THE GAME
After winning the toss and hesitating momentarily before he made his decision, Hayward, understudying as captain, put his 4 defence into a north goal into which the sun was shining.
Blackpool had a couple of early raids repulsed, and in one of them won a free kick, before Froggatt galloped inside from Portsmouth’s left wing to open a raid which ended in Harris, on the other flank, crossing a centre which Shimwell cleared.
THIS WAS CLASS
Still in the opening minutes. Blackpool were not outplayed and one attack, which had Adams, McCall, Davidson and Wardle in it without a Portsmouth player being within half a dozen yards of the ball, had class written all over it.
Blackpool’s pressure continued, too. Fenton slicing a shot high and wide when one of those loose balls came to him from which he shot his goal at Newcastle a week ago.
Suart’s clearances, long and confident, halted two successive Portsmouth forays which were built less on a plan than on the pursuit of random long passes.
FULL TILT
Blackpool’s shuffled attack continued to race full tilt, and with order in it, too, on to a Portsmouth defence which, against this unexpected challenge, was not as particular for a time as it might have been.
McIntosh was twice in the wars and there was, in fact, no quarter shown by lines of halfbacks and full-backs who have conceded fewer goals than any other defence in the division this season.
Portsmouth won one shooting position in the first 10 minutes. Big Duggie Reid created it for Harris who, in one of those positions where he has scored a lot of goals this season, lobbed the ball wide instead of cutting in from an open space and shooting.
UNEXPECTED
Blackpool were on top most of the time
Afterwards the pace declined for a time and the quality of nearly all the football declined with it.
Yet in the 18th minute Blackpool were nearer the lead than Portsmouth had ever been, McIntosh lashing across half a centre and half a shot which Butler booted to the far horizon a split second before Davidson could tear into it.
I gave, Blackpool nearly 15 of the first 20 minutes, which was as unexpected as nearly all Portsmouth’s football during that time had been strangely inconclusive.
In flashes the Portsmouth forwards in fast snap raids revealed how a front line can make about 50 yards with two or three rapid passes.
Otherwise it was the Blackpool attack which was exercising nearly all the pressure and still winning too many free-kicks against a defence which stood no sort of nonsense when its goal was even remotely menaced.
UNSETTLED
The division leaders were obviously as unsettled by a light bouncing ball as by the unexpected virility of the Blackpool attack.
Fenton, who was again repeatedly in the game and as composed and confident as ever, made one fine clearance before Portsmouth won their first corner as late as the 25th minute.
The corner was cleared and within a minute Butler fielded Wardle’s centre magnificently under the bar with two aggressive Blackpool forwards challenging him.
Twice, Portsmouth men were rebuked for tackles which had no quarter in them whatever. And still against all expectations it was the leaders' who were in retreat.
DESPERATION
Blackpool’s game upsets visitors’ backs
Davidson’s passes had repeatedly given purpose to Blackpool’s football in the first half hour. One of them Hind- marsh intercepted superbly as McIntosh was racing on it.
Twice, in rapid succession, with Blackpool’s attacks still raging, Portsmouth’s desperate full-backs passed back to their goalkeeper.
And repeatedly the referee’s whistle sounded against a remorseless defence whose right flank was twice passed by Wardle as if it was standing still.
This was great fighting football by Blackpool, played at a remarkable pace with 20,000 people who had come to moan cheering it instead.
SIEGE LIFTS
On half-time the siege, which is what it had nearly become, lifted, and there were infrequent breakaways by a fast, direct Portsmouth front line.
Suart conceded a corner in the half’s last minute, which Farm held brilliantly in a big leap over a ruck of men in front of him.
It had been Blackpool’s half, a Blackpool team that left the field with everybody applauding it.
Half-time: Blackpool 0, Portsmouth 0.
SECOND HALF
The Portsmouth goal was still under continuous assault in the opening minutes of the second half.
Centre followed centre across the face of this goal, every one repelled by Portsmouth’s tall defence which was still, however, inclined to panic a little under pressure.
Kelly and Wardle in rapid succession crossed flying balls which Butler fielded before McCall eluded a couple of men in a glittering raid on his own before shooting high and wide.
