23 December 1950 Charlton Athletic 2 Blackpool 3
Scot a goal-maker at Charlton
TWO FOR MUDIE
Charlton Athletic 2, Blackpool 3
By “Clifford Greenwood”
IT WAS STRANGELY QUIET DOWN IN THE VALLEY AT CHARLTON THIS AFTERNOON - A LOT QUIETER, I SUSPECT, THAN IT WILL BE IN A FORTNIGHT WHEN THESE TWO TEAMS MEET IN THE CUP.
ates open at 11 o’clock at White Hart Lane for the all-London clash of ’Spurs and Arsenal, and First Division leaders, Middlesbrough, at Stamford Bridge, this ground - a rectangle inside towering embankments and probably the unloveliest stadium in the capital or nearly anywhere else - was miles off the football map for the London public.
Not even the first appearance in English football of Allan Brown in Blackpool’s front line could make it box office, and a few minutes before 2 o’clock the mammoth terraces were almost deserted and the stands, open to a wind apparently blowing direct from one of the Poles, almost empty.
The Blackpool coach set off early from the team’s hotel because of reports of a pre-Christmas traffic congestion all the way en route.
NEW SCOT
It was a false alarm, and in the end nearly an hour had to be spent in a vigil which could scarcely have been good for the nerves of the new Scot, Allan Brown, imperturbable as he appears to be.
The Athletic could not play Gordon Hurst at outside-right, and Leslie Fell deputised in a line led by Charles Vaughan, who has often scored against Blackpool in his time and has often scored against most other teams, too. Teams:
CHARLTON: Bartram; Croker (P.), Lock; Fenton, Phipps, Revell; Fell, Lumley (T.), Vaughan, Evans, Kiernan.
BLACKPOOL: Farm; Garrett, Wright (J.); Johnston, Hayward, Kelly; Matthews, Mudie, Mortensen, Brown, Perry.
Referee: Mr F. W. Chadwick (Leicester).
First half
Blackpool played in white for the fourth successive away game.
Without being exactly a giant, Allan Brown in a football jersey was obviously not less than a couple of inches taller than any other man in Blackpool’s forward line.
On a pitch dusted with sand in the centre circle and the goal areas but firm, Blackpool lost the toss.
In the first minute - as so often happens in Blackpool games these days - there was nearly a sensation.
It was everything except a goal for the Athletic, who built a raid on the right which ended in Fell racing away from Jackie Wright, reaching the line as he cut in, and crossing fast a ball to which Farm fell in a mass of men.
CLEARED ANYWHERE
The ball was lost to view for a split second, bounced out of the pack with the goalkeeper submerged, and as it quivered in front of the gaping goal, inviting a Charlton forward to shoot it over the line, the vigilant Johnston cleared it far away.
No comparable Blackpool attack materialised for a time.
I noticed Brown back among the half-backs and fast and definite in the tackle to break up two Charlton advances.
Yet, in spite of all Charlton’s pressure - and in the opening minutes there was plenty of it, if little of it directed anywhere - Blackpool were twice near to the lead in the fifth and sixth minutes.
In the first raid the entire Charlton defence seemed slow to move to Perry’s punted forward pass. Mortensen raced on to it, and Bartram, deserted by his full-backs, galloped forward desperately to fall at the leader’s feet, ultimately losing a ball which Frank Lock cleared as it was bouncing towards the open goal.
MUDIE SHOOTS
And Bartram leaps to save
The next minute Stanley Matthews left his full-back sprawling, waited for his partner to reach shooting position, and crossed a centre with such precision that, as it crossed him, little Mudie shot it fast, and as it was rising beneath the bar watched Sam Bartram punch it over in a cat’s leap.
Chief impressions of Brown after 10 minutes were that in possession of a ball he required a lot of moving off it and he had a good sense of position, but that he was now and again unprepared for the pass when it came.
He hit one shot direct into the waiting arms of Bartram, shot barely wide from Kelly’s judicious squared pass in another move, and finished with a long forward pass into the open space to which the pursuing Mortensen was beaten.
BROWN SHOOTS
But Brown can shoot - shoot with a punch.
The aggressive here-there-and-everywhere Mortensen, aided and abetted by Perry and Mudie, made one position for him, and on to the ball as fast as a greyhound, Brown shot it with such ferocity that when it hit Harold Phipps, the big Charlton centre-half crumbled under the impact.
There was not, for the rest, a lot to write about.
