THE GAME
Harry Johnston, back as Blackpool’s captain, won the toss. Blackpool defended the town goal.
Early Blackpool raids were halted by Walton’s magnificent clearances before Matthews twice passed this full-back’s partner and crossed a ball which Corbett hocked away anywhere out of a packed goal area.
RAIDS CONTINUE
The Blackpool raids continued, Wardle taking Mortensen’s perfect forward pass, racing into an open position and crossing a high centre which Newlands held on his line.
Rickett was here, there and everywhere, once out on the right wing preparing to take a throw in before Johnston ordered him back to the centre. In these opening minutes, however. the man in the centre of Blackpool’s front line saw little of the ball.
Johnston ended North End’s first raid in the fifth minute by dispossessing the England forward Langton, and with undisturbed confidence making a pass back to Farm.
Blackpool were raiding almost without interruption, a Kelly - Wardle advance giving the wing forward position to cross another high centre which Mortensen headed into Newlands’ hands.
Once McIntosh had a lone spurt down the centre which came abruptly to a standstill under Wright’s tackle. Otherwise in the first 10 minutes the Preston forwards were subdued.
Bogan twice in a minute wandered into an offside trap before Newlands was in action again, fielding a centre which Matthews lofted over' with all the old precision after McCall and Mortensen had opened a raid with two grand long passes.
NORTH END ATTACK
Afterwards there was continuous but never convincing pressure by an awakening North End. Preston’s attacks ended every time, either in one of the offside decisions which were cutting the match to ribbons, or in their being stopped by a firm defence.
Rickett was still racing about waiting for passes that never came. The first corner was won by Preston, in the 13th minute.
Another followed which Farm punched out as McIntosh catapulted past him into the net.
When the ball reached Rickett at last he made everything he could of it, gliding to Mortensen a pass which put the inside-right on an open path to goal, but the inside man fell as he tore away.
Suart was playing close on Langton, yet Preston were beginning to storm into the game with all the familiar North End earnestness.
They won one free-kick a yard outside the penalty area, which Langton shot fast into a congested goalmouth, Suart hooking it out again.
Constantly afterwards North End were advancing.
In one Blackpool breakaway Langton raced back 50 yards to tackle Matthews, was penalised for the tackle and from the free-kick Newlands held a ball headed at him fast by Mortensen.
Blackpool’s open game always held the greater menace.
Twice in a minute it nearly snatched the lead. The first time at the end of a wing-to-wing advance Newlands lost a bouncing ball, Scott kicked it away.
CHANCE LOST.
The next minute, the 35th of the half, Blackpool should have been in front.
Matthews took a loose ball, saw an open space in Preston’s goalmouth and glided there a perfect pass. McCall moved to it, half hit it to Newlands with the goal wide open.
Three minutes later, a minute after Farm had made a grandstand save, hurling himself into the path of a low thunderbolt shot by Bogan, the Blackpool goal had a similar escape.
This time a rebounding ball put an offside forward into an onside position, Beattie unexpectedly finding himself in a place where it was nearly impossible to miss a goal.
Yet he hooked it wide with Farm at his mercy.
THE LEAD
Mortensen heads in a grand goal
Drama came thick and fast afterwards in the 40th and 41st minutes.
Matthews crossed another of his made-to-measure centres. A massed Preston defence and three Blackpool forwards leaped at it. Off one of the Preston men the ball cannoned, hit a post, came out again.
To this rebounding ball Mortensen leaped, headed it forward. Up to it Newlands went, punched it over the bar for Blackpool’s first corner of the match.
From that corner Blackpool took the lead. Wardle crossed it perfectly.
Backwards and forwards the ball swayed in the air before MORTENSEN, rising to it an inch higher than the rest of the pack, headed his fourth goal of the season.
Blackpool were entitled to the lead. There had been in their football the greater purpose and the long pass had certainly been in their game.
Half-time: Preston N.E. 0, Blackpool 1.
SECOND HALF
Blackpool's goal was in peril in the first minute. Suart was penalised for a tackle. Scott punted a long free kick into a swarm of men waiting near Farm who, in the end, had to dive daringly at McLaren’s feet.
In Blackpool’s first raid of the half Matthews beat three men almost in the space of the proverbial sixpence before putting forward a pass which Rickett chased away on the right wing, before cutting inside and shooting wide of the far post.
MORE OF RICKETT
Rickett was aggressive whenever he had the ball and by now he was being given it a lot more often. Another shot by him nearly laid a full-back out and in the next minute he chased the other full-back, compelling him* to make a hazardous pass to his goalkeeper.
