10 March 1951 Blackpool 0 Birmingham City 0
Mortensen injury a crippling blow
REPLAY EVERTON WEDNESDAY
Blackpool 0, Birmingham City 0
By “Clifford Greenwood”
IT IS A DAY WITH THE MANCHESTER SIGNATURE ON IT. THE SKIES ARE GREY AND BROOD OVER THE GROUND.
THERE ARE REPORTS THAT SNOW IS APPROACHING FROM THE NORTH, AND THE CLOUDS ARE SO BLACK THAT THEY SEEM ALREADY PACKED WITH IT.
Outside the main stand a church steeple slowly disappears into the murk as I write. Inside the gates an hour before the kick-off there are 40,000 of the 72,000 massed on the embankments.
Every few minutes, the players, not yet in their jerseys, walk on the barren earth which is the Maine Road pitch on this March afternoon.
The rattles explode with the noise of a thousand road drills working at once, and up in the air the blue and white and the tangerine ribbons toss almost like flames above the grey anonymous banks of the waiting, excited, turbulent multitude.
The Blackpool coach takes a secret route down roads so quiet to the Greyhound Inn on the outskirts of Lowton St. Mary's that it passes not one other coach mile after mile.
Not until the police escort meets it at Chorlton are the roads beginning to mass with the traffic which before two o’clock has packed every park within a mile radius of the ground.
Then it is bells and bugles and rattles all the way until at the Maine Road approaches the horses of the mounted police have gently to brush the people out of its crawling progress.
They announce over the loudspeakers three quarters of an hour before the kick-off that the teams are to take the field at full strength.
HULLABALOO
Everybody knew that 24 hours ago, but everybody still cheers and everybody for the next half-hour continues to make the babbling, chattering hullabaloo which is a release from the tension of the day.
But Birmingham make a last minute switch, Green and Badham, the full-backs, changing places.
Badham is given the unenviable task of marking Matthews because he is believed to be quicker to the tackle than Green, whose original place was on the right.
The famous duck is there, and the Atomic Boys, and splashed against the front barriers of the slopes which face the players’ entrance are the umbrellas and scarves of the “Ten Old Faithfuls” - the 10 who seem to be 100 today.
So the time passes slowly, so slowly but so noisily as the stands fill and all movement ceases on the two Kops and beneath the roof of the paddock behind one goal.
It is almost “seconds out” now.
Teams:
BLACKPOOL: Farm; Shimwell, Garrett; Johnston, Hayward, Kelly; Matthews, Mudie, Mortensen, Brown, Perry.
BIRMINGHAM CITY: Merrick; Green, Badham; Boyd, Atkins, Ferris; Stewart, Higgins, Trigg, Smith, Berry.
Referee: Mr. A. Bond (London).
GREAT RECEPTION
Out they came at last to a nearly demented reception as soon as the field had emptied of 100 girls who for a quarter of an hour had weaved patterns on the grass in a series of keep-fit exercises - a new departure in re-match sideshows.
The biggest posse of photographers I have seen at a football match since Wembley, 1948, massed at the players' tunnel.
The newsreel camera crews were perched high on a scaffolding flanking the stand. Out came Donald the Duck as Blackpool trotted into view. A broadside of fireworks greeted Birmingham.
THE GAME
First half
Harry Johnston lost the toss. The City defended the goal in front of the sheltered paddock. Three o’clock, and they’re off - and nearly with a sensation.
A fast pass from left wing to right. A swooping raid on this Birmingham wing.
Eric Hayward runs in to meet his man, falls. The ball rolls loose, bounces away from Higgins, the man who scored in the first 40 seconds against Manchester United in the quarter-finals, reaches Stewart, who is preparing to shoot as a Blackpool man crosses his path.
And out of the swarm within shooting distance of Blackpool goal comes Eddie Shimwell, taking the ball away, clearing it to thunderous cheers.
Inside a minute - all this in less than 60 seconds - Matthews chases a pass, and Badham, chasing it, and with the wing-forward at his heels, boots it 30 yards downfield and over the line for a corner.
MORTENSEN HEADER
Twice afterwards the Birmingham goal is in peril. The first time Tom Garrett lobs forward a high free kick. Stan Mortensen rises to it like a rocket and heads it backwards into the arms of the crouching Merrick.