I saw Eric Hayward make two undisturbed clearances, the second of them after Farm had fallen on both knees to punch out a fast, low shot by Johnnie Evans, which was about the first shot the Charlton forwards had produced in 15 fast but scarcely dramatic minutes.
NO POWER
There was another shot by Lumley in the 20th which skidded out wide of a post but had no venom in it, and another raid which produced nothing definite.
Otherwise, nearly all the good football was being played by Blackpool on to a defence which for a long time was still slow to the ball and not at all that certain in its clearances when it was first to it.
Bill Perry was once allowed to race 30 yards unchallenged before hooking in a fast shot which Bartram met with those two big hands of his, and twice afterwards Matthews was actually halted by Frank Lock to the sort of cheers which rise everywhere except at Blackpool whenever this happens.
But after all I had seen in the Middlesbrough and Arsenal classics it all seemed singularly tame.
The Athletic raided a lot, but no raid for a long time led anywhere until the 27th minute came, and with it a goal for the Athletic which nobody, I think, had ever been expecting.
Ben Fenton created the raid which opened with one of those cross-field passes which so often open out a defence.
The Blackpool defence seemed open, unprepared this time. Over sailed the ball. It seemed to me that Tom Garrett leaped at it and could only head it down and not, as he intended, away.
On to it TOM KIERNAN darted, shot fast and low - so fast that it skidded away from two men before they could intercept it, so low that it hit the far wall of the net before George Farm could fall to it.
That was the one major incident of the first half hour.
MORTENSEN’S LEAP
It awakened the Blackpool forwards again, awakened them to one raid which ended in Mudie taking his partner’s pass and crossing fast and high a ball which Mortensen could not reach in spite of a desperate lurching lean.
George Farm’s occupation for a long time was the collecting of back passes or passes so fast that if Charlton’s forwards had all been Mick the Millers they could never have reached them.
The football, as distinct from a game based chiefly on the long pass and the chase of it, was still being played by Blackpool, who deservedly made it 1-1 in 37 minutes.
EQUALISER
Brown shot leads to Morty goal
Allan Brown was definitely in this goal, hit a ball which, I think, was rising wide of the bar as Bartram leaped at it and half-punched it away.
Up to it rose a Blackpool forward - Bill Perry, I think - and waiting near the far post STAN MORTENSEN was there to head his 11th goal of the season. Three minutes later and Blackpool were in front with one of the great goals of the season. And this was a goal with the new Scot’s signature inscribed in capital letters on it.
Allan Brown darted on to a loose ball scarcely five yards inside his own half.
PEACH OF A PASS
He must have heard - as I heard up in the stand - Jackie Mudie’s call of “Allan, Allan.”
In the next second a peach of a pass was released - a ball which soared high over a full-back, left little MUDIE to race on alone and shoot fast past the deserted Bartram as the goalkeeper raced out in vain to meet him.
It was an all-Scots goal.
There might have, and should have, been another a minute later
CHARLTON LEAD
Crossfield pass - and a goal for Kiernan
but an Anglo-Scots goal this time as Stanley Matthews crossed a perfect pass and Mudie, in position for it again, sliced his shot high and wide.
That was a grand finish to a half which before it had been merely commonplace.
Half-time: Charlton 1, Blackpool 2.
Second half
Brown had no cause to reproach himself on his first 45 minutes’ football in England. Apart from everything else - and there was a lot else - he was in both Blackpool’s first half goals, making the second with a pass which deserved to be photographed.
Perry, in the game a lot before the interval, was in it again, direct from Kelly’s pass, in the first minute of the second half, taking the pass at full gallop and shooting it wide of a post.
The Athletic, for a time, were all excitement and panic, and had reason to be, too, with their defence still suspect under pressure and with gaps being torn in it almost at will.
PLENTY OF TIME!
Stan Mortensen was given time in the third minute of the half to go for a ball, lose it, fall down, and still walk away with it as Phipps and his left-back each left it to the other.
It nearly cost Charlton a third goal, too.
The leader put Matthews in possession, and from his pass the alert Mudie, the game’s most menacing forward, shot a ball which hit Bartram’s knees, bounced off them, escaped his clutch at it, and in the end was cleared anywhere by a full-back.
Another minute, too, and this goalkeeper - and what Charlton would do without him I shudder to think - was in action again, holding brilliantly a ball headed at him by Mortensen from Perry's long pass.
ON TOP
Blackpool press, score third goal
Without a question it was Blackpool’s game at this time, with raids being built nearly one a minute and the Charlton forwards, even when over the halfway line, scattering their passes anywhere.
