Promising start, then fade-out
LIVELY UNITED
Manchester United 1, Blackpool 1
BLACKPOOL, defeated in their last four away games, met at Maine-road this afternoon Manchester United who have been among the goals in recent times - 17 in the last five games including four at Chelsea a week ago.
A ground which has capacity of nearly 80,000 was barely populated half-an-hour before the kick-off, but I was told that in the centre of the city the queues for cars were of great length.
They either had to take a tram or walk today. The abolition of the basic petrol had left the huge car park almost empty.
Blackpool fielded the men who defeated the Cup holders last week, and the United again played a forward line which had in it Jack Rowley (13 goals this season), and Jack Morris (11).
BLACKPOOL: Wallace, Shimwell, Suart, Kelly, Hayward, Johnston, Matthews, McKnight, Mortensen, Buchan (W), Munro.
MANCHESTER UNITED: Crompton, Walton, Aston, Carey, Chilton, Cockburn, Delaney, Morris, Rowley, Pearson, Mitten.
Referee: Mr. F. Thurman, of Preston.
THE GAME
For the third successive match on tour a colour clash compelled Blackpool to play in white. There were nearly 40,000 on the ground and hundreds were still climbing the tops of the terraces when the teams appeared.
The attendance eventually reached 63,683.
The ground was so soft that the first time the captains tossed the coin came to rest on its edge in the mud. Johnston lost it the second time.
The United goal was in peril in the first minute as Buchan took a pass after a Johnston-Mortensen-Munro raid and lost the ball under a press of men inside shooting range.
It was good to watch the Blackpool forwards in the early minutes releasing the ball from man to man and introducing the long pass every time.
There was class all over Blackpool's football and for a time the United were penned in their own half.
When they escaped a crossfield pass to the left was perfectly intercepted and cleared by Shimwell
A couple of minutes later a peach of a pass by Pearson to his partner left Mitten to race in and shoot wide of the post. That was a raid built with one pass - the sort of raid which has been making a lot of goals for United lately.
A minute later Blackpool won a corner on the left which a massed Manchester defence repulsed.
At the end of six minutes not one pass had reached Matthews. In the seventh Munro took a Mortensen throw-in and from his long pass 'Matthews, given a glimpse of the ball at last, took it past Aston as if the full-back were standing still and lobbed into the centre a ball which Crompton fielded almost on his knees.
OUTPLAYED
Blackpool on top in first 10 minutes
In the next minute Blackpool won their second corner.
The United were outplayed in the first 10 minutes. Twice in succession Crompton beat out lobbed centres by Matthews after the outside-right had left his full back sprawling in the mud.
In one breakaway, Mitten shot past Wallace a ball which crawled over the line off the far post, but as the whistle had gone seconds earlier for offside the cheers seemed a little superfluous.
JOY TO WATCH
It was still nearly all Blackpool, whose football was at times a joy to watch, although in direct raids the United were remarkably fast on the ball and from the 12th to the 16th minute raided with such pace and fury that Blackpool surrendered three corners and, in the end. a free kick a yard outside the area which should have made it 1-0.
Carey took the kick, lobbed across a ball which Wallace could only reach with his finger tins. On to the head of Pearson the ball cannoned.
How the inside-left contrived to head wide from such a position baffled the comprehension.
Continuously afterwards these United forwards hammered on Blackpool’s goal, missed three reasonable chances in as many minutes.
In front of Wallace the ball was crossed and crossed again. Blackpool were for a time retreating everywhere.
Buchan shot high and wide from an impossible distance in a Blackpool breakaway. It was to breakaways that, after an opening of great promise, the Blackpool front line had been reduced.
A minute later, after Delaney had retrieved a ball which everybody else had given up and hooked it inside, Hayward made a desperate somersaulting tackle to halt Rowley as the centre-forward took the ball with the goal at his mercy.
THE LEAD
Five times in the first half-hour the Manchester forwards had been halted in offside traps.
In the 31st minute they took the lead deservedly. Again, it was a raid in two crisp passes A full-back cleared. Carey took possession, lobbed into an unguarded centre the second pass.
PEARSON was waiting for it, ran forward on his own half-a-dozen yards and shot wide of Wallace a ball which the goalkeeper parried against the foot of a post but could only stand watching as it went into the net.
That was 1-0. It might have been 3-0, so completely were Blackpool being outplayed by a forward line which moved faster to the ball and was constantly escaping into scoring positions.
Blackpool made one appeal for a penalty as McKnight came to earth in the area but Mr. Thurman said, “No.” A minute later it was nearly 1-1 as Munro cut into the centre and crossed a low pass which, in a dive Buchan headed wide of Crompton on whose right Cockburn cleared off the line.