Another minute and Bill Perry has his baptism of fire in his greatest Cup tie, takes a fast pass, races down the wing half the length of the field, outpacing the full-back who seeks to cut him off, crosses a bouncing centre which Atkins clears anywhere.
There are a couple of fast breakaways by the City’s front line, but they are only breakaways. Blackpool’s football has a poise and a confidence remarkable so early in the afternoon in such a match.
MORTY’S DIVE
Twice Stan Matthews takes passes away fast, the second time crosses a low fast centre. Down at it Mortensen dives, and off his head the ball shoots as if he had hit it with his boots, skids away into Merrick’s arms, with the goalkeeper crouching instinctively in the line of flight.
Birmingham raid once while all this is happening. The raid wins a corner as Johnston hurls himself across to meet a ball for which his goalkeeper is waiting, and watches it bounce off his knees over the line.
But still Blackpool attack three times to every raid by the City. Down the forwards surge again in another full-line advance.
It is the eighth minute on my watch. Up go a pack of men at a high ball. One man falls, lies still. It is a man in a tangerine jersey, identified, once the Blackpool trainer has been summoned to the scene, as Stanley Mortensen.
CARRIED OFF
Even the nonstop tumult is stilled for a few seconds as the ambulance squads race to the line to await the centre-forward as he is taken pick-a-back off the field.
With four forwards Blackpool unexpectedly continue to move on to the Birmingham goal. There is no shot, not a shooting position until Jackie Mudie hooks the ball high over the bar.
But once only have two Birmingham forwards been over the halfway line since he went off for repairs before Stan Mortensen the Indomitable is in it again, his right arm limp at his side.
Out he wanders to the left wing as Gilbert Merrick gives him a consolatory pat on the back, and into the centre of the line moves Bill Perry.
ALMOST!
That is in the 15th minute. In the 16th, after the Blackpool leader has gone up to a high ball and fallen again in a crumpled heap, Birmingham, in one fast crisp raid, nearly take the lead.
It was one of those two-pass movements which have paid high dividends for the St. Andrew’s team this season.
One-two it goes, and off the second pass Berry cuts in from the left wing, positions himself, steadies himself, and lashes his shot wide.
I see Kelly repel one Birmingham assault afterwards and Johnston halt another before, with 17 minutes gone, comes a miss which the man guilty of it will dream about or, to be exact, probably have nightmares about, for years.
It was another raid in two brisk passes.
CHANCE OF A LIFETIME
The second pass leaves Jimmy Stewart all on his own, his full-back at a standstill yards away downfield.
It is forward versus goalkeeper. George Farm comes out - he can do nothing else, appears to jerk out a foot - a foot from which the ball glances as Stewart half-hits it, and, watching this chance of a lifetime rejected, wrings his hands in abject lamentation.
Yet that is not the end of Birmingham, for in the succeeding minutes it is traffic all one way on the Blackpool goal, and in the attack Eddie Shimwell leaps high under the bar to head out a rising shot which has escaped his goalkeeper’s hands a split second after the whistle has gone.
Often afterwards this whistle halts the game. So early it is evident that Mr. Bond intends to stand no nonsense.
Mortensen goes down again
For the first time, in fact, there are jeers and hoots in a mighty chorus as Stan Mortensen, back in the centre again but perceptibly subdued, goes to earth under a tackle by Atkins which the London referee immediately punishes with an admonitory shake of the head.
There is pace everywhere, but fewer major incidents.
Twice, and again for a third time Stan Matthews accepts forward passes, swerves away from his full-back and puts inside a pass which the alert Gilbert Merrick fields, snatching the ball up fast, before a Blackpool forward can reach it.
FIRM DEFENCES
It has been about 60-40 for Blackpool with the first half-hour gone. But so firm are the defences that except for Jimmy Stewart’s incredible front-of-goal miss there have been comparatively few scoring positions and not even many shooting positions.
From a couple of them Mudie and Perry in rapid succession shoot the ball into the packed paddock over the bar of the Birmingham goal.
Harry Johnston is superb, cool, calculating in football which, in spite of its tearaway speed and the raging excitement in which it is being played, has design and purpose in it almost everywhere.
OFF TARGET
Johnston, out for the count, is soon up again, and Matthews passes both full-backs before crossing a ball which Allan Brown slices away yards off the beam.
