15 September 1951 Blackpool 0 Aston Villa 3
Weak defence, punchless forward line
NOW IT’S SERIOUS
Blackpool 0, Aston Villa 3
By “Clifford Greenwood”
EVERYTHING happens in football - if you wait long enough. You can even see an international centre-half playing as a goalkeeper.
That was Con Martin’s position for Aston Villa in the match at Blackpool this afternoon.
A gamble it may have been, but during the last three weeks it has come off, and not all that unexpectedly, for I am told that before he became a centre-half this tall Irishman was a goalkeeper and, in fact, played for his country in the position,
Not content with this experiment, the Villa introduced a wing half, Amos Moss, as a centre-forward in the absence of young Derek Pace.
Blackpool had Ewan Fenton among the half-backs again, and a shuffled forward line included W. J. Slater at inside-right and Len Stephenson, one of the club’s reserve centre-forwards, at inside-left.
BIG CROWD The sun shone after the morning’s rain, and half an hour before the kick-off, while a team of young RAF gymnasts gave an exhibition in a Battle of Britain celebration programme the attendance was approaching 30,000.
A quarter of an hour later it must have been within a thousand or two of Monday evening’s record.
Teams:
BLACKPOOL: Farm; Shimwell, Wright (J); Fenton, Hayward, Kelly; Matthews W. J Slater, Mortensen, Stephenson, Perry.
ASTON VILLA: Martin; Parkes, Aldis; Blanchflower, Moss (F), Dorsett; Smith (A), Thompson, Moss (A), Dixon, Goffin,
Referee: Mr. C. Fletcher (Northwich).
THE GAME
First half
The Villa, whose appearance was greeted by the release of a dozen or two claret and blue balloons, lost the toss.
Eric Hayward decided that his team should defend the south goal out of the sun’s glare.
It was a raid of promise by the young Perry-Stephenson wing which began the match. It was repelled in a curiously quiet opening, but prefaced several other advances on the Villa goal In which the Blackpool forwards moved as they had never moved during all the Preston match of unlamented memory.
It was Kelly who halted the Villa’s first raid, and that took as long as three minutes to mature.
BUSY WING
In fact it was merely an interruption of Blackpool pressure in which the Perry-Stephenson wing again made position perfectly for Stanley Matthews, who lost the ball.
Incidents were few in the first 10 minutes. One came as Jackie Wright brilliantly repulsed a fast swoop by Amos Moss and the Villa right winger.
A raid on the Villa's left flank produced the best shooting position evolved in nearly 10 minutes’ football, Tommy Thompson, the inside-left from Newcastle, taking a pass from his partner before shooting a fast-rising ball which Farm fielded magnificently.
Yet in the 11th minute a goal should have come, and Blackpool should have scored it.
Perry darted on to a loose bouncing ball, glided it forward to Mortensen, asked for a return pass, and was given it.
And that return pass left the South African racing away into an open space where, with only Con Martin in front of him, he could only shoot straight and low at the crouching Irishman.
The passes of Bill Slater were making a lot of difference to the Blackpool front line.
Constantly, between the 10th and 15th minutes, they introduced Matthews into the game. One of them would have given Mortensen a scoring position if Frank Moss had not intercepted it with an outstretched left arm.
GREAT CLEARANCE
A minute later Fenton, close to the other goal, made a great clearance as a right wing centre almost brushed the Blackpool bar before flying out to the other wing.
Twice Mortensen was off the beam with free kicks close to the penalty area edge.
A description of one Blackpool raid selected at random from half a dozen others offered a perfect illustration of what was repeatedly happening.
A pass stabbed forward by Slater was accepted by Mortensen. The leader crossed the ball far over to the left wing. Perry raced on to it, was moving to shoot it as Harry Parkes crossed his path and took the bouncing ball away from him.
VILLA OUTPLAYED
With the end of the first half-hour approaching, this match was obviously one of those games which required a goal to wake it up.
Yet no goal came, and, to be frank, there were few signs of one, good, in construction, as Blackpool’s football continued to be.
So completely at this time were the Villa being outplayed that except for a Dorsett free-kick from nearly 40 yards out superbly taken and as superbly fielded by Farm, the Blackpool goalkeeper was almost in the unemployment market.
Centres from the right continued to rake the Villa’s goal, but there was either no forward there to take them or they were too fast.
