THE GAME
Losing the toss the City had to defend the North goal with the sun glaring into it, There was an immediate but unwarranted demand for a penalty in the first minute as McCall, chasing McKnight’s square pass, fell in a heap in the area as Mould crossed his path.
The young recruit, Malkin, was soon in action for the City, taking Steele’s pass to shoot from the inside-left position a ball to which Farm had to fall full length.
So soon were the City playing football of the direct action plan which has been winning nearly all their games in recent weeks.
A man was no sooner in possession of one pass than he released it to make another.
That was sufficient to give the Stoke men plenty of the game in the early minutes without, however, bringing their forward line often to close quarters of the Blackpool goal.
When the Blackpool forwards crossed the halfway line, McKnight put Johnston’s long throw into Herod’s arms. A minute before, a neat, triangular movement on the left, with Fenton, Wardle and McCall in it, led to a pass into the centre where no man was in position to take it.
McCALL SCORES
In the next minute, the sixth of the half, Blackpool took the lead.
There was another advance on Blackpool’s left, a swift exchange of passes between the two for wards on this flank.
In the end McCALL took Wardle’s last pass and from half a dozen yards inside the penalty area shot a ball to which the sun-dazzled Herod did not appear to move, and he stood in bewilderment afterwards as the ball shook the net behind him.
This goal was a gift from the sun. It did not discourage Stoke who continued to raid a lot afterwards.
Then McKnight raced into a big gap in the Stoke defence, took a bouncing ball, and appeared to be hooking it away from the one fullback in front of him as this fullback seemed to hit it down with his hand.
PENALTY REFUSED
There was another clamour for a penalty, justified this time, I think, but again Mr. Gibson refused it.
Fifteen minutes had gone and Stoke made it 1-1. Again in every appearance it was a gift goal
STEELE, who scored twice at Blackpool last season, scored this goal and seemed to surprise himself in the process, hooking from 15 yards out a ball which rose high, appeared to ricochet off a Blackpool man, and curved over Farm’s head as the goalkeeper, two or three yards out of his goal, leapt vainly at it.
There was not a lot in it afterwards, although in the first 20 minutes I think Blackpool made more false passes than in all the Charlton game last week.
There was a tendency, too, to end crisp, open raids with shots from impossible distances.
MATTHEWS ROAMS
Given few passes again, Matthews twice went wandering out on to the left to send Wardle away with passes which each time found gaps in the City’s defence, but these gaps were not being exploited.
Otherwise, with 25 minutes gone, this was threatening to be another of those strangely inconclusive games which Blackpool are getting into the habit of playing on this ground, with McIntosh never able to find a path past England’s Neil Franklin and few shooting positions being created.
The City were faster on the ball; yet even their raids invariably led nowhere, except into a massed Blackpool defence in which Hayward made several headed clearances in rapid succession.
Suart was also prominent, and once with a tackle and clearance wrecked one raid completely on the City’s right wing.
There were more signs of a plan in Stake’s game, and for a long time that was about all that could be written about football which, after a promising opening, had gone into an almost complete decline.
Johnston cleared in front of his own goal with a serene self-confidence after Malkin had escaped Suart for about the first time in the match.
BLACKPOOL CORNER
It was almost an event when in the 40th minute Blackpool won a comer. Nothing came of it, but at least it interrupted a lot of football which had still little that was conclusive in it.
Steele finished one Stoke raid with a shot of great pace when at last a forward pass gave him a nearly open course out on the left, and in the last minute of the half Farm collected superbly in mid-air a free-kick crossing his goal.
Half-time: Blackpool 1, Stoke City 1.
SECOND HALF
The Blackpool forwards went off at a great pace. There were several raids on the left, in one of which Wardle outwitted his full-back perfectly before hitting this full-back’s partner with his centre.
That was happening all the time. The last pass was repeatedly going wrong. Yet, in the fifth minute of the half, Blackpool were near a goal as McIntosh crossed a long centre to which McKnight leapt and which Herod seemed to lose before the ball flew out for a corner.
GRAND RAID
Another five minutes, and with Stake in complete retreat for the first time in the match, the City’s goal nearly fell.