Too many Blackpool raids in the closing minutes of the half are going wrong with the last pass. Two in a minute to the waiting Mortensen are intercepted as the centre goes careering after them.
And as the half ends another misses its man.
A good half I would call it, even if it begins to fade towards its end after dramatic opening.
Half-time: Blackpool 0, Birmingham City 0.
Second half
The first half census reveals that the City have conceded 10 free-kicks for fouls, and Blackpool a couple.
Birmingham have won three corners and Blackpool two, but George Farm has taken only three goal-kicks, in the 45 minutes.
In terms of goal scoring positions it has been almost stalemate.
Stan Mortensen appears last for Blackpool, his right arm bent almost as if in an invisible sling.
In the first minute of the half the half-back of the match, Johnston, almost studiously accepts a back pass from Matthews, swerves away from his man, serves a long pass to the left wing.
PERRY CENTRES
There Perry takes it, gives his full-back a couple of yards start, passes him, and crosses another of those centres which all the first half the Birmingham defence had been repelling.
Inside the next minute, too, there is another Blackpool raid, a complex raid of many passes, which at long last ends in little Mudie hooking his shot high over the bar.
Birmingham's retaliation is immediate.
One raid is built and another and another, and as Harry Johnston breaks up the third, is taking the ball away, he falls under a hit-and-miss tackle, Mr. Bond immediately issues a stern rebuke to the offending Birmingham half-back.
STILL ATTACKING
Yet afterwards it was nearly all Blackpool but still a Blackpool front line which cannot make a position for a shot against Birmingham’s terrier tackling until Mudie, the one forward who was shooting today, hits a ball low and fast into Merrick’s arms.
On and on the Blackpool offensive goes. Right wing centres and a couple from the left are headed away by a Birmingham defence so strong in numbers that in one of these raids left wing forward Berry is laid out in a position where normally full-backs play.
It is definitely Blackpool’s game.
And next comes a raid which reveals the value of the long pass.
Stanley Matthews makes it, the half-speed Mortensen, unable to accept it as he wants it, steers it out to Perry.
The wing-forward from South Africa cuts inside, outpaces his full-back again, shoots a ball which is bouncing away out of Merrick's reach as Atkins, tearing back into the gap, hooks it out as it is crossing the line near the far post.
Then, after all this, there is one Birmingham breakaway, a chase of a loose ball by Stewart, a desperate tackle by Hayward which upsets the wing forward head over heels, and a clamour for a penalty which Mr. Bond summarily refuses.
ANOTHER SWITCH
The Birmingham full-backs, by the way, have changed positions again. It makes no particular difference. The elusive Matthews is still as elusive as ever.
Except when, in a Birmingham attack, Trigg finds at last an open path but squanders the chance by lofting his centre high out by the far post, Blackpool are moving almost without interruption on the Birmingham goal, without ever seriously imperilling it.
I have a close-range view of Stanley Mortensen. He is pale, almost haggard, and all the time his left arm is gripping that limp right arm.
Yet with 14 minutes to go he nearly wins the match - this game and gallant passenger.
Out goes the ball to Matthews again - he has been given plenty of passes this afternoon. This time he walks the pass up to his man, passes him, lofts over a high centre.
Up to it Mortensen rises. Off his head the ball flies, escapes Merrick’s clutching fingers, hits the bar and off the bar bounces out.
TRIGG’S RACE
Within two minutes Trigg has a race for a loose ball, reaches it first, runs on, stabs his shot slowly into Farm’s hands as the goalkeeper crouches in front of him.
Another minute and Brown shoots a ball of great pace which swerves away from Merrick in the air, dips, and misses the top of the bar by inches.
Desperate it is, with the game in its last 10 minutes.
Even Shimwell goes into the Blackpool firing line, thunders the ball wide of a post.
A free-kick against a half-back for a reckless tackle on Matthews. The free-kick crosses into a packed Birmingham goal area.
Brown moves to the ball, hooks it barely over the bar. These Blackpool forwards cannot score today.
BY INCHES
Stanley Matthews again. He races away from his man, stabs forward a pass which escapes Mortensen by inches as the centre plugs after it.
Four minutes left. Three minutes left. Two minutes left. Birmingham attack once. Attack again.
A loose ball rolls forward. Stewart, the outside-right, waiting in the inside-right position, hurls himself at it, shoots as he falls, hits the base of a post.