There was still no rhythm and no punch in Portsmouth’s vaunted front line.
REMARKABLE GOAL
When at last Blackpool took the lead in the eighth minute of the half it was a remarkable goal and one which will be debated for a long time.
A forward pass was released after an exchange of square passes between Davidson and McIntosh. Adams was in position for it, appeared to be a couple of yards offside.
He hesitated. The entire Portsmouth defence hesitated, too. Capt. Green made no signal, glanced out to the line. No flag waved there, either.
So on ADAMS went alone with no Portsmouth player moving either to> him or to the ball, shot his first goal in First Division football.
Portsmouth’s protests were as tempestuous as all the football had been which had given Blackpool this deserved lead.
STILL OUTPLAYED
Afterwards, too, the division leaders were still outplayed, their wing forwards in their few breakaways constantly slicing their centres wide.
Portsmouth were nearly two goals in arrears with 20 minutes of the half gone, Scoular conceding a free kick for a tackle on McIntosh, and, after Fenton's shot had been repelled as the free kick cannoned out, Adams pounced on the loose ball and shot it back again, hitting a fullback who knew nothing about it with his goalkeeper out of position.
A comer for Blackpool had prefaced this raid and nearly all the time before and after it the Blackpool forwards were racing in on Portsmouth’s resolute defence.
FARM LOSES CENTRE
Yet it was Blackpool who nearly lost a goal with 24 minutes of the half gone as Farm, impeded, I suspect, by his own men. lost a centre from the left and with the ball bouncing about in the jaws of an open goal Kelly tore across to clear it.
The Portsmouth forwards at last were revealing some glimpses of the football which routed Newcastle in midweek.
Suart made a great do-or-die clearance at the feet of Phillips before in another raid a Blackpool half-back - it was Hayward, I think - hooked back a ball which rose into his own goalkeeper’s waiting hands.
BLACKPOOL AGAIN
Yet within a minute the Blackpool front line were hammering on Portsmouth’s goal again, Butler parrying brilliantly a great shot by the shooting Adams. With 15 minutes left Blackpool were still leading the leaders.
PORTSMOUTH RALLY
And then crowd jeer at their tactics
Portsmouth stormed to the attack in the closing minutes.
Farm made a brilliant full-length clearance as the ball skidded away from him in front of his goal.
Three minutes from time there was an ugly scene as Scoular put Wardle on the grass writhing in pain and the referee racing up to the half-back and, angrily brandishing his book at him, entering his name in it with 20,000 people protesting furiously.
A minute later Adams took the full count.
The match ended in a storm of jeers - a grim sort of farewell to a team out for the championship.
Portsmouth outplayed, and at times outclassed, were retreating again in the final minute, conceding a corner with the Blackpool forwards swarming again all over their defence.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 1 (Adams 53 mins)
PORTSMOUTH 0
Everything that happened at Blackpool this afternoon was contrary to all expectations.
Blackpool not only won this match, which everybody expected Blackpool to lose, but deserved to win it and would, I think, have been in front by two or three goals if there had only been a few extra pounds and inches in the forward line.
As it was. this line, by working to the old principle of making the ball do the work and playing the long pass all the time, had Portsmouth going back for 70 of the 90 minutes, often in confusion.
Davidson and McCall were the men who made this line, for both hunted the ball tirelessly and, in possession, always found the man in the open space with their passes.
The entire line had a purpose in it not revealed in a Blackpool attack in a home game for months.
The chief architects of this triumph were the wing half-backs - Kelly, who was magnificent again today, and Fenton, who was again in his proper environment in the First Division.
Both full-backs - and Suart today had probably his best game ever - played on the danger men in the Portsmouth attack - the wing forwards - and, in fact, almost played them out of the match altogether.
After all that Farm was left almost with a watching brief for threequarters of the afternoon and this against a forward line that scored five goals at Newcastle three days ago.
It makes no sense but this made a great victory.
NEXT WEEK: Arsenal will lay a golden Easter egg for Blackpool
ARSENAL-BIRMINGHAM-ARSENAL is Blackpool’s Easter parade.
