THE GAME
The City won the toss, and Blackpool, with a high cross wind blowing, defended the north goal.
There were a few raids on the City’s right wing which were finally ended by Suart’s. tackle Then Wardle, McIntosh and Mortensen made progress, but were halted on Blackpool’s left.
Rickett headed a low centre from Matthews into Thurlow’s arms from the edge of the penalty area. This was the first time either goalkeeper had been called into the game.
A minute later Black shot wide for the City.
MORTENSEN SHOOTS
Wardle was using the ball intelligently every time it reached him. He gave Mortensen a pass which his partner chased to the line, outpacing two men, before raking the City’s goal with a shot which went out past the far post of a goal deserted by its keeper.
A little later Thurlow had to leave this goal again, won by half a yard a race with McIntosh for a long, loose forward pass.
In another minute, with Blackpool still pressing, Wardle put a centre on the roof of the net with the City’s defence showing signs of panic, losing position everywhere under this early pressure.
The City’s forwards exchanged passed with an almost studied precision in several advances afterwards, but practically all that came out to them was a free-kick, which Oakes shot so wide that the ball was nearer a corner flag than the goal.
The City’s defence appeared at times to be ominously open. Into one of these gaps Matthews glided one pass which left McIntosh to shoot a ball which Thurlow beat out almost, it seemed, by instinct.
Blackpool were playing confident football with McIntosh opening raid after raid with short, crisp passes. But for a long time it was football of technical perfection with no great punch in it.
PASSES DELAYED
Twice Wardle. after his promising opening, delayed passes as Mortensen raced into position for them, and twice Mortensen himself tried to corkscrew post one man too many when the position called for a pass.
That was happening all the time - everything moving smoothly into the shooting zone and then something going wrong.
Yet in the 20th minute Mortensen nearly snatched the lead for Blackpool with an unexpected hook shot from the inside-right position which had Thurlow going the wrong way.
Nearly all the time the City were retreating, the Blackpool full-backs halting their wing forwards whenever they were given a pass.
Linacre once shot wide after a missed pass by Johnston had given him a bare sort of chance.
Otherwise it was nearly all Blackpool - so nearly all Blackpool that when a goal came in 25th minute it seemed to have something almost inevitable about it.
The fair-haired Westwood intercepted with his hand a pass to the elusive Matthews. The free kick cost a goal. Into the packed goal area Matthews crossed one of those free kicks which make goals look simple.
McINTOSH SCORES
McINTOSH rose to it, headed down a ball which Thurlow reached as he fell to his left, but could only punch away into the wall of the net.
Five minutes later it should have been 2-0. There was a massed Blackpool raid. Out of a pack of men Rickett shot a low ball which was passing the City’s goalkeeper as Fagan beat it down almost on the line with his hand.
There was no question about a penalty. Not one Manchester man disputed it.
Mortensen, who has scored twice in the last two games from the “spot,” went for his hat-trick shot a ball which Thurlow reached as he lurched to his right.
The goalkeeper beat it out anywhere, and was left sprawling as his defence cleared it before mobbing him in congratulations.
It was still nearly all Blackpool. The City’s forwards were seldom within shooting distance. Yet once, after a succession of half-hit clearances by a scattered Blackpool defence. Farm had to come to the rescue with a daring dive at Smith’s feet, and in the next minute Shimwell made a desperate clearance at the cost of a comer with Clarke racing inside into a scoring position.
LONE SWOOPS
In between these two raids Mortensen had made one lone swoop which Thurlow had foiled, and after it the Blackpool forward had made another which Fagan halted.
On half-time the City made it 1-1. It happened after a corner on the right.
The ball was punched out by the jumping Farm after Oakes had curled it in from the flag. Out the ball flew to Clarke, who punted it back again. Then, as I saw it, Hayward half-hit it away out to SMITH who. standing almost under the bar, shot over the line from a position where he could scarcely have missed.
Half-time: Blackpool 1, Manchester City 1.
SECOND HALF
After a little preliminary skirmishing: by the City, Blackpool nearly went in front again the first time the forwards raided in this half, Mortensen leaping at and missing in mid-air a ball flying across the City’s barely protected goal.
Yet at the other end Clarke was as near a goal with a shot which rose out by the far post at a great pace.
There was not a lot in it now. That late first half goal had done the City a lot of good. Everywhere the Maine-road men were moving in to meet the ball as they had never moved earlier. Blackpool won a corner on the right, but that was about all for a long time.
The ball \Vas more often out of play than in during succeeding passages which had scarcely a vestige of planned football in them.
When at last, in a swift exchange of passes. Mortensen and McIntosh tried to bulldoze a path through the City’s defence, the ball was lost in a pack of men swarming to defend their goal.