Five minutes of the half had gone before Farm was in the game at all, and then he was given all the time he required to hold high over his head a long curling centre from the Athletic’s right wing.
It was almost inevitable when Blackpool made it 3-1 in the 10th minute of the half.
And again it was JACKIE MUDIE who was there to complete the discomfiture of a defence all over the premises.
PERFECT CENTRE
Stanley Matthews made the goal, took a pass away from his full-back, waited for the full-back’s second tackle, escaped him, cut in, and crossed a perfect centre.
All that happened afterwards was confusion. The centre appeared to hit Bartram and cannon off him to Brown, who shot it back again at a full-back on the line.
Three shots rained in and came out again. Men sprawled everywhere.
Out at last for the fourth time the ball ran loose, and MUDIE, as if tired of all these near misses, lashed it into the back of the net at a rocketing pace.
Then Brown stormed into the game on his own, racing 40 yards, refusing to be separated from the ball, running it on almost to the dancing, desperate Bartram before losing it in the end to a desperate tackle by Phipps.
IN RETREAT
The Charlton forwards decided afterwards that it was time to make some sort of impression on events, and for five minutes Blackpool went into an almost casual slow-motion retreat, repelling everything until a free-kick was conceded and Lock lifted it high into a packed goalmouth where Farm punched it away and left centre-forward Vaughan a casualty at his feet.
A corner followed and another, but there was scarcely anything except a feather duster punch in the Charlton front line, and nothing, to be frank, in Charlton’s football to indicate, with 25 minutes left, that Blackpool were not to win this Cup-tie rehearsal.
Tom Garrett was magnificent whenever the Athletic’s left wing surged on him, made two grand clearances in rapid succession, found his man with both of them, and with the second opened a raid which ended in Matthews actually shooting, but shooting, admittedly, a long way wide.
NEARLY 4-1
Mortensen wide from Matthews centre
Evans skimmed the Blackpool bar in one raid by the Athletic, which was an event in itself, but as the shades of night began to fall - and they fall uncommonly early at the Valley - it was still Blackpool who were winning almost everywhere.
It was nearly 4-1, in fact, with 15 minutes left as Matthews strolled away from a couple of his watchdogs, gave himself time to select a man in position for a centre, and crossed a ball which Mortensen sliced a long way wide.
By that time it seemed to be merely a case of waiting for the end.
Then in rapid succession came two events which could have tumbled the game in a Christmas somersault.
Fourteen minutes left and Bill Perry forced a pass by sheer persistence, lost the ball in the end but left Mortensen in front of an open goal.
The centre-forward stabbed his shot wide, and lifted his hands in the air in despair.
ONE FOR CHARLTON
That should have been 4-1. A minute later it was 3-2.
A rapid raid by Charlton, a swoop down the left wing and VAUGHAN shot the ball fast and low over the line with the Blackpool defence obviously unprepared for such swift retaliation.
The game was relatively open again.
In the end, Blackpool, instead of finishing on a loose rein, had to battle desperately, often in complete retreat, until the last minute.
George Farm was brilliant at this time, was out for the count after one daring dive at a forward’s feet with three minutes left, was soon fit again, and often in action.
Blackpool should have won by a mile - but won instead only by a neck. That was the only criticism today.
Result:
CHARLTON 2 (Kiernan 27, Vaughan 77)
BLACKPOOL 3 (Mortensen 37, Mudie 39, 55)
COMMENTS ON THE GAME
CHARLTON were a game team - a team outclassed but never surrendering - at the Valley today.
But if the Athletic can produce football of no greater quality in a fortnight’s time Blackpool are virtually in the fourth round of the Cup already.
For all the football of class was played by Blackpool in this game.
I call Allan Brown’s game good without any reservations.
He may not have been brilliant as the Mudie-Matthews partnership was, but his passes always found the open space. He was fast on to the ball, and once in possession of it it required a steamroller punch to dispossess him.
MATTHEWS AGAIN
It was the magnificent Matthews again, but down the entire length of the front line today there was football which until those last desperate minutes had the Charlton defence running all ways - and often the wrong one.
The Blackpool defence, by contrast, was firm almost everywhere with Hayward dominating the field’s centre completely and Garrett a full-back without an equal in the match.
Class told, as it nearly always will tell, everything else being equal.
