8 September 1951 Sunderland 1 Blackpool 3
Sunderland fade-out as game turns upside down
MORTENSEN GOAL IS TONIC
Sunderland 1, Blackpool 3
By “Clifford Greenwood”
THE season is only three weeks old, and yet already has exacted its price on the field.
Four of the men who were in Blackpool’s team for the opening match with Chelsea were out of it for a variety of reasons at Roker Park this afternoon.
Sunderland, too, chiefly because the last three games had been lost, made a shuffle which affected three positions and reintroduced Willie Watson, the England and Yorkshire cricketer, who came almost direct from the Scarborough Festival to play his first game of football for four months.
They expected 40,000 people for a match which on Wear-side is always first-class box office, and with the sun shining as if it were midsummer there were early signs in the queues outside and the packed terraces inside that the number would be approached.
The playing area had not a scar on it, and only a gentle breeze disturbed the flags.
FAITH IN RESERVES
It was an interesting commentary on the reliance that Blackpool put in their reserves, that no fewer than four men, a full-back, a half-back and two forwards, who began the season in the Central League were in the First Division for this game.
Teams:
SUNDERLAND: Mapson; Hedley, Hudgell; Watson, Hall Wright (A.); Bingham, Kirtley, Ford, Shackleton Reynolds.
BLACKPOOL: Farm; Shimwell, Wright (J.); Fenton, Hayward, Kelly; Matthews, Mortensen McIntosh, Withers, Perry.
Referee: Mr. J. W. Bowers (Huddersfield).
SEEKING BROADIS
I understand that a delegation from Bradford were at the match, the object of their visit Ivor Broadis, the Sunderland inside forward, who was out of this match and for whose signature two or three years ago Blackpool made a big bid before he left Carlisle for Roker Park.
The coin was tossed to a fusillade of fireworks, Watson losing to Eric Hayward, Blackpool’s captain for the day.
THE GAME
First half
Blackpool’s goal was menaced in the first half minute and fell in an amazing opening before a minute had gone and before, in fact, a Blackpool forward had crossed the halfway line.
The first raid was built out on the left and ended in “ Boy ” Bingham, the little Irishman, hurling himself at a left wing centre, half hitting it, and, as it bounced off a Blackpool man, leaving Trevor Ford to hook it fast into Farm’s hands.
That was an escape. It merely prefaced a goal with exactly 50 seconds gone.
It was a goal so crisply planned that it tore Blackpool’s defence open.
A pass outside by Ford to Reynolds. A pass inside back to the leader. A pass by the centre-forward into an open space. That is what built it.
And into this gap raced LEN SHACKLETON, who must be rapidly qualifying for the title of Blackpool hoodoo man, reached the bouncing ball, went away with it 50 yards as men chased him and vainly closed in on him, before stabbing it past the deserted Farm as the goalkeeper advanced to meet him.
Inside another minute there was nearly a second goal and probably would have been if Ford and Bingham had not collided in mid-air in a tearaway leap at a high centre from the left.
This was a bombshell first act, and it was bombshell football which Sunderland played afterwards.
Such was the picture, with nearly five minutes gone before Blackpool produced a raid at all.
Then, after the ex-Crystal Palace full-back Hudgell had taken a pass away from Stanley Matthews to a jubilant roar, Perry eluded his full-back neatly and crossed a high centre which Mapson punched away, with Mortensen and McIntosh leaping high into the air to challenge him for it.
Afterwards Sunderland began to retreat and in retreat were not too impressive.
Perry volleyed one ball which came back off a full-back, and another couple of raids were repelled in this brief retaliation.
Little happened afterwards, but it was merely the calm before the storm, for between the 10th and 17th minutes incidents came almost too fast to report.
CLOSE CALL
The purple patch opened as Ford took the tall Kirtley’s pass, and, finding himself in a shooting position, shot a ball which hit the bar and left it rattling.
Back darted the Blackpool front line into the match. Out on the right Matthews outpaced his full-back and ran 40 yards alone before crossing a high centre.
Up to it rose Mapson, was clutching it over his head and reeled back over the line with it under the aggressive Willie McIntosh’s shoulder charge.
Mr. Bowers said, “No goal,” and Blackpool’s protest seemed to be only a token disagreement.
So it went on, drama all the time.
WITHERS SHOOTS
Out on Sunderland’s right wing Bingham raced away from Wright - and not for the first time - before half-shooting, half-slicing a ball which, as Farm clutched at it, appeared to hit the inside of a post and cannon out off it.
Another raid was repelled, another and another, before Blackpool built at last a shooting position and revealed in the process a forward who could accept it.
As the ball ran loose, Alan Withers was so fast on to it and so fast in shooting it that Mapson, masked by his own defence, had to leap sideways to his right to reach and hold it in mid-air.