BARE CHANCE
Yet a bare sort of chance offered itself now and again.
Such a chance fell unexpectedly to Mortensen who, unprepared for it, I think, could only stab a bouncing ball slowly wide from a position where he has often scored.
Then, in front of the Blackpool goal, Jackie Wright stabbed back a pass too short and Farm had to dive at the feet of two forwards to retrieve it.
A minute later, too, Hayward had to make a fast clearance in an open space, with two forwards in claret and blue galloping fast on to him.
Thirty-five minutes gone, and it was still 0 - 0.
Stanley Matthews broke his own shooting average with his second shot of the match in the 36th minute.
It was a good shot, too, the position created for him by his own craft plus the perfect long passes of Kelly and Mortensen.
FINE SAVE
A minute later came the clearance of the half.
A high centre flew over from the Villa’s left wing. Up to it leaped Wright with a Villa forward on each side of him.
One of those forwards - Amos Moss, I think it was - was first to it. The ball cannoned off his head as fast as a bullet.
To it rose Farm, held the flying ball in mid-air inches under the bar, and fell to earth still clutching it to a thunderous cheer from the south stand.
So it went on, backwards and forwards, neither team able to achieve command.
Villa were near to a goal with two minutes of the half left.
HAYWARD’S CLEARANCE
Smith careered through on his own escaped three tackles, lost the ball, retrieved it, and in the end glided it out to the left wing.
There Bill Goffin darted to it and shot it back so fast that Farm could not hold it. The goalkeeper watched it spin out of his arms and bounce away on the line from Smith, and in the next split second saw Hayward clear it from under the bar.
That was a dramatic end to a half which had not had a lot of drama in it.
Half-time: Blackpool 0, Aston Villa 0.
Second half
Bill Slater was that half-yard too slow to take a gem of a forward pass by Matthews in one of Blackpool’s early - in - the - half raids. There was also a shot by Mortensen that rose barely over the bar, followed by many other raids which promised a lot and achieved little.
For five minutes, in fact, this half was almost a carbon copy of the first 45 minutes.
One had the impression that the Villa were going faster into the tackle, beating the Blackpool front line to the ball whenever the Blackpool forwards raided, and building their own attacks at a greater speed.
VILLA AHEAD
It was this greater pace in the release of passes which gave the Villa the lead eight minutes after half-time.
Harry Parkes opened the movement with a long clearance down the left wing.
Out on this flank - a partly exposed flank - Goffin took the ball, crossed it without hesitation to Moss.
The centre-forward steered it inside into another open space where, as Hayward moved to close the gap and fell, JOHNNIE DIXON hit a rising ball which appeared to shake the underside of the bar before cannoning out.
There was a claim by the Villa for a goal, but play continued for three or four seconds before Mr. Fletcher’s attention was called to a linesman on the left wing with his yellow flag lifted.
On his confirmation a goal was given, as a goal I am convinced it was.
THOMPSON RAID
For a time afterwards Blackpool’s football was perilously near eclipse, and in one Villa raid Thompson zigzagged past three men, made a position for himself, and in the end, with full-back Shimwell passed, could only hook the ball slowly into the crouching Farm’s hands.
After the goal the Villa, except for one lone 50-yard raid by Perry, were raiding almost continuously.
The quality of the football declined a lot. Attacks were built, repelled and built again without ever bringing the goalkeepers into action.
OVER THE BAR
No promise of another goal presented itself until Goffin ran fast on to the ball and shot it fast over the bar of the Blackpool goal.
Blackpool, after that brief fade-out which had followed the Villa’s goal, were no longer outplayed, but always seemed to need that one extra pass and that little extra time to make it which the fast-tackling Villa would not permit.
With only 20 minutes of the game left, Blackpool’s prospects of retrieving anything from this game appeared remote.
With 19 minutes left, they almost disappeared entirely as Moss took a forward pass, swerved away from Shimwell, beat Farm to the ball as the goalkeeper fell at his feet, and watched Shimwell run in to it and clear it with his goalkeeper beaten.
GOAL No. 2
Not that it made any difference, for before this attack had been repelled the Villa made it 2 - 0.
It was a goal for a forward who, when he had a chance, even half a chance, as this was, took it.
There was a pass inside from the Villa’s left wing, an unmarked TOMMY THOMPSON waiting for it, and before a Blackpool man could move to him the inside-right had shot a ball fast and low which hit the foot of a post and bounced in off it as Farm fell on one knee and was left watching it skid away from him.