FINE CLEARANCE
One of Johnston’s throws was so long that it beat the two men stationed perpetually on Matthews, left the outside-right to cross a ball which McIntosh headed in fast, but Thurlow made a clearance which Frank Swift would not have disowned.
A minute later, too, Rickett stabbed the ball slowly at this City goalkeeper after Wardle had given the inside-right position for a shot.
Another minute and another of Wardle's long curling centres was punched out. by this vigilant Thurlow.
There were signs at this time that Blackpool were waking up. Two corners came in these raids in less than three minutes, and with only 20 minutes left the pressure continued
GREAT SAVE
Wardle rocketed one shot high on to Spion Kop with Blackpool still hammering away.
Yet with only 12 minutes left, and in spite of the fury of all these Blackpool attacks, it was the City who nearly took the lead and they would have taken it if Farm, with an amazing leap to his left, had not beaten out a Clarke shot with such a glorious clearance that even the City’s outside-left applauded him.
That prefaced several raids by a City front line which still held plenty of menace in it and was still faster on the ball than it had ever been in the first half. Ten minutes left and the game was still open.
It was still the City who were nearer to winning the game right up to the end.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 1 (McIntosh 25 mins)
MANCHESTER CITY 1 (Smith 44 mins)
This was a game which Blackpool for a long time threatened to win in a canter and in the end nearly lost. For nearly 45 minutes Blackpool played as if it were only a case of time before the goals came and the points were won.
There was, during the first half, plenty to admire in the team’s football which, in its composure, almost bordered on nonchalance.
Then the City made it 1-1, and afterwards it was anybody’s game, and might have been the City’s. Blackpool, from being a team eminently assured, became a desperate force seeking in vain to batter gaps in a City’s defence which had been torn open almost at will earlier.
This was a second half fade-out which Blackpool will be glad to forget. Nearly all the order went out of the front line. The Mortensen at inside-left experiment was abandoned before the end, and long before the end, too, the line had almost disintegrated with even Matthews nearly played out of the match by that fine fullback Westwood, with the aid of a few reinforcements.
After a first half of great promise, McIntosh was lost in a maze of short and back passes. Johnston battled to the end, but I made the two full-backs, Shimwell and Suart the best men in the team.
They played good football all the time and not merely until half-time. Ultimately it was a great clearance by Farm which retrieved for Blackpool a point in a game in which for a long time Blackpool seemed certain to win a couple.
NEXT WEEK: Blackpool return to Town to play Charlton
BACK again to London go Blackpool next weekend for a match down in the Valley where so little stirred last season that at the end of it a Blackpool director said: “This is the sort of football match which fills dog-tracks.”
Charlton Athletic won by two goals, and those two points ensured that there should be First Division football again this season in the SE7 district, writes “Spectator.”
Blackpool, losing all the time, were completely indifferent to the result, for a week later there was another match in London - at Wembley Stadium - which reduced everything else in the calendar to negligible proportions.
JIMMY McCRAE who has since gone to Middlesbrough, scored one of the two goals in the first five minutes. Twenty minutes later it was 2-0, and for all practical purposes all over.
Blackpool had to field two second team men in the full-back line, one of them Gordon Kennedy, the other a centre-half, Johnny Crosland, who was to play in the line again a week later in the Cup Final.
There are no relegation shadows in the Valley these days The defeat by Bolton Wanderers a week ago was the Athletic’s first at home this season, and before it this London team had won five of its eight games in front of its own public.
It will, presumably, be a different Athletic from the desperate battling team that met Blackpool last April. But it will also be a different Blackpool from the one that was content in that match to play out time from about the first minute.
I EXPECT another low scoring game, for before last weekend’s upset the Athletic had lost only seven home goals, and Blackpool’s defence has not been conceding many goals away from home in recent weeks.
Blackpool, in fact, could win this match without putting the couponeers into the bankruptcy court.
THIS CENTRE-FORWARD PROBLEM
It is hoped McIntosh makes the grade
By “Spectator”
"WHO plays centre-forward?” is still the question Blackpool football public debates. One experiment, advocated, according to my mail, by about half the population, has ended in failure. Johnny Crosland, the tall, fast centre-half, has played another game in the position, and will offer no objections if he never plays in it again.
At Barrow, in the Lancashire Cup-tie on Monday, he learned the old lesson that centre-forwards are not made in a day.
He learned that centre halfbacks, even if they are as tall and fast as he is, even if they are as accomplished as centre half-backs as he is, are not, by a law of nature or anything else, the sort of centre-forwards required by First Division clubs.
Johnny Crosland never considered that he was.
