THE GAME
George Hardwick, the ex-England captain, won the toss for Middlesbrough. I could not see that it conferred any particular benefit.
Blackpool’s defence protected the north goal. It was the other goal that nearly fell, a goal that had a miraculous escape in the first 10 seconds.
Direct from the kick-off Adams took a pass from Johnston, and at full speed crossed a perfect ball. It fell into a big gap in the Middlesbrough defence where McIntosh, all on his own, ran forward a couple of yards before shooting low.
Roberto Ugolini, the goalkeeper from Italy, fell to his right, reached the flying ball, which hit his wrist, rose off it, bounced against the face of the bar, and flew away.
That was nearly a sensation before most folk knew the game had opened.
MANNION’S SHOT
Inside this first minute, too, Mannion shot barely over the post of the Blackpool goal with a shot of such pace that Farm could only watch it.
Playing football of complete confidence afterwards, with the passes on an open front all the time, the Blackpool front line found gap after gap in front of Middlesbrough’s goal.
The acrobatic Ugolini conceded one corner in a position where full-backs customarily play after one of the backs, Robinson, had mishit a clearance completely Another two corners followed.
In two breakaways on the right, both of which Suart ultimately repelled, the Middlesbrough forwards swooped fast on Blackpool’s goal.
Otherwise the north-eastern team were retreating almost continuously during the first 10 minutes, with their defence showing a few pardonable signs of an excessive excitement with such big issues at stake.
The Middlesbrough left-wing won a corner with the 15th minute approaching, and by that time the Blackpool forward division was not as completely in possession of the game as it had been.
GOAL HUNGRY
Middlesbrough pile on the pressure
Farm had to punch Reagan’s high, falling centre over the bar for a second Middlesbrough corner, and from the corner held a ball which bounced into his arms after Mannion had headed it down to him.
Middlesbrough at this time were raiding like a team mad for goals and won another corner before Hardwick took a free-kick, hit the mass of men in front of him with it, and left Reagan to thunder the rebound at such a pace at Farm that the Blackpool goalkeeper was nearly rocked over his own line as he again held on to the ball.
HIT SIDE NET
Immediately Blackpool were near a goal again. This time Adams took Mortensen’s forward pass, raced on with it as the referee refused an offside appeal, lashed it into the side net with his partner waiting for a pass in a certain scoring position.
Another minute, too, and McIntosh was away on to a Middlesbrough goal still, as I saw it, inadequately protected, and finished with a shot fast but too high.
There was not a lot in it in the passages which followed. All were fast and direct, testing both defences.
There were no signs that this was. to be an undisputed passage for Middlesbrough. During the first 20 minutes it had been as good football as I have seen for a long time, nothing of the end of the season about it.
Every minute the goalkeepers were in action and for minutes after the 20th Middlesbrough were raiding.
There was nothing in Middlesbrough’s football up to this time which had relegation or anything resembling relegation about it.
It was losing whatever little punch it had ever possessed in front of goal, but it was sufficing to outplay Blackpool, whose forwards, after a promising opening, were in the game only twice in five minutes and each time were halted for offside.
OVER THE BAR
Afterwards the quality of the football declined everywhere. Farm advanced once or twice to snatch away fast passes which Middlesbrough’s inside men were vainly pursuing, and twice hatched the ball sail over the bar of his goal.
GOAL IN PERIL
Blackpool have couple of escapes
Otherwise there was little to write about with Middlesbrough’s forwards and Blackpool’s, too, repeatedly coming into a halt in offside traps.
Johnston was surging forward with the ball and creating three out of every four Blackpool raids.
But it was the Blackpool goal which was more often in peril. Twice inside a minute it nearly fell. The first time Farm had to make nearly the greatest clearance of the half to reach a ball lobbed back but wide of him by his own centre half Hayward.
The next time, as he only half- hit away a centre which was falling beneath the angle of bar and post, Shimwell lashed the ball over the bar of the goal as Hartnett raced into it with the line empty.
IN ACTION AGAIN
From the corner, too, the Blackpool goalkeeper was in action again, holding a ball which came off Donaldson as fast as a bullet.
Middlesbrough were still all out for a priceless but elusive goal as the half approached its end and after that remarkable first minute escape deserved one for their pressure alone.