Another Blackpool raid, and again a goal was near.
Matthews cut in for the third time in as many minutes, his full-back trailing him, before luring Mapson out of goal and crossing in front of this gaping goal a ball which a massed and desperate defence cleared anywhere.
The pace was still amazing, the major incidents still non-stop. Eric Hayward headed out one shot by Ford which seemed destined for the net in another tumultuous series of Sunderland raids.
It was not, in fact, all that surprising when, with 25 minutes gone, the ball burst.
With the new ball Sunderland were still aggressive.
Three corners in rapid succession were conceded by a retreating Blackpool defence, George Farm once being put out for the count after falling at the feet of a forward.
Yet with half an hour gone, chiefly, I think, because the Blackpool defence was steadying, Sunderland were no longer in complete command of the game
HITTING BACK
Twice I noticed young Ewan Fenton shoot barely over the bar from a range close to 25 yards.
And three times afterwards the elusive Matthews crossed in front of the Sunderland goal, bar-high centres which no Blackpool forward could reach.
The pace was inevitably going out of a lot of the football as half-time approached.
Yet, with five minutes of the half left, the Blackpool goal nearly fell again as Hayward stabbed backwards a pass a yard too short, and Farm had to catapult at the feet of Ford as the big Welshman went chasing after it.
Sunderland’s forwards, often snared in the offside trap, but always fast and always aggressive, might have won this game in the first half.
As it was, when the half-time whistle went, it was a match still open, even if the signs and portents were all against Blackpool.
Half-time: Sunderland 1, Blackpool 0.
Second half
The half opened as fast as ever - could nothing tire these teams? - but for five minutes not one episode of any consequence happened in front of a goalkeeper.
Two Blackpool raids were repelled before a shooting position, or even anything remotely approaching one, could be built.
Afterwards it was the Blackpool defence v. the Sunderland front line and the wing half-backs again.
This defence was holding this seven-man-power attack as it had never been held during those first 20 dramatic minutes.
Yet twice inside two minutes, and before 10 minutes of the half had gone, the alert greyhound called Trevor Ford moved at a great pace to a shooting position and each time shot magnificently.
The first time Farm parried the ball as magnificently as he fell on one knee and jerked sideways at it.
The second time the Sunderland leader found himself all on his own, and, with a forward pass rolling to meet him, braked in his tracks, swerved round on to the ball and hammered it inches wide of a post at a pace which should have beaten any goalkeeper.
Yet this game was not yet Sunderland’s in spite of all the Sunderland forwards’ pressure and punch.
Withers, always prepared to shoot, shot barely over the bar in one raid, and in two others Matthews zigzagged past three men before a fourth Sunderland player was content to settle each time for a corner.
In the end, when a Blackpool goal came it was a goal made to measure by fast passing which had Sunderland’s defence scattered to the winds.
It was a grand pass downfield by Hugh Kelly which opened the raid.
EQUALISER
McIntosh darted on to the pass, glided it to his right to Mortensen, and asked for a return. That was the Sunderland orthodox move, and the Sunderland defence, I think, positioned itself for it.
Instead the cunning Mortensen pivoted on one foot, and with the other steered out a pass to a gaping right wing, where Matthews, waiting for it, cut inside and crossed it fast.
The flying ball, sailing away from Mapson, might have hit the far wall of the net and given Matthews that goal which has been eluding him for so long.
But MORTENSEN made certain, hurled himself at it and brushed it further away from the falling goalkeeper with his head.
That was 1 - 1, and within a minute it was nearly 2 - 1 as Withers went into an open space and hit a ball which left Mapson standing but rose in flight a couple of inches over the bar.
IN RETREAT
Afterwards, in a game which had utterly reversed its course, Sunderland were not only retreating but for the first time in the match being outplayed and outclassed.
It was remarkable how after the Blackpool goal all the lustre for a time faded out of the Sunderland front line in approach. Not for a long time have I seen a team so completely lose command of a match and go into such a desperate retreat.
Nobody could hold Stanley Matthews. His opponents were either tackling him too late or not tackling him at all.
Two more corners were won on this wing with Sunderland’s defence torn.
Yet, as so often happens, it was the outplayed team that came nearer to a goal.
BIG ESCAPE
That was in the 23rd minute, when Shackleton, great opportunist that he is, darted into a shooting space in a breakaway, and shot a ball which hit the far post like a bullet exploding against a wall.
Two minutes later came the goal for which Blackpool had been waiting for nearly three years - a goal for STANLEY MATTHEWS. And what a goal it was.
A raid on the right again. Again a full-back left standing.
Into the centre passed Matthews, almost strolled past one man, swerved away from another, and as Mapson came out, passed him, too, before hooking the ball into the far wall of the net amid such a scene of jubilation as I have not seen in a Blackpool team for years.