Faded may be a little of Arsenal’s between - the - wars glamour, but the Highbury team are always good box- office, have created three ground records at Blackpool in their time, and will pack the 30,000 enclosure again on Good Friday afternoon.
Arsenal took their biggest defeat of the season at Blackpool last Easter, met a Blackpool team that awakened from its pre-Cup Final lethargy to race the London men out of the game and to win 3-0. It was probably Blackpool’s best team game of 1947-48.
Stanley Mortensen scored two of the three goals. The other was. the first Andy McCall ever scored in the First Division.
The visit to Birmingham the following day will introduce nine out of the 11 men in Blackpool’s present team the exceptions are Harry Johnston and Eric Hayward - to territory where they have never played before in a tangerine jersey in the First Division.
The last time a Blackpool team had a League match at St. Andrew's was in 1939. Birmingham won in spite of a goal by Jock Dodds, but the points from a 2-1 game late in April were still insufficient to reprieve the Midlands club from a Second Division sentence which ended only a year ago.
When the teams met at Bloomfield-road last October Blackpool won the first game between the clubs for nearly 10 years with a Walter Rickett goal.
No First Division team have scored as few goals in home games as Birmingham - 15 in 18 matches - and no team have conceded as few, for eight goals only have visiting teams scored at St. Andrew's this season. It threatens to be one of those grim checkmates.
On to Highbury on Monday for another 60,000 attendance and a lot of £ s. d. Blackpool have never won at this London goldmine, but have been near to it once or twice, played a draw there in 1946-47, were beaten by only 2-1 last Season.
TOO FEW GOALS AND TOO MANY HOME
GAMES LOST
That's why they are talking about relegation
By “Spectator”
ALL the old platitudes about the ominous writing on the famous wall and the black cloud no bigger than a man’s hand on the blue horizon art being trotted out in Blackpool this week.
Ever since the public saw the First Division table last weekend and noticed Blackpool’s abrupt fall in it I have heard people confiding to each other, “They can go down yet!”
Blackpool could go down into the Second Division. But, honestly, I don’t think Blackpool will, and I don’t think that anybody else seriously thinks so, either.
Blackburn Rovers lost First Division status with 32 points last season, and Brentford went out with 25 a year earlier. Thirty-three points were not enough to enable Blackpool to escape the dread descent in 1933.
This season, admittedly, there is such congestion in or near the relegation zone that as many as 34 or even 35 points may be a death warrant. Yet, even assuming that 36 points will be required, which is between two and three points above the average since the first world war, Blackpool would require only four points from the remaining seven games, including this afternoon’s Portsmouth match, to reach sanctuary.
Glory fades
AND if four out of the last possible 14 points cannot be won - well, Blackpool would deserve to be relegated.
My chief concern is that such speculations and conjectures cannot be dismissed as mere alarmist chatter only 12 months after Blackpool’s great triumph in reaching Wembley for the first time. How soon the glory fades!
How is it that Blackpool’s position even, as a First Division club should be menaced, however remotely, in a season which opened rich in promise?
Several reasons stand out the proverbial mile.
Never, to be fair, have I known the club in all the years I have been reporting its ups and downs to De so beset with casualties week after week. Once only since the season opened have Blackpool been able to field an unchanged team three weeks in succession - and that team contained a reserve.
Notable absences
WHEN such a player as Harry Johnston misses half a dozen games and Stanley Matthews is out of exactly a dozen, and Stanley Mortensen is absent eight times, and not one man in the team, with the exception of Ronnie Suart, is able to play in every one of the first 35 matches, the inevitable disturbances in the team’s formation must have certain unfortunate consequences.
No club can legislate against that sort of misfortune.
Yet this team, nevertheless, has at times invited the almost embarrassing position in which it finds itself by repeated and at times inexcusable failures at home and by the low rate of scoring of its front line.
Eight forward lines in the First Division, admittedly, have scored fewer goals, and with 56 goals against it the defence has scarcely been invulnerable.