This was a grand raid opened by McIntosh and continued by Matthews whose centre, headed on by the centre-forward, gave McKnight position to shoot a ball on to which Herod fell in a heap.
A minute after this thrill there was the biggest cheer of the afternoon as Matthews outwitted man after man. swerved past about the sixth in his path before shooting a ball which hit the angle of bar and post and cannoned out again with Herod nowhere near the flying ball.
Blackpool were atoning completely for that indifferent first half by football with such a punch in it that there were times when the City were nearly at a standstill.
The City lost one chance in a breakaway with the ball bouncing away from every Blackpool man who went near it.
But Blackpool still raided on almost without interruption, Wardle blazing one shot over the bar after McIntosh’s pass to him had given him perfect position.
Still, in infrequent raids the City were not yet out of the game, Farm punching out one ball headed at him by Steele which was curling under the bar.
Yet. when Blackpool went in front for the second time in the 24th minute of the half it was a goal eminently deserved.
Inevitably it was Matthews who made it, the England forward tangling Stoke’s left flank of defence into such a knot that in the end they seemed to let him centre in utter despair.
To the centre two men darted. One of them, McKnight. appeared to lose the ball. The other. McCALL, took it. shot into the roof of the net for his seventh goal of the season to a thunder of cheers.
Five minutes after this a goal eluded Matthews again for the second time this afternoon, the outside-right taking a pass from Johnston which deserved to be photographed before hitting the foot of the near post with a shot which came out again.
The City made a last despairing bid for a point in the closing five minutes when a Mountford free - kick was deflected into Farm’s waiting arms off the mass of men lined up in front of him, and a right-wing centre raked Blackpool’s goal with no forward in position to shoot it through.
There was an ovation for Matthews at the end. He deserved it.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 2 (McCall 6, 69 mins)
STOKE CITY 1 (Steele 15 mins)
NEXT WEEK: Blackpool lost on the Moor last season
ONE Blackpool player has always asserted that the best game in which he appeared last season was Blackpool’s match at Turf Moor. And he was in all the Cup-ties - and Blackpool lost the match too.
It was a good game. If the match next weekend is half as good it will still be worth watching.
Burnley won all four points from Blackpool last season. Each time there was just a goal in it.
The goal at Turf Moor came late to win 1-0. The goal at Blackpool in an evening match when Blackpool fielded one of those beams which prefaced the Cup Final was a gift to Billy Morris, a forward who never, or seldom, says “No” when he is offered that sort of present.
It has not been such an illustrious year this time for Burnley, who have let Mr. Cliff Britton go to Everton and Alan Brown to Notts County, and, for a time, made a few folk wonder if it had been wise to bid farewell to either of them.
Still, these Burnley men have had their days since. One of them was last weekend. when they halted Bolton Wanderers’ little gallop with a 3-0 defeat, and it remains a fact that before today only three teams in the First Division had won more home games and only three had conceded fewer goals in home matches.
BLACKPOOL DOES NOT SEE THE BEST
BLACKPOOL FOOTBALL
Team more attractive on tour
By “Spectator”
THE composer of “Home Sweet Home” would never have written it if he had lived in Blackpool these days and been going to watch the Blackpool team every fortnight.
There may have been no place like home to this character but there would appear to be several places preferable to it in the opinion of the present generation of Blackpool footballers.
One of the curiosities of the present season has been this team's continual failure in home games to play the football which elsewhere in the country has been the subject of sincere admiration.
Ten points out of the present total of 19 have been won in home games, but the quality of the football played by Blackpool outside the town has seldom been approached in front of their own public.
And even if this may be merely a matter of opinion, statistics, which are unanswerable, reveal that the Blackpool forwards have scored 18 goals away against a mere 10 in nine matches at home.
It all began as long ago as the season’s first fortnight, when Manchester United in the first game of the season on Blackpool’s home programme won 3-0, but nine days later were beaten 4-3 by Blackpool at Maine-road.
Forwards who had been unable to score one goal against the Manchester defence at Blackpool, and had seldom ever promised to score one, scored four at Manchester a little over a week afterwards.
That’s the sort of crazy result which has littered Blackpool’s up and-down progress all the season.
A 2-2 draw was played at Sunderland at a time when the Roker Park men were at their peak, and that game would have been won if Len Shackleton had not scored a late equalising goal which still ranks as the best goal I have seen and probably shall see this season.