The football with goals in it was still being played by a Manchester forward division that went tearing after the ball and invariably found the unmarked man with its passes.
SLICED CLEARANCE
A chance offered itself to Mortensen, an unexpected chance, as Walton sliced a clearance into his own goal area. The centre forward lost it as the ball skidded away, from him in thick slime in the goalmouth.
Direct from the goal kick the tearaway United nearly increased the lead, Morris taking Rowley’s back pass and shooting inches over the bar.
Half-time: Manchester U. 1 Blackpool 0.
Second Half
The half had a tame opening after all the fire and fury of the first 45 minutes. Then Suart made two desperate clearances from Manchester forwards pursuing those fast long passes which were too seldom in Blackpool’s game.
Wallace beat down one ball shot at him by Morris, a forward who takes his chances as soon as they offer themselves.
Twice, too, with the Manchester pressure continuing, the two fullbacks, Walton and Aston, actually raced into shooting positions and each time shot just wide.
They were beginning to cheer whenever the ball reached Matthews.
When at last he was given a pass. Aston was content to give a corner.
ON LEVEL TERMS
In the seventh minute of the half, Blackpool made it 1-1. Munro crossed a centre, Chilton leaped at it, misjudged the ball’s flight and headed it down to MORTENSEN.
In the next split second the centre-forward veered away to the right from the centre-half, passed the remaining full-back, and shot the ball over the line as he fell to earth.
He was almost buried beneath a heap of men arriving on the scene that fatal second too late.
Nobody had expected that goal, least of all a Manchester defence which had palpably been taken unawares.
The Manchester forwards went at it again with a greater fury than ever. Twice Wallace snatched out of the air centres flying across his goal.
Yet in Blackpool’s next raid Munro, suddenly appearing at outside-right, won a corner all on his own.
The United were no longer in complete command. The pace was beginning to take its toll of those fast forwards.
There was one free-for-all in the Blackpool goal area which ended with Hayward reeling, his hands clutched to his face after a boot had hit him in the wild foray.
It was nearly all Manchester, but with 20 minutes left the United’s raids were at last packing no particular punch.
FEW PASSES
Too few passes were being given to Matthews; in fact, scarcely any at all. For minutes the game was in midfield. Both defences at last were holding their men.
In a last desperate bid by the United, Hayward halted Delaney brilliantly as the outside-right was racing on to a certain goal.
In the next minute Suart cleared on the line.
Could Blackpool hold out in the jaws of a goal almost lost to view in the gathering gloom?
In the end Blackpool finished as a raiding team. Six minutes from time Crompton made the clearance of the match when Matthews nearly won the game with the greatest shot of the afternoon.
Result:
MANCHESTER UNITED 1 (Pearson 31 min)
BLACKPOOL 1 (Mortensen 52 min)
Blackpool won a point against all the odds in this match. At half-time I had nearly given it up. Blackpool, presumably, had not.
In the second half a Manchester forward line which missed its chances in the first 45 minutes, was tamed at last by a defence which met it with a resolution which had to be admired.
Earlier, this defence had nearly been played out of the match by one of the best attacks I have seen this season.
If Shimwell had not played out of the game the wing facing him there might have been a rout before half-time.
The Blackpool forward line was a study in contrasts. For the first 15 minutes and often after the interval it was a line whose football was a model in mid-field in the precision of its passes.
For the rest of the time it held merely a watching brief and always it was guilty of the error of putting Matthews on an austerity ration of passes.
The left-wing 'partnership of Buchan and Munro was its chief instrument. The little outside-left refused all the time to submit to the dictation of a Manchester defence which for long periods had the entire line in its grip.
BLACKPOOL’S GRAND LOYAL ARMY
Supporters Club’s achievements in its first year
By “Spectator”
WHEN is a football supporters’ club an intolerable embarrassment, sometimes even a menace, to the club it purports to serve?
That is the question. This is the answer: When it interferes in the management of the club and assumes an authority to which it is not entitled.
HERE is another Q and A.
Q: When is a supporters’ club of service to the game in general and its own affiliated club in particular?
A: When it conducts itself as the Blackpool F.C. Supporters’ Club has been conducted during its first postwar year.
It is exactly 12 months ago on Wednesday of next week that the new club at Blackpool was established at a meeting which revealed immediately that there was a demand for such a club among the town’s football fans.
Its record
THIS is the club’s record in its first year.
