of the club having struggled against relegation and being severely in debt was continued. It was revealed in the first strip that in the intervening years, while Rovers had managed to survive the threat of bankruptcy, a bribery scandal had caused a mass exodus of players and eventual relegation to Division One. Rocky, meanwhile, was playing for fierce local rivals Melborough, after a bitter falling-out with his father over a car accident in Italy in which his mother, Penny, had been killed. Roy, who had quit football as a result, was blamed by some (including his son) for the accident, even though he had no memory of it, and the precise circumstances surrounding the event were never resolved.

Roy was persuaded to rejoin Melchester as manager and part-owner, backed by the unscrupulous Vinter brothers, and he arrived just in time to save the club from relegation. The following season, Roy and Rocky resolved their differences. Rocky rejoined Melchester, and the club was promoted back into the Premier League at the end of the year. When the magazine closed in 2001, Rovers were attempting to achieve a league placing that would secure them UEFA Champions League football, giving them financial security. Although this storyline was never resolved, there was nevertheless a certain sense of closure as, shortly beforehand, Roy Sr. had wrested full control of the club from the Vinters, thus completing his 44-year progression from player to owner.