Pressure, but—
BUT people who have been watching Blackpool in every match all the season, as I have been watching the team, must long ago have come to the conclusion that few teams in the- Division can have exercised such a lot of pressure in match after match with such inadequate results in the scoring table.
The concession of points in home matches, too, has become almost notorious.
Ten have been lost in the last 10 games, excluding today’s match with the Division leaders, and, in fact, there are only two teams - Huddersfield Town and Preston North End, who are holding up like a couple of dismayed Atlases the rest of the Division - who had won fewer home games or lost more before this afternoon’s fixtures.
Away points
THAT, primarily, is where Blackpool have gone wrong.
It verges on the ridiculous when a team has had to win 13 points away from home at this time of the year to aggregate a total of 32 for the season.
Yet Blackpool have managed to do it, and it is, I think, everything else apart, because the team have been a lot too generous to their visitors that you hear the forbidding word “relegation” in too many conversations at the present time.
It would have been called “careless talk,” calculated to cause despondency and alarm, in wartime, and that’s about all it is now, I suppose. But I still think it is a pity that events should have caused people to talk that way at all.
Bright Reserve
STRANGE that at a time when the First Division team have been drifting towards the shoals and eddies in which a few proud clubs have sunk, the Central League men should have been redeeming a first half of the season which threatened 31ack- pool with the indignity of an application for re-election to the League.
That, at least, could not happen now. This team has lost only four games since the beginning of the year, has won 10 out of the last 14 points and, in the words of Jack Duckworth, its trainer, is “playing every match as if it were a team.”
It never had the chance earlier, when its forces were so shuffled by first team demands that during the first four months of the season it had fielded no fewer than 31 men.
Since then it has been allowed to settle into something approaching a regular formation, and the result has been a slow but unbroken climb out of the Central League foothills.
Stars of future
THERE have been revealed in the process not a few potential stars of the future, several of whom have been in and out of the first team and have not been too noticeably out of their class in the First Division.
That, if people will insist on talking about black clouds on- blue horizons, is the silver lining to the cloud.
There are signs already that Blackpool’s long-term policy of training young footballers instead of spending extravagantly on other clubs’ products - a virtue which Blackpool’s economic position makes a necessity- may yet be Blackpool’s ultimate salvation.
A shot and a half
I HAVE now had the letter which advocates Ewan Fenton’s conversion into a forward. It always comes after a half - back has scored a goal or two.
And this young wing - half has scored more than one or two this season, has scored, in fact, more than any other half-back at Blackpool for 20 years or longer.
For the second team he has scored four goals - only - one was a converted penalty - and now, in his first game in the First Division since Christmas he has broken his duck in the First Division with one of the finest shots I have seen by a Blackpool player all this season.
Yes, he's from the NE
IT’S not often that Blackpool play in the northeast with a team containing only two men from that rich nursery of football stars.
Yet that happened Newcastle a week ago.
And the majority of people did not know that there were even two, thought there was only one -
Stanley Mortensen.
The other was Tom Garrett, who did not, contrary belief, learn his football at Bolton, where he was working as a collier when Blackpool signed him. but up in the area which produces coal, steel, ships and footballers in about equal proportions.
Few people knew it, too, but this Newcastle game was Tom Garretts first in the First Division as a fullback for almost exactly a year.
His last previous appearance for Blackpool was against Middlesbrough on April 10, 1948.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 9 April 1949
UNITED ASSAULT
I HAVE seen some madcap autograph hunters in my time, but none to compare with the Newcastle breed.
Dozens of them besieged Blackpool’s hotel a week ago. One or two of them crept inside the swing doors, and I actually saw one apprehended on the floor where the Blackpool men had their bedrooms.
But it was at St. James’s Park that they went into their grand assault. Hundreds raced on the field, escaping the police cordons, when the Blackpoo1 team appeared for the second half, and for the first time in all the years I have been watching football I saw a team encircled by a palisade of books and a forest of pencils unable to position itself on the field, with the. referee standing at a loss in the centre circle and dozens of policemen swooping from all quarters of the compass on the mob and eventually dispersing it.