The goal came as it had been fated to come in the 38th minute. There was yet another in the almost notstop sequence of Middlesbrough raids. This time Reagan’s shot hit Farm with the goalkeeper tumbling backwards into him and knowing, I suspect, little about it.
Out the ball cannoned to the right, was crossed back into the centre where DONALDSON, waiting for it, swept it into the net with the Blackpool defence scattered.
Yet inside two minutes it was 1-1. The man who made this goal was McIntosh who, on a forlorn race, reached a pass on the line, crossed it perfectly.
The bounce of it eluded Mortensen. Out the centre passed to the other wing where, McCall lobbed it back again.
MORTENSEN’S GOAL
To it two men moved. Off one of them, Davidson, the ball seemed to cannon to the other, MORTENSEN, who, taking the sort of chance in which he specialises, shot his 17th First Division goal of the season with the Middlesbrough defence in ruins about him.
Half-time: Blackpool 1, Middlesbrough 1.
SECOND HALF
It was as fast as ever in the opening minutes of the second half.
After early Blackpool attacks had been repulsed Middlesbrough won a corner on the left and from it a goal was near, Farm making a double-fisted punch at the flying ball, missing it, and- being glad, I should think, to watch it curl out near the other post for another corner.
HAYWARD HURT
Hayward had to have prolonged attention after a collision, playing on with a handkerchief pressed to a bleeding nose.
Middlesbrough’s earlier command was waning, but one missed pass after another repeatedly halted the Blackpool attack.
Mannion made a confident demand for a penalty after a deliberate shot had hit a Blackpool man and cannoned off him in the area, but it was ignored.
Suart made a grand clearance with a pack of men on top of him, and Johnston opened yet another raid which went the way of all the others with the final pass going wrong.
For a time it was football as fast as ever, but a lot of its earlier order had gone.
The offside whistle was still putting the brake on Middlesbrough’s forwards. When at last Blackpool won a free-kick, Shimwell shot wide from a range where not even this full-back could have hoped to score more than once in a hundred times.
AN ESCAPE
A minute later, Middlesbrough had an escape, Suart becoming almost an inside forward before crossing a high centre to which Ugolini and McIntosh leaped desperately.
This time the little man beat the big one to it, headed forward a ball which was bouncing towards the empty line as Gordon waiting for it, and with all the composure in the world, hooked it over his own head for a profitless corner.
Blackpool put on the heat afterwards, Adams shooting wide from almost the position where he shot his goal against Portsmouth a fortnight ago.
Yet neither team was long in command of this game Middlesbrough being as near a goal three minutes later as Donaldson hit a ball only inches wide with the best shot of the match.
LAST 10 MINUTES
It was still either team’s game
With the game in its last 15 minutes Middlesbrough were in retreat again.
Ugolini’s goal was retrieved from downfall again with the goalkeeper left sprawling, but in a Middlesbrough raid Farm had to make a grand clearance, fisting Reagan’s centre off Donaldson’s head with the tall centre-forward leaping at the ball almost under the bar.
It was still cither team’s game with 10 minutes left.
It was nearly all Blackpool in the closing minutes but something always went wrong near goal.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 1 (Mortensen 40 mins)
MIDDLESBRO 1 (Donaldson 38 mins)
This was no end of the season game. A great match it may not have been, but in its pace and at times in its drama it might have been played in September instead of April.
Middlesbrough’s football had nothing at all that was desperate about it. It was good in flashes, as Middlesbrough’s football invariably is, and only in defence were there the wide open spaces which, I suspect, have put this team in peril of relegation.
For a time Blackpool’s forwards exploited these gaps, nearly scored from one of them in the first minute. But afterwards, constant' as was the pressure exercised at times, there was no great order in the line.
McCall had too few chances on one wing, and on the other Adams was often mastered by a full-back who was playing for England while Adams was still at school.
These forwards, again with the exception of the outside-left, had plenty of the ball, with McIntosh pursuing it tirelessly all the afternoon, but on a day when Mortensen seemed strangely subdued there was little finish in the line.
Kelly and Johnston were, I think, as so often they are, Blackpool’s best men, but the two full-backs served their purpose too, by playing out the two Middlesbrough wing men.
Neither team could complain of the result. This point may be priceless to Middlesbrough who, as they played today, do not deserve relegation.