Blackpool’s eclipse was almost complete during the last quarter-hour.
THEN A THIRD
With five minutes remaining Blackpool were at last near a goal, when Mortensen shot a ball which Aldis, crouching near his goalkeeper, headed away off the line after Con Martin had at last been beaten.
A minute left, and Villa made it 3 - 0.
This was a curious goal shot by JOHNNIE DIXON who, hitting the ball from a narrow angle in the inside-right position must, I suspect have been as surprised as nearly everybody else when it escaped Farm’s dive at it and hit the far wall of the net.
That was Blackpool’s final discomfiture.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 0
ASTON VILLA 3 (Dixon 53,89 Thompson 72)
COMMENTS ON THE GAME
THIS is becoming serious, and it would be idle to deny it.
After a first half which had plenty of good football in it but scarcely any punch at all, Blackpool faded out again almost everywhere.
The Villa, without being required to achieve classic heights, won deservedly chiefly because their half-backs and full-backs never permitted the Blackpool forwards the time they seemed always to need to settle on the ball and because the Villa’s front line took chances which earlier Blackpool had rejected.
There was a time during the first half-hour when the passes of Bill 'Slater promised to introduce order into the Blackpool front line, but long before the end this force was reduced yet again to mere skirmishes, with little plan in them.
LINK BROKEN
The contact between half-backs and forwards was broken, too, after Fenton and Kelly had both played football of considerable promise in the first half-hour.
And again the defence was exposed as vulnerable to fast direct raids.
With a forward line which had scarcely a shot in it the result, I suppose, was inevitable.
This was the first time the Villa had won at Blackpool since the war, and in the match Blackpool lost the seventh of the 10 points for which the team have played in home games this season.
Yes, this is serious.
Official attendance: 31,783.
By Clifford Greenwood
IT’S back again now to the one - match - in - a - week programme, writes Clifford Greenwood.
After this afternoon’s Villa game Blackpool will not be in action again until they take the field - the field which appears so small, dwarfed by the double-tier stands which tower over it - at the Baseball Ground at Derby, where once baseball was actually played, but where it has been football since the days of Steve Bloomer.
Blackpool have won a few points at Derby since that memorable tie of 1920 when the County, after a 0 - 0 game at Bloomfield-road, lost a match which was prefaced by the sale of mock memorial cards inscribed “To the memory of Blackpool . . . . black edges an* all.
The first postwar match there was won 2 - 1 by a goal scored in the last minute by Jim McIntosh, who was an outside-left in those days.
Raich Carter scored his last goal in a Derby County jersey to win the next year’s match
1 - 0. Blackpool were beaten 3 - 1 in goalkeeper Joe Robinson’s last game for Blackpool a year later, but a goalless draw was played in 1949-50.
Last season came the 4 - 1 game which big Jack Stamps made notable by scoring all four goals for the County, who today are obviously not the team they used to be but still a team liable to go off into a devastating explosion of goals.
There are the men in the forward line to do it, but the defence is a little suspect.
Blackpool, who have won three of their four away games, will obviously enter this match intent on avenging last season’s biggest defeat and not without hope of being able to do it.
Captain’s job - and a grand job, too
BY "CLIFFORD GREENWOOD" 15 September 1951
A NICE little tribute to | Blackpool’s captain by. Mr. Jack Tinn, the former Portsmouth manager and one of the present-day stormy petrels in football, writes Clifford Greenwood.
In a Sunday newspaper Mr. Tinn comments: “There are probably not half a dozen men in the game at present who could be called real leaders of their teams.
He lists half a dozen, and among them is Harry Johnston, the Blackpool and England wing-half.
Deserved - such a selection?
I am convinced that it is.
Harry Johnston is not among them. They made him captain of the first postwar team. He did not expect the honour. And few people expected it to be offered him.
A grand job he’s made of it, and it is good that it should be acknowledged by an impartial commentator.
There are too many captains these days who call “ heads" or “ tails ” or spin the coin for the other captain to call it - and for the rest of the afternoon cannot be distinguished from the rest of the cast.
AND SCORE HE DID -
SAID Stanley Matthews to the Mayor of Blackpool (Coun: Joseph Hill, JP) - according to common report - “Now I'll have to score on Saturday at Sunderland."