Nearly 1,000 members signed, and not among Blackpool and Fylde people only, but Blackpool exiles in all parts of the country and even overseas as far away as Gibraltar.
The installation of a £750 broadcast system at Bloomfield-road.
The production of the first postwar programme.
The promotion of coach excursions to away games and a series of social events ranging from dances to brains trusts. Also all-star snooker matches which have been so lucrative that the total receipts, intended as a gift to the parent club, may reach four figures by the end of the year.
The mobilising of a squad of stewards for every match day.
Overdraft went
THE turnstile receipts even in those days would have been dismissed by a few present-day clubs as petty cash, but in the end they sufficed to liquidate an overdraft which had soared to £33,000 when war broke out.
That enabled Blackpool to begin all over again from scratch, not from one of those plus handicaps with which the directorate had become too familiar.
Two men only have been signed since the war - Stanley Matthews and Eddie Shimwell - who are in the big-money class, and yet for a season and a half a Blackpool team has never been out of the top half of the First Division table and for several weeks last season led the Division.
Their loyalty
ALL this, which can be assessed in terms of £ s. d., and something else outside exact definition - the fostering of a new sense of loyalty to the club which the 1,000 are content to serve as unpaid volunteers.
One of these Great Unpaid whom I met the other day was devoting his leisure to painting and renovating the directors’ box in the centre stand. That is scarcely spectacular, but it is indicative of the selfless service which the club has given and is still prepared to give.
It all adds up to a remarkable achievement in one year, and the club’s first anniversary should not, I think, be allowed to pass without an acknowledgment.
Appreciation
HERE, then, is the “Thank you.” The directors, who have never had reason to complain of the club’s discreet and unobtrusive policy, are as appreciative of all that has been accomplished in one short year.
It shows what private enterprise can still do - if it’s left alone. Happy birthday -and many of ’em.
Compliments are thick in the air this week. Here is another to Mr. Harry Evans on his deserved, and, in my opinion, inevitable appointment as chairman of the club on whose board he began to serve way back in the ’20’s
Time marches on
IT makes you realise how time, in truth, marches on when it is recalled that the new chief of staff, has served under ' the chairmanship of Mr. Fred Seed, Mr. Sam Butterworth, Mr. Albert Hargreaves, and Sir Lindsay Parkinson and Col. W. Parkinson Some of those names are already almost legendary in the story of Blackpool football.
The board will not regret its selection of him as chairman. Nor Mr. Albert Hindley’s as vice- chairman.
REMEMBER THE LAST TIME?
THEY can begin today preparing the “Ground full” notices for Preston North End s visit to Blackpool next weekend. If ever there was a sell-out this match is it.
Last season’s game was a match and a half. Preston were beaten 4-0 - it was Blackpool’s biggest victory of the season - and yet it was no one-way traffic afternoon.
Tom Finney missed a penalty for North End soon after George Dick, a last-minute deputy, had scored two goals in the first 14 minutes for Blackpool. Later in the afternoon, too, these Preston forwards had two goals disallowed.
It was in a couple of breakaways that Stanley Mortensen shot No. 3 and No. 4 after the interval.
The teams were:
BLACKPOOL: Wallace; Shimwell, Sibley ; Farrow, Hayward, Johnston; Nelson, Munro, Mortensen, Dick, and Blair (J.).
PRESTON N.E.: Fairbrother; Beattie (A.), Scott; Shankly, Williams, Hamilton; Finney, McLaren, McIntosh, Beattie (R.), and Wharton.
That was last February - only 10 months ago. Yet it is possible that next week only one of those Blackpool forwards will be playing.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 6 December 1947
I THINK they must have scouts watching the Belfast boats. No English manager ever crosses to Ireland these days without his presence soon being' broadcast to the world.
Manager Joe Smith was soon identified when he went to Glentoran last weekend. And, according to his report when he returned, he was not there watching a particular player, but merely on one of those routine visits which wise managers make to these outposts every now and again.
Now if a star outside-left had revealed himself, and they had not wanted the earth - or a good bit of it - for him . . . well, that might have been different.
***
CHRISTMAS DAY - 2-15
THE Christmas Day match at Blackpool - Stoke City are the visitors - is to be played in the afternoon.
Col. W. Parkinson, J.P., the late chairman, never approved of morning games on Christmas Day, considering that they affected attendances at the churches.
The board could scarcely reverse this policy of afternoons-only oh this day of the year so soon after the chairman’s death. But in future - well, time alone will tell.
A 2-15 kick-off means either dinner after the match or an early one before it. Housewives are not inclined to look with approval on either.