"Happy with Blackpool" - Allan Brown
“IT’S been a long time coming, but it’s come at last - my first game in England and for the club for whom I have always wanted to play,” Allan Brown, Blackpool’s new Scottish international, told Clifford Greenwood a few minutes before the team took the field at Charlton this afternoon.
Every one of the Blackpool lads has made me so welcome that I seem to be at home among them already.”
Brown’s inseparable companions this weekend have been his brother Scots in the team, Hugh Kelly, George Farm and Jackie Mudie.
CHRISTMAS comes but once a year - and there are a few footballers who are glad of it, writes Clifford Greenwood.
The Blackpool team will not be back from Charlton until shortly before midnight tonight.
They have a home match with Liverpool on Monday afternoon (2-15), which is Christmas Day to nearly all the rest of the community, but merely another day to them, go to Anfield for the return game 24 hours later, and four days afterwards have Manchester United as visitors.
All of which makes four games in a week, which may not seem all that great an ordeal over seven days, but which exacts an intensive toll, nevertheless.
What will happen in the Christmas games? What is almost certain is that scarcely anything which could be reasonably expected to happen will happen at all.
It is sufficient to record that Liverpool have never won a postwar game at Bloomfield Road and that Manchester United have won only once.
At Anfield, where Blackpool play on Boxing Day, Blackpool teams have won twice - last season four days after the Cup-tie defeat, when Jackie Mudie’s first goal in the First Division settled the match - drawn once and lost once.
On past records, therefore, for whatever they may be worth, the odds must be on Blackpool making a little profit out of a four-matches-in-a-week endurance test, which is a little too close to the Cup-ties for the peace of mind of a few people.
Blackpool, I think, would be content to call it a Happy Christmas if they won four out of the six points.
Blackpool attack had to be strengthened
By Clifford Greenwood
THE ’Spurs were the first London team to beat Blackpool this season in seven games - and last weekend’s match was the first home game in which Blackpool had not scored since another London team, Charlton Athletic, came to town and played a goalless draw in the second week of the season.
Other statistics? The Spurs’ winning goal was scored at the north end of the ground, where no Blackpool forward has once scored since the first-minute goal Jackie Mudie shot there against Everton on November 4, nearly two months ago.
The south stand and paddock customers not only see all the Blackpool goals this season - or nearly all of them - but are spared a close-range view of other forwards scoring against Blackpool.
No wonder the prices are higher there!
***
ONE OF THE OLD BRIGADE
THERE are some of the no-longer-boys of the old brigade whose names are familiar even to this present generation of the Blackpool football public.
There is one I heard of this week - and he is still living in Blackpool, practising as an estate agent - who is, I think, too seldom mentioned when people begin saying “Now I remember . .”
John Scarr was a wing forward for Blackpool and Plymouth Argyle at a time when the Blackpool footballers of those distant days played at Raikes Hall and trained on the trotting track.
Few of his generation - for he was playing before this present century was born - are still alive. He has a nephew, J. G. F. Scarr, who has forsaken football and plays hockey for the St. Annes club, for which, it is possible, his uncle will never forgive him!
For old John Scarr has remained faithful to the one game all his days, can still talk about it shrewdly and intelligently, can recall long-ago times when Blackpool football was in its cradle days.
***
QUEST after Allan Brown into the Frozen North by Chairman Harry Evans and Manager Joe Smith a week ago recalled a similar mission, if into a different locality, by those two Blackpool agents exactly five years earlier.
That time they went into Yorkshire, signed Eddie Shimwell from Sheffield United - what a bargain that was! - and went on to London for a match at Charlton.
The full-back was to follow them from his Derbyshire home the following day. That was the programme. But man proposed and the snow disposed.
The train taking the new player to London was halted in a snowdrift for hours, and by the time he reached the capital and telephoned the Charlton ground it was half-time and Blackpool were winning 1-0.
All of which was the strangest first game for a club a professional never played.
***
ANOTHER honour - and I am glad to report it - for the St. Annes referee, Mr. James Houston. He has been given the Yorkshire “Derby” in the Cup-ties - Rotherham United v Doncaster Rovers.
That one, I think, will require a man of firmer discipline than a few referees I have seen this season, than one I saw only the other day.
But Jimmy Houston can exercise discipline and can do it, too, without being too self-assertive.
He is one of the few men who have ever dared to read a lecture to Billy Liddell in front of the Anfield audience. Anyone who can do that could have gone with Daniel into the den of lions.
***
No wonder display - and no wonder
HOW SOME FOLK LOVE TO BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP THE FASHIONABLE TEAM!