Two minutes later, in the seventh of the half, Blackpool won a corner and from it snatched a second goal.
Again Wardle crossed the flag kick. Again Mortensen was in position for it. lobbed it further inside. MATTHEWS was waiting for it, lobbed it over the goalkeeper’s head.
Four minutes after Blackpool’s goal North End reduced the lead. It was a peculiar goal. The entire Blackpool defence came to a momentary standstill when a pass reached Langton.
They were waiting for the offside whistle.
It did not blow, arid this time Langton released a forward pass, and McINTOSH, racing on to it, careered 20 yards on his own before shooting a low ball which Farm reached and could not hold.
Another two minutes and it was 3-1 for Blackpool.
This was a goal no less peculiar. Again Matthews was in it. took a free kick for a helter-skelter tackle on himself. Across came the ball, bounced about, at last reached MORTENSEN.
He shot it as Newlands, probably unsighted, and in any case impeded by Horton, watched it pass him as he stood on his line as still as a statue.
That made three goals in six minutes, and threatened to settle the match.
Yet with the North End forwards tearing in undismayed Farm, with the ball loose in front of his goal, had to make a dramatic clearance from McLaren at the cost of a corner.
That corner was not cleared until the Blackpool goal had been in a state bordering on siege.
SHOT WIDE
McCall shot wide and inches high after Rickett’s pass had put him through all on his own, and in another lone raid Mortensen raced 50 yards into a gaping defence before Corbett upset him as he was cutting inside after his third goal of the match.
Fifteen minutes were left and Blackpool were still not only leading, but threatening in open raids to increase this lead All North End’s desperate attacks afterwards were being repelled on the wall of a Blackpool defence seldom losing position.
Five minutes from time after creating position for himself brilliantly Mortensen, with the Preston goal at his mercy, shot into Newland’s hands.
In the last minute McCall shot a ball which bounced out off the goalkeeper’s legs.
Result
PRESTON NORTH END 1 (McIntosh 56 min)
BLACKPOOL 3 (Mortensen 41, 58 mins, Matthews 52 min)
Fast open football, shorn of all embroidery, won Blackpool this game.
Preston’s close complex plan led nowhere against a Blackpool defence often in desperate straits but never torn as wide open Preston’s was.
Suart had a star match against Langton was the best back on the field, and yet again was almost his equal in resolution.
There was a closer contact between wing halfbacks and forwards, giving the Blackpool front line a “New Look.”
Whether Rickett is a centre-forward is still problematical and that he is a holy terror to a hesitating defence admits of no question.
The Mortensen-Matthews wing had its best match of the season but in the entire front line was a new punch.
NEXT WEEK: A new look at Old Look Everton
THE Old Look Everton who have given the club a New Look are Blackpool’s visitors next week.
This will be Blackpool’s fourth successive all-Lancashire game, and with Everton still among the bottom dogs and Blackpool still not too far away from their kennel it will be no polite go-as-you-please meeting.
Everton have a big defeat to avenge. In the corresponding match last season the Goodison Park men lost their centre half, the Welsh international, T. G. Jones, in the first few minutes, and afterwards folded up.
Blackpool won 5-0, Stanley Mortensen and George Dick each scoring twice, and Jim McIntosh making it a nap hand
A year earlier it was a different Everton, for Jock Dodds played one of the games of his life against his old club - scored twice and made position for a third goal Everton won 3-0.
This was two days after Blackpool had won 3-2 at Anfield, and only three days after they bad played a 1-1 draw in the first meeting with Everton on Merseyside.
One-one and 3-2 in away games - then 3-0 down at home - all in one Easter weekend.
And yet there are still people who say that you can bet on form at football.
FOOTBALL CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE THE ARTIST
STANLEY MATTHEWS GIVES HIMSELF ANOTHER FIVE YEARS IN FIRST-CLASS FOOTBALL.
Is that mere self-conceit? I do not think so. But, apparently, there are folk in Blackpool who hold different opinions.
Matthews a model and example
By “Spectator”
CONSTANTLY I am being told in my mail - and not always by anonymous correspondents - that the greatest footballer of his generation is nowadays a luxury too expensive for the club to afford.
I am told that all his arts and graces win no matches. I am told that he slows up the frontline, that the demand today is for forwards who can take the short route to goal, trampling everything in their path underfoot, presumably, in the manner of the old panzer divisions.
All this I am told - and I don’t accept a word of it.
The greater a man’s fame in football the greater is this inclination among certain critics to play him down. It happened with Jimmy Hampson in his day.