You can hear the impact of the ball on the wood even in the stand.
Then comes the final whistle. Both teams stand, hesitating, half the men thinking they had to endure another half-hour "extra time" of this grim epic.
So Blackpool earlier in the week, I understand, had been told. But soon the teams are shaking hands, and trooping off the field at Mr. Bond's commands.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 0,
BIRMINGHAM CITY 0
Attendance 72,000 Receipts £13,475
COMMENTS ON THE GAME
WHAT would have happened in this match if Stanley Mortensen had not been reduced almost to the semblance of a passenger early in the game?
It is a futile speculation. Nobody will ever know the answer. One is merely entitled to assume that a Blackpool front line, commanding the game as this was commanded nearly all the second half, would have stampeded a gap in the City's magnificent, close-packed defence.
All the afternoon a Blackpool defence in which Eddie Shimwell was a nearly impassable full-back conceded only two scoring positions. Jimmy Stewart squandered one and with the other hit a post with a shot which could have ended Blackpool's interest in the Cup.
For the rest, the Birmingham forwards were slowly but inexorably mastered by a half-back line in which Harry Johnston was always a star resplendent.
MISSING PUNCH
The forwards had a good match in the open, were fast on the wings and in Stanley Matthews had again a forward always able to make the shooting positions.
Jackie Mudie was, I think, the best inside man on the field. That little bit of punch which went out of the line when its leader was crippled would have sent Blackpool to Wembley without having to go instead to Goodison Park on Wednesday.
It’s an “if” week in Blackpool football
It’s an “if” week in Blackpool football
THERE are some "ifs" in Blackpool's immediate future in the League, writes Clifford Greenwood.
If the Maine Road semi-final is settled this afternoon, the team will go to the Hawthorns to play West Bromwich Albion in a postponed First Division match on Wednesday.
And if Blackpool have defeated Birmingham and if - which, when you begin to count them, makes a third "if" - Newcastle United have dismissed Wolverhampton Wanderers in the other semi-final, it will be a Wembley dress rehearsal at Blackpool next weekend.
The Hawthorns match - if it is played - will recall for Blackpool the notorious game of blind-man's-buff in the fog which ended in a stalemate last season before Blackpool visited the ground again and lost by the only goal towards the end of last season.
It will too reintroduce Blackpool to a little Scottish forward called Andy McCall, who, as I report elsewhere, scored his first goal for the Albion last weekend since he left Blackpool a few weeks ago.
Newcastle United will come to Blackpool next Saturday with an undefeated record in Blackpool matches since the St. James' Park club won promotion from the Second Division.
It was a goalless draw in the corresponding match last season, but Newcastle have won the other four which have been played between the clubs in the last three seasons, the last of them by 2-1 up in the North-East last October.
Undefeated in the League since Boxing Day, Blackpool may end this little sequence this time.
TICKETS FOR REPLAY
STAND tickets - the only tickets to be issued - have already been printed for the replay between Blackpool and Birmingham City at Goodison Park on Wednesday.
Stand and centre-paddock season-ticket holders will be given priority, and the tickets will be on sale to them from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. tomorrow.
The allocation will be one 21s. or 10s. 6d. ticket each for west stand reserved box holders; one 10s. 6d. or 7s. 6d. ticket for south box reserved and centre-paddock holders; and one 7s. 6d. ticket for south stand unreserved holders.
If, after these season-ticket holders' requirements have been met, tickets still remain, they will be offered to the general public at a time and on a day published in the Press on Monday evening.
ST. ANDREW’S - JANUARY 8, 1938
As dusk was falling, a throw-in...
By Clifford Greenwood
FOOTBALL GOSSIP
BY "CLIFFORD GREENWOOD" 10 March 19510
Not such a Cup of gold
THERE may be gold in that Cup - and there is, writes Clifford Greenwood. But not such a lot of gold as most people think.
A statement of account on the Cup-tie at Blackpool in the Fourth Round by Stockport County is illuminating.
It reports that the County ultimately came out of it richer by £1,114 4s. 10d. in a match worth £4,082 at the turnstiles.
Deductions included £459 in entertainment tax, and such items as £86 7s. for police and gatemen, £12 13s. for the referee and linesmen, and £46 8s. as the League's four per cent. levy.
The balance, after all these and other expenses had been paid, was divided between the FA, Blackpool and the County. All of which explains why the tie was no Klondyke for any of them.