Away points
THERE was another 2-2 draw at Bolton, which is no mean achievement in these days, a 3-1 win at Preston, and another draw - 3-3 this time - at Chelsea, where two goals in the last four minutes alone enabled the London team to escape defeat.
A fortnight later, at Portsmouth, this Blackpool team that seems to reserve all its best games for other clubs’ customers, became the second team this season to leave Fratton Park with a point.
A draw at Charlton a week ago was merely in accordance with something which has been threatening to become a tradition.
And while all this has been happening, while Blackpool have lost only one game on tour - the Middlesbrough match - in the last six, and in all these games have been playing football of complete self-assurance, home points have been forfeited and the team’s football in these games has not been self-assured at all.
Too anxious?
IT IS said in the north-east that Newcastle United are so intent on giving joy and gladness to their own rapturous home public that they have played few convincing games in front of it.
It may be that Blackpool are too intent on impressing their own discriminating and exacting population.
I don’t know the answer to this riddle, but that it is a riddle nobody can deny.
And, of course, it will be strictly in accordance with the mysterious entity called football form if Blackpool this afternoon have gone and beaten such a team as the up and coming Stoke City.
In the meantime, according to my mail, there is a disposition in several quarters to criticise not the team but the team selectors for the omission of Walter Rickett from last week’s forward line.
THE theme of the complaint is that this forward, who has consented without a whisper of objection to being put on a sort of shuttle service from one position to another - he has appeared in four of the five forward positions this season, and has never played more than three successive games in one of them - has had to pay the price of his own uncomplaining loyalty, that, never given the chance to settle in one position, he has been left out of the team because he could not settle.
And, viewed from this angle, one has to regard him as a victim of circumstances.
Nine out of every ten correspondents on this subject advocate the drafting of Billy Wardle into the inside-left position, so enabling Rickett to become an outside-left again.
The switch
I AM not impressed by the people who think the decline has been aggravated or in any way affected by the decision a fortnight ago - a decision which has now been revoked - to play him as an inside-left.
A good tactical case could be made out for that experiment. With Stanley Matthews on Blackpool's right wing there is an inevitable tendency in every opposing defence to bunch on this flank.
The theory was that on the other wing there might be the open spaces into which a few months ago Mortensen was racing to score half his goals.
It has not worked out that way, chiefly, in my view, because this England inside-right is not a forward who can be chained to one position, that by temperament and inclination he is always roaming, always has, and always will.
Two factors
A LOT can be said for this move, too, if - (a) Wardle had not expressed a disinclination to play at inside-left, although obviously he would play there if he were asked to, and (b) Blackpool had not on their staff a certain little Scot called Andy McCall, who has almost completely justified his elevation to the First Division this season.
I shall not forget for a long time the game that the adaptable and zealous Rickett played in the Cup Final. Nor the grand service he has given Blackpool during the year he has been with the club.
He would always be in my team, but only as a wing forward. Who would have to be left out in that case it is not half so easy to decide. It’s the old problem of six men for five positions.
MORTENSEN GOING ON HOLIDAY
STANLEY MORTENSEN, the England and Blackpool forward, is going for a short holiday to forget all about football and to rest, writes “Spectator.”
How long it will be before he wears a tangerine jersey again is uncertain.
"I hope it won’t be long,” he said, when I talked to him this afternoon. “But not until I’m absolutely fit will I play again.
"You can take it that next time I take the field I’ll be 100 per cent. Then, I hope, you’ll see the old ‘Morty again.”
I wrote last week in an article about which dozens of correspondents have expressed appreciation that for weeks this big-hearted player had been under a shadow, tormented by a disabled left ankle and by the loss of confidence which it had caused.
“The truth is,” said Mortensen today “I’ve not been as fit as I should have been all season. That fact has to be faced - not as an excuse but as a fact.
THAT LEFT ANKLE
“That left ankle has given me no peace. A specialist has seen, it, has said that there is no bone broken, that there is nothing seriously wrong, but in match after match it’s given out on me.