NEXT WEEK: To Stoke again - and on Cup Final day!
WHILE the Cup Final is being played at Wembley next weekend Blackpool will be speculating on the “might have been,” and meeting the team that halted the club's own march to the Stadium.
That, at least, should give some vestige of interest to the Stoke City match at the Victoria Ground a week today, although, inevitably,
I suppose, writes “Spectator,” it will all seem a little tame compared with the January Cup-tie which went into extra-time and ended in a tumultuous 1-1 draw - and in a 1-0 defeat for Blackpool a week later.
It will be Blackpool's third First Division match at Stoke since the war. The first was lost 1-4 and
included a goal which I still think of as one of the greatest I have seen for years. Stanley Matthews scored it for the City.
Blackpool made a 1-1 draw on the Victoria Ground last season - the second of the Christmas games - a match notable, I think, chiefly for the reason that Harry Johnston generously consented to move into an unfamiliar position to enable Hugh Kelly to be drafted into the left flank of the half-back line.
Stoke City - Blackpool games have been memorable for little else in the postwar years, and It is probable that this match, Blackpool’s last away from home this season, will be just another game.
Yet there will be sufficient famous personalities An it, among them Neil Franklin, the greatest half-back of them all, to promise football of the sort which the best people play.
And if you can’t have drama, but can have good football, it is, at least, something in these end-of-the- season days.
AFTER THE HARVEST - THE LEAN YEARS?
Football facing austerity
By “Spectator”
ARSENAL expected 60,000 people to be at the Blackpool match on Easter Monday. There
were empty seats in one of the stands all the afternoon, and only 47,000 inside the gates, writes “Spectator"
Birmingham two days earlier had budgeted for a 50,000 attendance, and fewer than 40,000 watched the game.
These figures are symptomatic of all that is happening in football today, all that I wrote only a few weeks ago would inevitably happen in football as the postwar boom began to subside.
Aggregate attendances during the Easter weekend were comparable with the figures of a year earlier.
But, when they are analysed, it is immediately revealed that only a glut of fixtures concerned with promotion and relegation problems during the holiday put Easter, 1949, into the class of Easter, 1948, in terms of £ s. d.
Teams outside the championship and relegation zones playing other teams similarly disinterested in the season’s major League issues were left = in the figurative if not the actual sense this Easter - out in the cold.
Round the corner
IT is not an Arctic wind which is blowing yet, and it probably never will be.
But the days when people go to football matches as thousands of them go to cinemas whether it’s Ingrid Bergman or the Marx Brothers on the bill are going and may even have gone already.
I am not calling it a slump. It shall be given the polite and less sinister word “recession.” And it is just round the corner.
I do not think the indisputable decline in the quality of 60 or 70 per cent of the football played this season has had anything to do with it. I think it would have come if every team in the First and Second and Third Division had been as good and as rich in talent as we are always being told the teams of yesterday used to be.
Counting pennies
IT simply happens that the people who watch football matches have begun counting the shillings and even the pennies again and are not spending either on football or any other little luxury as they were spending a year ago.
And, if Sir Stafford Cripps and other realists have anything to do with it, they will be spending even less in the months to come.
The truth is that football has until now escaped the Austerity which is spelt with a capital “A,” but cannot reasonably expect to escape it indefinitely.
And the truth is, too, as I wrote a week or two ago, that, these stark economic realities apart, every season is lasting just that little bit too long, that almost everywhere the public are tiring of the game for the simple reason that they are seeing too much of it.
Still, football has had a good time While it has lasted, and if the clubs have not reaped a golden harvest it is nobody’s fault but their own.
Ground question
FOR Blackpool, I think, the present unmistakable trend of events has a certain significance. Blackpool as a First Division club obviously require a ground of greater capacity than the present enclosure at Bloomfield-road.
But in the circumstances the uninformed chatter you still hear about the club transferring to the remote southern borders of the town and playing in a second Wembley built for 100,000 spectators should be examined, can best be disregarded at the moment.
That may be an admirable long-term policy, but today the alternative of working to a short term one and increasing the ground’s capacity on the present site to 45,000 or 50,000 should in my view be given priority.
For as football seems to be going these days - and not only in Blackpool but everywhere - a 50,000 ground will suffice for all Blackpool’s requirements until the lean years have passed.