“But,” as he said when I talked to him, “ it was worth a trial, for it’s a glorious chance for somebody.”
Position he prefers
TODAY, after spending 90 minutes in vain pursuit of a ball which was going away from him and not coming at him - one reason, among others, why defensive centre-half backs have all the dice loaded against them when they are fielded in an attack - he is content to revert to the position he understands and prefers.
My last comment on this subject is that it is one of football’s injustices that such a player as this should be condemned so long to the comparative obscurity of Central League football.
I wrote last week, ignoring the Crosland advocates and the experimentalists who want to play Eddie Shimwell in the centre of the front line, that out of the present staff there was only one man for the position. That man is the criticised Jim McIntosh.
Within a few hours this view was confirmed at Fratton Park, where impartial witnesses were asking long before the game ended “What’s wrong with him? Why are they searching for a centre-forward?”
There was scarcely anything wrong with McIntosh at all in this game, for, apart from leading the line, which is what unquestionably he can do and which converted half-backs and fullbacks cannot be expected to do, there was in his game a little of the aggression which, since the war, has been missing from it.
All hush hush,
“IF,” said Manager Joe Smith, A after he had been given these reports, “he can always play like that...”
If he can - and it all depends on the player himself- the quest for a centre-forward can end immediately.
The quest was off at full blast last week. Everything was “hush, hush,” for the player under review was being watched as a preliminary to an approach being made to his club. He is a player of high reputation who is not content - and has said so - to remain in his club’s second team as an understudy.
He was playing for the second team last weekend and had the sort of negative game which players of established class often play in these circumstances, such a negative game that the Blackpool delegation were not persuaded to make for him the sort of bid which would have been demanded by a club disinclined in any event to lose his services.
What they think
IN the meantime there is even an airmail message on this centre - forward subject from South Africa, written by Mr. Jackson Smith, who lived in Kingsland - grove, Blackpool, before he went out to Durban. In this letter he expresses the view of a little colony of Blackpool exiles.
They think that Jim McIntosh is Blackpool’s “scapegoat,” that Blackpool signed Billy Wardle during the close season, intending to play him as an inside-left, thinking that Andy McCall’s football would not have matured efficiently for him to qualify for the First Division so early in his career.
When this little Scot made the inside-left position his own - he played in the first 16 games of the season before he was omitted at Portsmouth last week - there were six men for five positions, and the Question was “Who’s to be left out?”
The answer, according to this South African observation post, was the man who never complains. Jim McIntosh. And they want him back.
Well, he is back again now. The rest, I repeat, is up to him.
GEORGE DICK
GORGE DICK has been impressing them at West Ham in his first two games, since his transfer from Blackpool.
They put him in the team for the Luton match. The United lost that match, discovering in the process what I have been told repeatedly this season - that Luton’s goalkeeper. Bernard Streten, is one of the best men in the position in the game today.
Still, if George didn’t hit the goal, he hit a photographer crouched near it and laid him out, and last weekend at Bradford he made two of his new team’s three goals, and graded* according to all the critics, as the best forward on the field.
Reports that West Ham paid £7.000 for him are not strictly correct. They paid over £5,000 - but it was still a big profit for Blackpool, who, when they signed him, paid nothing at all.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 20 November 1948
My weekend at Portsmouth - They spotted Stan Matthews
SIX hundred miles for a football match . . . Fifteen hours in trains ... A missed connection at Preston on Sunday afternoon . . . Taxis to Blackpool in a thunderstorm which might have drifted in from the tropics . . . All for a game of 90 minutes at Fratton Park.
It was a long weekend. A lot seemed to happen during it.
Meeting Peter Doherty at Blackpool South on the way to London. Talking of the days when he was an Irish boy in a strange land in the early 30’ after Blackpool had signed him and even prewar papers had not given the signing a headline.
Talking, too, of the day in 1936 when Blackpool had to transfer him for £10,000 because £10,000 had to come from somewhere to meet the bills.
FAME cannot spoil him
Peter was on his way to Birmingham - Peter as modest, as unassuming as ever, one of the men fame cannot spoil, one about whom I’ve never heard a man in football say anything which was not kind and complimentary.
“I’m with one of the nicest clubs in the world at Huddersfield,” he said.
But I always suspect that his heart is still with Blackpool, even if his talents have been bartered to other clubs.
Stanley Matthews, another of football’s gentlemen, boarding the train at Crewe. He had a couple of days at Stoke after the international match.
Everybody on the platform gazing at him, saying “That’s Stan Matthews ... see him!”
It’s amazing that he’s not a great conceit of himself. Such adulation would make most men as vain as peacocks - and a few politicians who shall be nameless.