The moral is, I suppose, that you make a great deal of money in the Cup, but you also pay a lot out.
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NET RESULT WAS THE SAME
THE penalty goal which cost Fulham the Cup-tie at Blackpool a fortnight ago has recalled to a correspondent, Mr. G. N. Cheatle, of Lyme Street, Stockport, the concession of another penalty in similar circumstances in another quarter-final tie 21 years ago.
It was an Arsenal-West Ham clash at Upton Park.
Cliff Bastin shot from the corner of the penalty area.
Mr. Cheatle was standing almost directly behind the flight of the ball, but admits, even 21 years later, that he could not assert whether it would have hit the post, flown wide, or entered the net.
A West Ham full-back took no chances, fisted it out, and the penalty was converted.
All of which was almost a carbon copy of the penalty goal at Blackpool a fortnight ago.
But, as this correspondent notes, the coincidence has not ended there.
For the initials of the two men who took the penalty are identical - Alf Baker for Arsenal and Allan Brown for Blackpool.
After the defeat of West Ham, Arsenal went on to Wembley and won there - after beating a Second Division team, Hull City, in the semi-finals.
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Who would decide?
THIS incident in the Fulham tie, by the way, should end once and for all the demand that the referee should be given authority to award a goal if, in his opinion, the ball would have crossed the line before being intercepted by an unauthorised goalkeeper.
I was asked the other day at a St. Annes YMCA question-and-answer session if I considered such a revision warrantable. That was immediately after a full-back had punched out a scoring shot in the Stockport County Cup-tie and Tom Garrett had missed the resulting penalty.
I said, "No... it would be unfair on the referee." And the Fulham episode confirms this view.
Who is to decide whether the ball would have entered the net? From the Press box in the Fulham match, it appeared to be rising up between bar and post when Joe Bacuzzi fisted it out. Yet as early as half-time a Press photographer stationed near the ball asserted that it would have passed wide.
And in the post-mortem which followed the match it was generally held that it would have passed wide.
How can one man be expected, in a split-second decision, to settle such a problem? He cannot be - and he should not be.
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Among the goals
GEORGE DICK has been among the goals since he went to Stockport County. His present total is 19 in 21 games - in League, Cup and non-League fixtures.
It has put him at the top of the County's scoring list and given him a total, with nearly two months still to go, of 23, for he scored four times for Carlisle before going to Edgeley Park.
All of which is not surprising.
For George came to Blackpool as a centre-forward, played all his early games there and, in fact, promised to be at one time the natural successor at Blackpool, in build and shooting achievements, to Jock Dodds.
I shall always think that George Dick might have become one of the star centre-forwards of postwar football. Such great promise I have seldom seen in an unknown player as he revealed in his Blackpool trials.
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CAN MANSFIELD KEEP COOLE?
I AM not surprised to learn that several First and Second Division clubs are showing an interest in Billy Coole, the part-time professional who plays on Mansfield Town's right wing.
I was impressed with him in the Cup-tie at Blackpool last month. And so, I know, were one or two members of the Blackpool board.
As an attacking forward, he was all on his own in a Mansfield front line which in this match seemed to be concerned almost exclusively with the problem presented by a certain character called Stanley Matthews.
Billy Coole was often a one-man band that day. But still, even without passes, he looked good.
Manchester City are one of the clubs convinced that he is good. They may pay the fee which Mansfield will require.
And for the player, it would be a convenient transfer, for he is employed as a draughtsman in a Manchester office.
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THREE YEARS AGO-
THREE years ago today another Blackpool team played in another FA Cup semi-final - the famous extra-time match at Villa Park which ended in the 3-1 defeat of the 'Spurs.
These were the men who took the field in the 1948 match:
Robinson; Shimwell, Suart; Johnston, Hayward, Kelly; Matthews, Mortensen, McIntosh (J.), Dick, Rickett.
The entire half-back line is still in commission three years later, which is remarkable in all the chances and changes of modern football, but only one of the full-backs remains - Eddie Shimwell - and three of the five forwards are now playing with other clubs - Jim McIntosh (Everton), George Dick (Stockport County), and Walter Rickett (Sheffield Wednesday).
Was it a stronger team that took the field for Blackpool at Maine Road this afternoon? On paper it was. But it had no bigger heart than this side of three years ago.
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