The writing is on the wall - and if you can’t read it you should go to an optician - if he can give you an appointment inside 12 months!
Mark's pupils make good
PROUD man is Mark Crook, the little centre-forward who was signed for Blackpool by Major Frank Buckley in the long ago, and for several years now has been chief of the Wolverhampton Wanderers’ nursery.
Two of his apprentices were the reserve full-backs who played for the Wanderers in the Cup semi-final - Alf Crook and Springthorpe, the latter of whom was in the Wolverhampton team that played at Blackpool last September.
Nor were these the only two products of this school which Major Buckley founded, which Mr. Ted Vizard always encouraged, and which has made its contribution to the success of Mr. Stanley Cullis in his first managerial post.
"Spectator" presents an Easter
personality parade
JUST KICKING AROUND 23 April 1949
NEARLY 500 miles for two football matches in Birmingham and London . . . Four and a half hours of football in four days, which, according to the games I watched, was about a couple of hours too many.
Meet a few of the people I met on the Easter parade.
Come to a few of the scenes I visited.
There was Albert Watson, the former Blackpool halfback, author of the unpublished treatise “How I Scored a £10,000. Goal"
He still lives in the north-east, works for a firm of electrical component manufacturers, and, every weekend, combs the northeastern playing fields for young men for his old club.
It was Albert who found Kenneth Smith, the £2,000 forward from Annfield Plain, and came with him to Blackpool to witness his name on the transfer contract. He remained to watch the Arsenal match.
He is talking of Stanley Mortensen’s 35-yard goal.
“It made me think of my 1930 goal which kept Blackpool in the First Division,” he says. “I shot it into that north goal and from almost the identical position where Stan shot today.”
Was the 1949 goal a carbon copy of the famous 1930 goal?
I think Albert Watson was nearer when he shot, that he hit the roof of the net with a rising ball.
But what’s the difference? They were both goals to make ’em cheer.
Too old at 35?
PRESTON for dinner an hour after the Arsenal game at Blackpool had ended.
Manager Joe Smith talking on "Is a Footballer Too Old at 35?
You would think, according to the present generation, that by that age a player has only one foot in football and the other inexorably in the grave
"Yet,” said Joe Smith, “I scored 38 goals in a season for Stockport County in the Third Division when I was 38.”
A goal for every year of a man’s age. What a pity some of the few sharpshooters left can’t play until they’re 50!
Joe went to Manchester Central after he left Stockport, and at 41 was in a Darwen team which won everything which could be won. And for 17 years he was captain of Bolton Wanderers, which for a captain is probably a record.
Too old at 35? You can almost hear Mr. Smith snorting derision at such an effete philosophy.
Enthusiasts
MR. EDDIE STANDRING, a London music publisher, who once lived in Blackpool, calls it his Easter holiday to come to Blackpool on Thursday for the Arsenal game the following day and work his way back via Birmingham to London for the Highbury match on Easter Monday.
Eddie would almost as soon watch Blackpool in a football match as discover another “Tree in the Valley.”
There is another Blackpool fan - his name I never learned - who came from his London home for the first of the Arsenal fixtures, took a train to Birmingham which marooned him in the Midlands city at 5-30 on Saturday morning, slept in the sunshine in a Birmingham park until noon, and was at St. Andrew’s on Saturday and at Highbury on Monday.
Some people still seem to think they’re not such a bad team!
Still playing
MIDNIGHT on Friday in a Birmingham hotel Eddie Standring meets Harry Davidson, who has been broadcasting for 17 years continuously, which is probably one of those records which have never been announced.
Maestro Davidson specialises in old-time dance music, packs ’em in wherever he plays.
"They prefer the old dances these days,” he says, recites a list of his future engagements which resembles a Cook’s all-England tour and ranges from Broadcasting House to such outposts of Empire as Keswick and Ulverston.
On fire
ST. ANDREW’S on Saturday. What’s happened here?
The main stand has gone. The players’ dressing rooms are in a separate brick building at the side of a new stand built of the new tubular scaffolding.
“Blitzed?” I asked. “Well, not exactly,” I am told.
The stand and its underground chambers were a headquarters for the NFS during the war. One day there was a fire, and it burned out the stand and burned out the NFS headquarters, too.
Which Seems a little ironic, but one of those accidents which are sometimes unavoidable in even the best circles.