Hampson had only to be guilty of three or four indifferent games in succession - and what player at any game has not played them? - for letters to bombard this department asserting that he was finished.
It’s happened with Stanley Mortensen this season. Now the boys of the whispering gallery - but not all of them whisper and a few of them trumpet to high heaven - are sniping at “The Wizard of Dribble.”
What nonsense it all is.
If ever there was a time when a man who can play football as Stanley Matthews plays it was required in the game it is today, when the quality of nearly all the football I have been condemned to endure during the last month has been about as low as it could be without the customers having their money back.
As an art
AND in all this slap-dash stuff, this pursuing of a ball at high speed and calling it football, there are folk who want to banish from the game one of the few men still in it who prefers to practice it as an art instead of as a turbulent free-for-all.
Blackpool cannot afford Stanley Matthews? Football cannot afford to lose such players as Stanley Matthews. That’s the truth of it.
There are in him all the little perversities apparently inseparable from the artistic temperament, and he exercises to the limit all the licence which that temperament usurps to itself.
Often he juggles with the ball and toys with the full-back for the sheer joy of it, and, as a consequence, puts a brake on an attack.
But how often is an attack built by his genius? How seldom is a pass or a centre given without a direct purpose in it?
Stanley Matthews would always be in my team - if I could have him.
What they say
“AND he would always be in mine,” said Bob Finan, the ex-Blackpool centre - forward when I was expressing this opinion to him the other day.
“If only,” said Bob, as one who beholds a celestial vision, “he’d been playing for Blackpool when I was in the centre here!”
Jock Dodds, who once scored 70 goals in a season in a Blackpool wartime front line which included Matthews, talks of him always as if he was and always will be the answer to the centre- forward’s prayer.
It is, I think, Jim McIntosh’s misfortune that in only two of his seven First Division games this season has he had the England wing forward playing with him.
It is probably one of the' reasons for another of those falls from grace which have punctuated McIntosh’s career ever since the war and which today resulted in his exclusion from the match at Deepdale.
It is only about a month ago that McIntosh was reintroduced into the first team at Manchester, scored two goals, and was apparently firmly established in the First Division again.
Search for leader
HE has scored five goals in seven games - an average higher than any other Blackpool forward has achieved - but he has had to go.
The result is, I have little doubt, that Blackpool have put a new priority on their agenda today - a search for a new centre-forward.
Good ones are about as scarce as the Stanley Matthews of this world - and there are so few footballers anywhere within measurable distance of this Matthews even in the autumn of his days that it would be folly not to appreciate one of those we possess while we still have him.
In a Blackpool team which, whatever its other limitations, has always preferred to play football to specialising in the smash - and - grab masquerading for it, Stanley Matthews remains both as a model and an example
Hit by injuries
THE big crop of casualties has afflicted the defence to a greater degree than the attack. Eddie Shimwell and Harry Johnston have both been out of commission and no defence can afford to lose such men as those.
These casualties, to be fair, have affected the entire team, have never allowed it to settle into the force it was a year ago, have sapped its confidence, and, in part, at least, have contributed to the team’s comparative failure in the first - five weeks of the season.
The half-back line, with the exception of the indomitable Eric Hayward, has not been as impressive as Blackpool half-back lines have a habit of being. The full-backs have not, match by match, been as decisive as they were last season.
The goals in the “against" column are a sufficient indication of all that. Nor are 14 goals in nine games, even if the total equals last season’s figure, such a mighty achievement by the forwards.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 2 October 1948
IF a man who once lived in Blackpool, is seldom able to watch the Blackpool team play, but reads every word written about it, had not one day gone to watch a match at Oxford, Rex Adams would never have signed for Blackpool.
Johnny Sumner, the Blackpool exile, wrote to the club said, “Come and watch this boy.”
Adams was still in the Services, but they went to watch him, and signed him as an amateur.
There were a few complications afterwards. Hereford Town, the club in whose attack Jimmy Blair played during a disagreement with Blackpool, persuaded Adams to play for them. Blackpool had to file a petition with the authorities to establish their priority to his signature.
Now Adams is a Blackpool professional, one of the fastest men over 100 yards Blackpool have ever signed - and one day, unless I am wrong, will be a star.
IT WAS glad to read the good reports they gave Bob Finan for his leadership of the Crewe Alexandra front line last weekend. He still lives and trains in Blackpool - one of the greyhound racing track colony.