SO Cheltenham Town are still in the Cup. Whenever I see this club’s name in the lists I recall the amazing Cup-tie which Blackpool played at Cheltenham in 1934.
The match had to be played on the Rugby Union ground because the Town s little enclosure would never have accommodated the people.
The Town, a team of market gardeners, butcher, bakers and (for all I know) candlestick-makers, led 1-0 at half-time, but could not last the pace.
They were beaten in the second half 3-1 by a Phil Watson penalty and a couple of goals by Walter Bussey, who, by the way, was Stanley Matthews’s first partner at Stoke, and Peter Doherty.
WHEN last George Farrow was on Blackpool's transfer list - as he is on it again today - Port Vale were interested.
George was not. So the Vale took Jim Todd, the Irishman, instead, and now, after playing him regularly as a wing-half, are converting him into an inside-forward.
Where will George go now? I shall be sorry if he goes anywhere. He’s still too good to lose.
I SHALL have watched Jack Morris, 23-years-old forward of Manchester United, with interest this afternoon.
His three goals at Chelsea last week have persuaded a lot of people that he is today the one man seriously challenging Stanley Mortensen or Wilf Mannion for one of the inside positions in the England team.
All three may be playing for England before another couple of years have passed - Stan Mortensen as the attack leader with the other two partnering him.
WORKINGTON, shock team of the F.A. Cup first round, had Alf Pope, the Blackpool wartime full-back, on their books last season, and were one of the non-League clubs who made a bid to Jock Dodds after he had refused Blackpool’s terms of re-engagement.
I hear, by the way, that Pope, P.T.I. at St. Joseph’s College, Blackpool, these days, charged from a full-back position to score one of Blackpool North End’s nine goals in a Fylde League match last weekend.
***
EX-BLACKPOOL men still in and already out of the Cup at the end of Round One:
In: Alec Roxburgh (Barrow), Jim Blair (Bournemouth), Bob Finan and Louis Cardwell (Crewe), Hugh O’Donnell, Cyril Lawrence, Dick Withington (Rochdale).
Out: Jim Todd (Port Vale), Dick Burke (Carlisle), Malcolm Butler (Accrington).
Bob Finan scored another goal for the Alexandra in the defeat of South Shields.
***
THERE are only five men in Blackpool’s first and second teams who have not yet missed a match this season. Not one of them is a forward - and only one is a half-back.
The never - absents in the First Division are Jock Wallace, his two full-backs, Eddie Shimwell and Ronnie Suart, and the centre-half, Eric Hayward.
Full -back, Gordon Kennedy, is the Reserve’s one ever-present.
The moral of all this may be that you take less punishment in a defence than in an attack. It might be, but I think it’s merely a matter of chance.
GOALKEEPER protecting the only undefeated away record left in the First Division, Burnley’s Jim Strong, could have been signed by Blackpool from Portsmouth for less than £1,000 during the war years, when he was one of Blackpool’s guest players.
I am not blaming Blackpool for not buying - even at that price. There was always Jock Wallace, working in the Scottish pits but prepared to come back as soon as he was required.
And with Joe Robinson and Walter Thorpe in reserve no goalkeeper problems appear imminent today.
SAM BARTRAM, the Charlton goalkeeper, who at times scorned all the conventions at Blackpool a week ago, is the Jock Ewart of his generation. It is not surprising.
He has not always been a goalkeeper - even if he’s become one of the best in the land now. It was as a centre-forward that he entered football, went to Reading on a trial as a front-line leader.
Manager Joe Smith, who was with the Berkshire club in those days, was not impressed. So Sam picked up his musket - and departed until one day by chance he went into goal, and took to it as a duck to water.
Alec Roxburgh is another case of a forward converting himself into a man beneath the bar. He learned all about it in a shooting gallery on Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
GEORGE AINSLEY, who scored two goals in his first game for Bradford - goals which defeated the Second Division leaders, West Bromwich Albion - will be in no strange environment at Park-avenue.
He often played as a guest for Bradford during the war, after he had been Blackpool’s first wartime captain.
And at “The Avenue,” too, he will meet the man who was Blackpool’s trainer in those days, Mr. Allan Ure.
OWING to the illness of Mendel Showman, the snooker match fixed for last Wednesday evening at the South Shore Hotel had to be postponed.
The match will be played later.
Next week’s game
NEXT Saturday we meet Preston North End.
We appeal to all who are going to watch the game to arrive early and take notice of the stewards who are there to assist them.
We are sure of a big gate and we ask for spectators’ cooperation.
Membership
OUR membership is increasing, but not so well as we would like. Join today and give a helping hand.
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