Blackpool director W. S. Lines talks afterwards about the new stand, says, “See what can be done and how fast they can do it with this tubular scaffolding.”
What Birmingham has done yesterday may Blackpool do tomorrow - or the day after?
Dad and Mum
WATCHING the Blackpool team are Hugh Kelly’s father and mother and a brother whose relationship to the Blackpool half-back, so alike are they, reveals itself before you are introduced.
And from Oxford have come the parents of Rex Adams. They watched their son go through the mill of a remorseless Birmingham defence, went to London on Monday, learned that he was out of the team' for Highbury.
“That’s all right,” said Adams pere. “He’s young yet. We never expected him to be in the first team at all in nis first reason.” Not all fond parents are so wise.
Sun Day
EASTER SUNDAY - and what a Sun Day - in London. Hyde Park and the orators near Marble Arch who can cure all ills but their own, and solve all crises if only somebody would let ’em!
Stanley Mortensen padding about the hotel in the red carpet slippers he wore with such devastating effect on Rugby station the previous evening.
Footballers hate those sunbaked pitches, which cause blisters and all sorts of other abominations.
Square deal
JOHNNY LYNAS in a London cafe pointing out a paragraph in a Scottish paper about Blackpool’s release of John Morgan, the young full-back from Clydebank, who, when he wanted to return to Scotland, was told “You go back, lad. And if you want to play for a Scottish club we’ll not hold you.”
Third Lanark are reported to be interested. But that’s not important.
What is is that Blackpool’s treatment of this player will enhance the club’s reputation up in Scotland for giving a square deal.
A HOUSE in a quiet London square - so quiet that it seems incredible that the swarms in Piccadilly Circus are only 10 or 15 minutes away - on Sundav evening.
I watch television for the first time.
It is a 90-minute play - and as good as a film, crystal-clear, and of greater intelligence than most of the films I seem fated to endure when I go to the cinema.
In this lovely Chelsea home they watched the Boat Race and the Royal Wedding and the England-Scotland international as if they had booked a seat in the stalls for all of them.
"I seldom go out in the evenings,” confessed our host. If they had not been going to the Highbury match the following day they could have remained at home and watched the racing at Kempton Park.
What’s going to happen when the chain of television stations is complete and nearly every home has its set, and instead of a few thousand a few million people begin to say “I never go out now in the evenings”?
It makes you think. It will make all those people who supply entertainment for the masses think, too.
So to Highbury—
HIGHBURY on Monday afternoon. Only 47,000 there - and "only” is a word which is justified when you are writing of a match at the stadium in N.5.
But there are again the mounted police whose horses gently but so firmly, and, as I think, almost miraculously move the populace about in great wedges of humanity from one sector to another whenever congestion threatens.
There are women and girls, and men, too, fainting in the heat in the queues.
There are the marble halls behind the scenes, the bust of Herbert Chapman gazing down from a pedestal like one of the long-dead Caesars, the dressing rooms which on cold days have heated floors.
—and Denis
AND there is Denis Compton who is a god among men in these days when the people are not only mad about sport, but idolise its eminent personalities.
He has a few majestic curves where footballers should have no curves at all - as even I might have them if I had been in South Africa for six months.
It is, as a result, a rather sedate Denis who is on view in this match, a forward not half so excitable as he was at Blackpool last Easter - and not half so provocative, either.
But his centres are of a greater precision than some of the slow bowling I have seen him perpetrate in Test matches - and both Arsenal’s goals came off them.
And when he gallops in and shoots there is almost as much delirium on the terraces as among the “bobby-soxers” of the States when Mr. Sinatra sings.
Home again
WE’RE not home until morning - early on Tuesday morning - which is about three days and eight hours after 1 had left Blackpool merely to report three hours’ football.
But, as you see, it is not only the matches, but the men in them and the people who watch them, and the scenes in which they are played that also make the news.
***
And, after all, if I hadn’t gone I might never have seen the newspaper advertisement which contained the information that Stanley Mortensen is passionately addicted to mustard!
Morty - compere
STANLEY MORTENSEN, the Blackpool and England footballer, will compere a variety concert at St. Thomas’s Church Hall, St. Annes, tonight, in aid of ' the Bishop of Blackburn’s appeal for Church Schools.
Leave a Comment