***
VISITING goalkeepers are often asked to “Sign, please!” at St. James’s Park whenever play is at the other end. George Farm was refusing invitations all the afternoon last weekend.
In the end, when the match ended, the half-time scene was repeated on an, incredible scale. Thousands surged on to the pitch until from the Press box, which is perched high on the main stand roof, the chaos resembled Wembley, 1923 - without the white horse.
Both teams disappeared from view in the seething, clamouring multitude.
There are separate entrances for the teams at this ground. Hugh Kelly, the Blackpool wing- half, seeking sanctuary, found himself in the wrong tunnel, and had to battle his way out and back to the other one.
If ever there was a football- mad population it is in Newcastle.
THERE may be no place like home and there probably isn’t. But Blackpool’s footballers will be no authority on the subject next weekend, when their Easter will be spent everywhere except at home.
Immediately after the match with Arsenal on Good Friday the players will have an early dinner in a Blackpool hotel and take a coach to Birmingham for the match at St. Andrew’s the following day.
And within half an hour of the St. Andrew’s match ending they will be in a train en route to London, where they will spend Sunday and Monday, playing Arsenal on Easter Monday afternoon at Highbury.
THE BARGAIN TEAM
IT was nearly Blackpool’s cheapest team for years at Newcastle last weekend. Only one of the forwards, Stanley Matthews, cost a fee which could be called a fee in these inflationary days.
The two wing-halves and the two full-backs were men signed for a nominal figure. The entire team was built for less than £15,000 - and eight of the 11 men in it were priced at less than £500 for the lot when they were signed.
If Johnny Crosland had been at centre-half, Walter Thorpe in goal, and Albert Hobson at outside-right - although, of course, am not suggesting that they should have been - it would have been a team comparable with Stoke City’s famous £110 eleven
IS this a record? Blackpool played at Newcastle for an hour and a half last weekend, and, according to one of Mr. George Sheard’s census charts, did not win a solitary corner.
If it is a record, I hope that for Blackpool it remains one.
Strangely, in spite of this poverty of comers - and while Blackpool were not forcing one the United won 10 - there was little between the goal-kicks, for against Newcastle’s 10 Blackpool had eight.
***
THEY’VE come - forwards, halfbacks, full-backs - from the north-east to Blackpool in their dozens in the last 20 or 25 years. And when their playing days are over 90 per cent, of them go back again.
Jack O’Donnell is back there now - Jack O’Donnell, the fullback - from Everton, who might have played for England, for he was such a good full-back, if life, and football, too, had not so often been such a grand and glorious joke to him.
They still talk in these parts of the day when he wandered on to a Fleetwood trawler to meet the ship’s cook, who was one of his friends, never noticed that the ship had sailed until it was a few miles out, and, instead of an afternoon at Fleetwood, spent a fortnight in Icelandic fishing waters, and, so he always said, loved every minute of it.
IT was a pity that this should have happened during the football season and at a time when Blackpool were facing another of those crises during the club’s early days in the First Division.
Yet when Jack came back and apologised and had served his period of suspension he went into the team again and played like 10 men to reprieve it from relegation.
He’s in the Newcastle district now, working on the railway. And he served all through the war, which is just what Jack O’Donnell would do, was often in action, which would suit him no end, and finished with the rank of sergeant.
There's a hoodoo
BLACKPOOL have not won a game in the north-east for a couple of years.
The last time Blackpool came from those parts with two points was from Middlesbrough in April, 1947, and those points were won, too, only after Dave Cumming, the Middlesbrough goal-keeper, had been crippled in an accident near the end which finished his career.
Since then Blackpool have lost twice at Middlesbrough, without scoring a goal in either match, lost once and drawn once at Sunderland, and now have lost at Newcastle. That makes a grand total - or is “grand” the word? - of one point in five games.
ONE Blackpool man invariably goes on the field almost convinced that he will never play the sort of game he wants to play when he is so near his home at South Shields.
Stanley Mortensen seems to be under a north-east hoodoo, has scored only once for Blackpool - and that was at Middlesbrough against a deputy goalkeeper in the 1947 game - in all the matches his team have played in the north-east since the war.
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