The 'Spurs are such a team these days, writes Clifford Greenwood. They have been called “the eleven of the century” and all that, and, unquestionably, on contemporary standards, they are good, at times very good.
But what conceivable purpose is served by pretending that they were good at Blackpool a week ago?
No team could be. No team - probably not even the famous Invincibles, or even the Moscow Dynamos - could have played anything except hit-it-and-hope-for-the-best football on a field of rutted ice patches and crumbling frozen snow.
So why assert that the ’Spurs achieved the impossible and produced a copybook game? They would be the last to say that they were doing anything of the kind.
Said one of them after the match, when I talked to him.
“We did our best, but that wasn’t so good - how could it be?”
There’s the perfect comment on the match - not all this almost obsequious praise of a team that happens - and deserves to be - a headline team at the present time.
Arsenal and the ’Spurs must often pray to be saved from their friends.
***
11 out of the 22
HOW many of the 22 men who met in the Blackpool-Spurs match last weekend played in the famous Cup semi-final between the clubs at Villa Park in 1948?
Blackpool had five: Harry Johnston, Eric Hayward, Hugh Kelly, Stanley Matthews and Stanley Mortensen. The ’Spurs had six: Ted Ditchburn, Bill Nicholson, who played at centre-half, not wing-half, in the Cup-tie, and four forwards, Les Bennett, Len Duquemin, Eddie Baily and Leslie Medley.
There was no Alf Ramsey, today an England full-back, in the ’Spurs’ defence, and three of the Blackpool forwards who played in that unforgettable match, Jim McIntosh, George Dick and Walter Rickett, have since left the club.
How brief is the glory ....
***
PEOPLE - and there are quite a lot - who think the Atomic Boys and the Ten Old Faithfuls, the two Blackpool mascot squads, have no love for each other, should have been at the Atomic Boys’ dance the other evening.
As Mr. Sam Bailey, the Old Faithfuls’ chief, is the first to admit: “We couldn’t have been made more welcome!” And the Old Faithful in the course of the evening proceeded to monopolise the prize list for the biggest and best tangerine rosettes - and, as two of them were five feet high, that is not surprising!
Mrs. Hodgkinson, Mr. and Mrs. S. Bailey, Mrs. Haley and Mrs. Miller collected £2 in prizes.
During the event, after being introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Ronnie Clayton, these Old - and they are not so old as all that - Faithfuls promised in future to attend the champion on all his championship excursions.
I hear, by the way, that five of the women in this squad, not content to confine their interests to football, gave a concert to the patients at the Victoria Hospital one night this week.
***
TWO SAY "IT'S NOT TRUE"
Bill Slater
“Going to Belfast? First I’ve heard of it.”
TWO denials before the Spurs match at Blackpool last weekend:
No. 1 by Mr. Arthur Rowe, the 'Spurs manager: “So we've perfected a plan - have we? - for blotting out 'The Two Stanleys'? Who's perpetrated that nonsense? A secret plan?
Yes, we've a plan, but it isn't a secret. What is it? To score more goals than Blackpool."
One was sufficient.
No. 2 by W. J. Slater, Blackpool's amateur international: “Leaving the North and going to Queen's College, Belfast. It's the first I've heard of it. I'm on a physical training instructor's course at Leeds, and I shan't finish it until next summer. No, I'm not going to Belfast."
That’s good news.
***
And now Ken
NOT all Blackpool colts make their name with Blackpool, says Clifford Greenwood. A few go elsewhere and achieve fame.
I wrote the other week about Paddy Sowden’s success while on loan from Hull City to Aldershot during his Army service. Now there is news of another of the products of Blackpool's nursery system - the play-anywhere (and often at Blackpool he had to) Kenneth Horne.
Brentford signed him on a free transfer during the summer. He soon won his spurs in the London Combination. During recent weeks he has been in the London club's Second Division team, playing as a full-back.
I notice also that another of the young players who left Blackpool during the summer, Walter Jones, the brother of the club's assistant manager, is often these days in Doncaster Rovers’ half-back line.
He was not a free-transfer man, but at the price - which was scarcely in four figures - which Mr. Peter Doherty paid for him, he was obviously a bargain.
***
Jackie's day
CONGRATULATIONS to Jackie Mudie, Blackpool FC’s inside forward, whose engagement is announced today to Miss Brenda Rushforth, younger daughter of Mr. and Mrs. R. Rushforth, of Alexandra Road, South Shore.
Jackie celebrated the occasion by hitting goals at Charlton.
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