“And wherever I go these days in Blackpool I’m asked ‘How’s your ankle?’ until I’m tired of it So I think I’d be better out of Blackpool for a short time, nursing the ankle and forgetting football - if I can!”,
Stanley Mortensen will go away with an “All the best’ attending him from the thousands of fans in Blackpool and wherever else football is played.
Tales from Charlton's Valley
BY "SPECTATOR" 4 December 1948
IT WAS A BIT THICK ON SAM
THEY can tell you fog stories until the cows come home at Charlton, where they are still saying that it was a miracle for the Blackpool game last weekend to have been played to a finish.
How near it was to being abandoned only those at the match can realise. There was a time 15 minutes from the end at The Valley when a thick drifting curtain fell on the ground and reduced visibility to about 20 yards.
If it had lasted another couple of minutes Mr. J. Tregellas, the Birmingham referee with the West Country name, would have had to call it a day.
It lifted, the match was completed, and afterwards they told all those stories about other matches at the Valley which had not been finished.
***
STILL THERE
ONE of them was about an Arsenal game during the war. Fog descended on it. Inside two minutes it was "a London particular".
The referee ordered the players to the dressing room, abandoned the game. Five minutes later - some folk say it was nearer 10 - the Charlton players missed Sam Bartram, the goalkeeper.
“Where’s Sam?" they asked. Nobody knew. A scout was sent on a reconnaissance, found him still in his goal peering agitatedly into the fog screen.
Behind on one of the terraces thousands of people were still massed and were peering with him.
Everything had gone quiet, but they did not know the match was over.
That, I am assured, is fact not fiction. The following day a subeditor was visited with inspiration, produced a headline which featured Mr. Bartram in this Christmas Day fade-out, called him, “The little boy Santa Claus forgot.”
THE HOODOO
IT had its little comedies - last weekend’s freak fog. Whether one of them would be called a comedy by Mr. Joe Smith, the Blackpool manager, is, however, questionable.
He left the London hotel where his team were guests in morning sunshine, went to Southend to watch - so it was rumoured, but never confirmed - the United's centre-forward, Dudley, in the Cuptie with Swansea Town.
The sun was still shining when he arrived at Southend and when he reached the United's ground. Then the fog fell, and the match he had gone to watch was abandoned.
Mr. Smith will soon be thinking that there is a hoodoo on these scouting missions of his this season.
The first time he went to put George Farm, the goalkeeper from Hibernians, under a close-up, there was not a shot worth calling a shot to test the man in goal, and the errand was futile.
And it is only a week or two ago that he went to watch another centre - forward, who, playing for. his club’s second team, was so disinterested in the game that he finished it without a splash of mud on his pants. And there was a lot of-mud about.
SNOW THEN
'THEY were asking, when the question, “Will the match be played?” became topical an hour or two before the kick-off. “When were Blackpool last in an abandoned First Division game outside Blackpool?”
I can answer that if it’s of any particular interest. It was a game at Leicester in the winter of 1933. Snow, not fog, caused this game’s cancellation.
When Blackpool reached Filbert-street the pitch was under a foot or two of snow. The referee made his formal inspection and reached his inevitable verdict while the two teams, unable to play football, had a snowball match instead.
Then, when a month or two later, Blackpool went to Leicester again the City won 3-0, which was one of the chief causes of Blackpool’s relegation at the season’s end.
A note for coincidence comer: The last time Blackpool played a goalless draw before last weekend’s game was on May 17, 1947. Who were Blackpool playing?
Charlton Athletic.
JUST LEARNING
MET Sam Bartram, the Charlton goalkeeper, before the match. He still ranks among the first half-dozen in the country.
Bartram is no longer addicted to those little eccentricities which at one time threatened apoplexy in the Charlton directors' box, great as was their admiration for him.
People said it was all gallery play. It was nothing of the sort. It was the inevitable consequence of a centre-forward teaching himself to be a goalkeeper.
For Sam, before he picked up his cap and went off into goal with it, fancied himself as a centre-forward, once applied for a trial in the position when Manager Joe Smith was at Reading, and, after the trial, was found “Guilty” and sent home again.
Alec Roxburgh, the ex-Blackpool goalkeeper, playing for Hyde United these days, was another who learned his trade softer entering the game as a forward, learned it, so it is said, in one of the shooting-in galleries at the Pleasure Beach.