He said that on Thursday evening after he had pulled the switch which presented to the world the current production in the Illuminations series, including the little animated tableau which revealed the forward who seldom scores a goal in the act of scoring.
Said the Mayor - again according to unconfirmed report - “And I’ll be up at Roker to see you do it.’’
Well, Mr. Matthews went up to Roker and scored his first goal for nearly three years. And one of the 55,163 people who saw him do it was the Mayor of Blackpool, who was up in the North-East to open another illuminations season in that distant part of the world.
Odds against all this happening might be reasonably computed at about 1,000-to-one - a Stanley Matthews goal and the chief citizen of Blackpool present at the major event, 120 miles away from home.’
But it came off last week-end, and indicated that it is not only ' in novels that happy endings are contrived against all the odds.
THAT MAN AGAIN
“HERE comes the bogey man . . .” Len Shackleton, that temperamental artist from Bradford - and on his day he can be one of the greatest forwards in the game and on another day seems to be almost invisible - is rapidly becoming a Blackpool bogey.
He scored the first-minute goal which might have won the game at Roker Park last weekend. He scored twice in a 2-2 draw on this North-Eastern ground when Blackpool were the visitors three years ago and the late goal which gave Sunderland a 3-3 draw later in the season.
The following year he had the winning goal at Blackpool in the Sunderland match. He has been a little quieter since, but he erupted into action again last week, scored that early goal, hit a post, and for a time was threatening to win the game all on his own.
Then again he faded out, as so inexplicably he makes a habit of fading out.
Unpredictable is Len Shackle- ton, but against Blackpool he nearly always has one of those purple patches which leave a big impression on a match and a goal in the score sheet.
But only once
STANLEY MATTHEWS not only scored a goal at Roker Park a week ago but was apparently so near to another that several newspapers credited him with a couple.
Would that fast centre of his have gone into the net if Stanley Mortensen had not brushed it away from the Sunderland goalkeeper for Blackpool’s first goal ?
The answer is “ No.”
From the Press box the centre appeared to be destined for the far wall of the net. But Willie Watson, the England cricketer, who, even in his first football match for four months played, until he tired, as if he were an England footballer, too, testified: “ It would have passed wide, and I’d have reached it if Stan Mortensen had not intercepted it and scored.”
***
NO fewer than six of the 11 players who appeared for Blackpool against Sunderland and at Bloomfield-road against Preston last weekend graduated in the club’s nursery teams-.
And there would have been a seventh if Tommy Garrett had played. There were full-back Jack Wright and half-backs Ewan Fenton and Hugh Kelly and forwards Stanley Mortensen, Alan Withers and Bill Perry.
According to the signatories to one petition in this writer’s mail there should have been a seventh - and it should have been Tom Garrett.
“ We demand,” wrote these not- at-all-humble petitioners, “ that this future international should be reinstated.” And as a postscript they added, “ Send Tommy by plane to Sunderland.”
Every player has his admirers and his critics. The number of Tom Garrett’s critics is a lot fewer than his admirers, among whom I am numbered.
He will come again, back into the first team, back into the front rank of football to make a big name for himself.
***
I WILL not disclose his name, but there was a certain player who went the other day to the ground of a club in whose jersey he played not so long ago.
He had a ticket for the match, but the ground was so packed that in the paddock to which his ticket admitted him there was nothing visible to him - for he is not so tall - except the sky above.
So he went to the office and asked politely if they could find him a square yard somewhere inside where he could see. They said it was impossible, and so he went out and stood in the street and listened to the cheers and never saw the match at all.
And there was never a player more loyal to his club than this man when he played for this particular club. Now I suppose he’s asking, “What price, loyalty?“
By Clifford Greenwood
***
Incredible
THAT this sequence of events should happen to one team in one month borders itself on the incredible. Yet it has happened.
And, obviously, if it continues to happen, there will soon be a greater number of blood pressure patients on the Blackpool doctors’ panels than there has ever been before.
Net result of it all is this not unimpressive record:
P W D L F A Pts.
8 4 1 3 14 13 9
Last season, at the end of the first eight games, the figures for Blackpool were:
P W D L F A Pts.
8 2 4 2 12 7 8
So, according to these charts,
Blackpool are a point in front of last year’s total in spite of the loss of six fewer goals a year ago than have been conceded this season.
***
***
***
***
Leave a Comment