Strange, I always think, that Blackpool should have signed Finan from Yoker as a centre - forward and yet for two seasons never! played him there - until Manager Joe Smith arrived, saw him once in a practice, and asked “What are you looking for a centre-forward for?”
Finan went into Blackpool's Second Division team and that season scored 34 League goals. Only Jimmy Hampson beat that figure for Blackpool in the Second Division.
HULL CITY’S new record of winning the first nine games of the season recalls a Second Division record which still stands to the name of Blackpool.
During the last promotion season the Blackpool team that Frank Hill captained, also won nine games in succession between November 21, 1936, and New Year’s Day, 1937. No team had ever done that before in the Second Division, and no team has done it since.
The ninth game was at Bury. Blackpool won it and won, too, I recall, a great platter of black puddings festooned in tangerine and white ribbons.
The team had to board a train immediately for London, took the field stale and tired and, with three reserves at Upton Park the following day, were beaten 3-0 by West Ham United.
POSTSCRIPT - They had not eaten the black puddings. The puddings had nothing to do with it!
THEY were joking with Bill Lewis, the Blackpool fullback, at Bloomfield-road, when I was there the other day, telling him that he was having a nice holiday - and being paid for it.
Bill declined to agree. He has not had a match since the Central League game at Newcastle early in April. This for a man who would play every day of the week - if they’d let him -is not his conception of a holiday at all.
Specialists have twice been consulted about the knee Lewis hurt. Latest news is that an operation will be necessary.
There seems to be a hoodoo on Blackpool full-backs. The seven or eight on the books have gone down one by one week after week since the latter half of last season.
WHILE George Dick was out of commission at Blackpool he accepted an invitation to train every day at the gymnasium of Ronnie Clayton, the British and Empire featherweight champion.
It would be a familiar environment for him - a boxer's gymnasium. He was still in possession of a professional boxer’s licence when he came to Blackpool, held the title of cruiser-weight champion of the B.A.O.R.
“I’m as fit as I’ve ever been, he told me an hour or two before he re-signed for Blackpool.
***
EWAN FENTON, the Blackpool wing-half, who had seldom played outside the West Lancashire League when the season opened, moves in distinguished company these days.
He has had four games for Blackpool in the First Division this season, and in every game an international has been on the wing he has faced.
His target against Derby County was Billy Steel, against whom he was pitted twice in a week. He had to watch "Paddy” Smythe. the Wolverhampton Irish forward, in the Wanderers match.
Now, to complete the David and Goliath act, he has played against Billy Liddell, the Liverpool and Scottish wing-forward.
That Fenton has never been made to appear too palpably out of his class is the highest compliment this 19-year-old boy from Scotland could be paid.
ALF POPE, the Blackpool cricketer and wartime football guest, is mighty proud of the Darwen team in whose defence he is playing in the Lancashire Combination these days. Its latest achievement was to win 4-3 at Rochdale a week ago.
A grand battling fullback is Alf Pope. I always recall the first time I met him after the war. He went to watch his wartime team, Blackpool, play at Leeds. The United had only 10 men in their dressing room five minutes before the kick-off, and Alf volunteered to play.
***
Christmas Day - 11a.m.
THIS season Blackpool will play a Christmas Day game in the morning for the first time for years.
I hear, that the Huddersfield Town match at Bloomfield - road will have an 11 a.m. kick-off. This will please nearly all the Blackpool football public.
It will assuredly please all the wives and mothers of that public, for they will now have sole undisputed possession of their kitchens on Christmas Day morning and the Christmas dinners they cook will be given the appreciation they deserve and not gobbled by their families with one eye on the clock.
INCREASE THE NUMBERS!
THE membership of the Blackpool Football Supporters’ Club certainly leaves a lot to be desired.
I hear of other clubs formed recently whose membership already exceeds 7,000. Surely, Blackpool fans, the local club is not to be left behind other smaller ones!
The home “gates” average more than 25,000, while our membership is only just over 2,000.
Let us make an effort. If every member will introduce one new member by January we shall at least be able to start the new year with a membership of over 4,000.
The secretary, Mr. C. A. Hay, will be pleased to send receipts and any information. His address is 10. Swanage-avenue, Blackpool.
NOW that the new rules have been passed at a public meeting membership cards will be sent shortly to all members. The cards will include the rules and also a space for the renewal of subscriptions.
I am sure that all members found a great improvement in the recording system at Bloomfield-road last Saturday.
Do not forget that the new hut at the Spion Kop and east side is now open for information. Make use of it, and let the officials have views and suggestions.
***
Make a note of November 5. The big dance will be held at the Tower on that evening, and tickets are now on sale.
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