Roy of the Rovers focus switched to Roy's son Rocky, who also played for Melchester. This publication was short-lived, and folded after only 19 issues. The adventures of the Race family were subsequently featured in the monthly "Match of the Day" football magazine, in which father and son were reunited as manager and player respectively. These strips began in 1997 and continued until the magazine's closure in May 2001. Football-themed stories were a staple of British comics for boys from the 1950s onwards, and Roy of the Rovers was the most popular. To keep the strip exciting, Melchester was almost every year either competing
Roy of the Rovers 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