Stan, never mentions the Welsh match until you talk to him about it. Then he says “If ever there was a case for substitute it was this game. England playing with only ten men spoilt it. Ifs not fair on the public.”
Every time passengers pass through the saloon they tell each other “Look, that’s him... That’s Stan Matthews.” He takes no notice, plays cards, often has to interrupt the game to sign autographs, but is never anything except studiously polite.
The other Stanley - Stanley Mortensen - is induced to talk about the disallowed goal which ended his scoring sequence for England.
“I'm not complaining,” he said, “but I still don’t know why the referee said ‘No goal.’ I gave a pass to Jackie Milburn. He shot. The ball came out off the goalkeeper and, following up, I had it over the line as it cannoned back to me. What’s offside about that?” I could not tell him.
MOTHER watched son’s team
Meeting Mr. J. R. (“Bob”) Jackson, the Portsmouth manager, whose mother lives in Blackpool and only the other day - and you could almost call her an old lady now - went to Liverpool to watch with pride her son’s team.
Bob Jackson played for Worcester City before he went scouting thousands of miles for Portsmouth, who appointed him to the managerial post when Mr. Jack Tinn and his spats left Fratton Park.
He invites Blackpool to a music- hall as guests of the music-hall’s manager. Autograph hunters have tracked Blackpool down to their headquarters at Southsea, board the bus which takes the team to the show, scuttle up and down stairs collecting the signatures while the conductor laments “If you don’t sit still I’ll have you put off!”
They think - these young opportunists - that 12 autographs for a Id. bus fare are cheap at the price.
THE everlasting beer barrel
One embarrassing moment at the Coliseum when an illusionist, knowing that the Blackpool team are in the house, asks that one of them shall go on to the stage to drink a pint of beer flowing in an everlasting stream from a barrel which he says is empty - and seems to be empty.
Backstage signals warn him that professional footballers don't drink pints of beer -in public or private - on the eve of a big game. So he invites the Navy instead - and the Navy, being the Navy, hasn’t to be asked twice.
Introductions afterwards at the Southsea hotel to the Portsmouth chairman, Mr. R. Vernon Stokes, and his charming wife. They are completing the plans for the Portsmouth club’s jubilee, which is to be celebrated when the Arsenal visit Fratton Park next weekend.
All the League clubs are sending guests. Blackpool will be represented by Mr. A. E. Parkinson, the new vice-president, and the vice-chairman, Mr. A. H. Hindley. The high jinks begin on Friday and continue until Monday. There is to be a sportsmen's service on the Sabbath.
***
THEIR tribute to the pitch
With pride Chairman Harry Evans and Trainer Johnny Lynas, two grand companions for a long weekend, were shown the pitch at Fratton, acknowledged, after noting the absence of weeds and the immaculate surface, “It’s the best pitch we’ll have played on outside Blackpool this season.”
That qualification was warranted. Players tell you that never have Blackpool had as good a pitch as the ground staff have made for them this season. Take a bow, “Charlie,” and all you others!
Praise for the referee. Captain F. C. Green, of Wolverhampton, after the match. There is one player in Portsmouth’s royal blue jersey who has scarcely an enviable reputation.
Capt. Green showed him no mercy from the first minute, soon had him tamed, was as firm in his treatment of every offence without finding crime where none was intended.
Amazing weather down on the south coast. While rain fell in Blackpool the sun shone all the weekend at Southsea. and there was such warmth in it that wearing a winter overcoat was a penance. “It’s been like this for three weeks,” I was told.
It seems to be almost as long a way to Portsmouth as to Tipperary for an hour and a half’s football, but it still seems worth it.
Says Mr. Harry Evans “It would have been nice to come back with two points - and we could have come back with them, but you can’t have everything in football.”
If ever there was a man who has learned to lose one point, two points, or even, as in April, a Cup Final with a grace which has no shade of affectation in it it is Harry Evans.
He’s one of the best losers in football - and he can win without crowing like a cockerel.
REPORTS ARE INVITED
WE are still hearing rumours that the broadcasting system is inaudible in different parts of the ground.
Reports from members on the matter will be appreciated. Write to the secretary, Mr. C. A. Hay, at 10, Swanage-avenue, telling him the exact part of the stand or ground from which you watch the match and whether or not you can hear the announcements.
Whist drives
QUR keen and enthusiastic ladies’ committee are busy as usual.
Please give them your support at their weekly whist drives at the Liberal Club every Tuesday evening. On Tuesday, December 21, they are holding a turkey drive at Tyldesley School.
New badges
OWING to manufacturing difficulties the new badges which have been ordered have again been delayed.
We hope to have a new supply early in the New Year.
Again we anneal for members. Show your interest in the club by joining at once.
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