***
STAGE WHISPER
BEFORE the game, too, I met Mr. Tom Moss, producer and revue comedian, who put Stanley Matthews into an act in his St. Annes Pier show last summer, and whispered that he had another engagement contemplated for the England outside-right next summer, which, if negotiations are completed, will be headline news, and not only on the sports page.
Mr. Tom Newton, the treasurer of the Blackpool FC Supporters Club was also among those present, recalling during the long, long trail back to Blackpool - 12-30 a.m. on Sunday at Preston and a motor coach back to town afterwards - the early days of Peter Doherty.
Few people know it, but the Irishman who had played one of the games of his life at Newcastle a few hours earlier won an Irish Cup medal before he signed for Blackpool.
And in those distant days he was the Peter we still know, was out for the count and taken off three times during the Final, but came back each time asking for more like a second Oliver Twist.
BABE'S BAPTISM
AND there was another Irish-man there, too, Alec Steele, who played for his country - and for Charlton and Fulham - 20 years ago, and was as lyrical as only an Irishman can be about the football of Ewan Fenton, the babe of the Blackpool team.
“I’ve never seen a more composed player for a lad who’s been in the game so short a time,” he said. And so said nearly everybody else.
Few of them knew it, but this was the first time that this young half-back had not faced a wing containing an international when playing in the First Division for Blackpool.
In his four other games he had met Billy Steel (twice), Paddy Smyth of the Wolves, and Billy Liddell of Liverpool.
Quite a baptism.
KINSELL AGAIN
AND the night before the match there was West Bromwich Albion - and W. G. Richardson and Harry Kinsell - at the Blackpool team’s hotel.
"W.G" is still on the Albion’s staff. Once he was one of the greatest marksmen in League football. “It’s nice being at the top of the table,” he said, “but everybody’s after you while you’re there, and every match is a Cup-tie.” Still the Albion beat Southampton and remain favourites in the promotion race.
They still think that Harry Kinsell is one of the best fullbacks in the country. Yet when he came to Blackpool during the war he graded only as a reserve at the Hawthorns.
It was the football he played in these parts in the all-conquering war team that put him on the fringe of the England team and put several thousands on his transfer value when Blackpool asked the Albion if he could remain in Blackpool’s service after the war.
- AND COLCHESTER
AND after the match everybody’s first question was "How’ve they gone on at Colchester?”
Blackpool have always had an affectionate interest in this little club which rose unexpectedly to the stature of a Goliath early in the year. Before every tie last season which followed Blackpool’s dismissal of this gallant kittle team, Colchester, sent a message of good wishes to their conquerors and despatched a delegation to cheer them at Wembley.
Blackpool’s relationship with the United is, as a result, a little more than formal. It is strengthened, too, in the present tie by the fact that these days Ronnie Dix, Blackpool’s wartime guest, is playing for Reading, the club which meets Colchester in today’s replay, and Reading is also the club which Mr. Joe Smith managed before he came to Blackpool.
So there are a few folk in these parts who want Colchester to win and still don’t want Reading to lose.
Nothing whatever can be done for them!
Blackpool, by the way, go into the drum for the third round on Monday week. December 13. The third round ties are played on January 8, a week after Blackpool greet the New Year in Birmingham with a match at Villa Park.
The 13th - it's going to be unlucky for somebody.
THE TARGET IS 5,000
AGAIN we heard the roar of the Kop on Saturday - it was most pleasing at a reserve team match.
Keep it up, fans!
In the new year the Blackpool Football Supporters Club will be making a great drive for membership.
Their aim is 5,000.
Will you please help.' If you are not a member, join immediately, and if you are already a member will you please be good enough to persuade a friend to join ?
Now, Blackpool, what about It?
Let the membership be a record in the new year.
Badges
AT the moment we have no badges in stock, the supply having been exhausted, but a new batch is on order. An announcement will be made immediately they are available.
Do not forget the ladies’ whist drives every Tuesday at the Liberal Club. Full details of the big turkey drive on December 21 will be announced shortly.
Members can also show their interest in the club by writing to the secretary, Mr. Charles Hay, MBE, 10, Swanage - avenue, Blackpool, with suggestions or criticisms.
The aim is to help the members and the parent club.
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