It was Matthews’ first goal for Blackpool since New Year’s Day, 1949.
If that was not the end of Sunderland it was an end merely delayed, for 10 minutes later Blackpool settled it with a third goal.
This was a one-man goal, too. The Sunderland defence, positioned too far downfield, was trapped by a long forward pass.
On to it ALAN WITHERS darted, found himself 40 yards from goal, the goalkeeper alone in front of him and a full-back vainly chasing him.
He took this chance admirably, reached shooting range as Mapson came out, and shot a ball which hit the foot of the far post and cannoned slowly over the line.
It had been a remarkable second half comeback by Blackpool.
SUNDERLAND 1 (Shackleton 1)
BLACKPOOL 3 (Mortensen 60, Matthews 70, Withers 80)
COMMENTS ON THE GAME
Blackpool’s second half show was magnificent. It outplayed, outwitted a team which earlier had dominated the game and threatened to win by a distance.
The defence, once a relentless pressure had been lifted from it, had the Sunderland forwards almost completely in its grip.
The wing half-backs established contact with the forwards in the second half, and with their aid this front line raced a tiring Sunderland defence nearly to a standstill.
It will be called Stanley Matthews’ match because of his goal. It was nearly his match for other reasons.
He revolutionised a line which in its new formation took a long time to settle.
Attendance 55,163.
By Clifford Greenwood
TWO GAMES in five days next week at Blackpool - and that will finish for Blackpool the two-matches-a-week serial Which opens every season, writes Clifford Greenwood.
Attractive games they are on next week’s calendar.
To town on Monday evening (6-15) come Preston North End, and at the weekend the Villa for the first Saturday match in the Illuminations season.
It will be North End’s fourth visit to Blackpool since the war. The two rivals are level on points for the first three meetings.
Blackpool won the 1946-47 match by 4-0, George Dick scoring two of the goals and Stanley Mortensen the other two.
It was 1-0 for North End the following season, when the deciding goal was Willie McIntosh’s.
And it was this Scot who scored Blackpool’s two in the 2-2 draw three years ago, when, after Bobby Beattie had reduced this early lead, Bob Langton, now a Bolton Wanderer, levelled the scores almost in the last minute.
What’s it to be this time?
All that is at present indicated is that there may be a new attendance record for a midweek match in the town.
Leave it at that and go on to Saturday, and to a Villa team who may come to town with an Irish centre-half, Con Martin, in goal, and a record at Blackpool Which is all grief and sorrow - for the Villa - an all-encircling gloom which a last-minute goal in a 1-1 match last season has alone illumined.
That was actually the first goal scored by a Villa forward at Blackpool in postwar football.
The Villa’s four other visits had all ended 1-0, for Blackpool, which totalled a mere four goals in four games but which aggregated eight points, and not one for the Villa at all.
It is little wonder that when Billy Goffin scored his last-minute goal a year ago they began to think at Villa Park that the millennium was dawning at last.
BIGGEST FADE-OUT FOR A LONG TIME
Players’ lost confidence
BY "CLIFFORD GREENWOOD" 8 September 1951
IF somebody can inform this department exactly what went wrong with Blackpool at Deepdale the other evening I should appreciate the information. Nearly everything did go wrong. A goal early in the game - the goal which counts for such a lot in such a game was worth nothing.
It merely prefaced the biggest fade-out I have seen perpetrated by a Blackpool team for a long, long time.
Preston played good football. It would be ungracious not to acknowledge it.
They were saying behind the scenes after the match that it was the best game North End had played since the days of the Deepdale club’s prewar triumphs.
Courtesy - the chivalry of the victors to the vanquished - may have dictated this expression of opinion. That is conceivable.
But, whatever actuated it, a grand exhibition of fast, precise football, destructive in defence, constructive in attack, it was which the North End team produced on the one day of the football year when North End - and Blackpool, too - are intent on hitting the jackpot.
Too simple
YET if it is true, and presumably it is, that a team plays exactly as good, bad or indifferent football as the other team allows it to play, it is obvious that Blackpool made it all a lot simpler for North End than it should have been.
Nobody, I think, would be all that concerned about the events at Deepdale on Wednesday evening if they had not again exposed certain limitations in Blackpool’s armament which had betrayed themselves in earlier matches.
These are early days yet, I know, and I am not inclined to subscribe to the panic measures which everywhere in the town are being advocated. A team that reached the Cup Final last season and finished in the First Division’s first three cannot be a spent force so soon afterwards.
Confidence gone
BUT the fact remains that inspiration, and with it, inevitably, confidence, has deserted two or three men in the team.
In the defence it is revealing itself in a fatal tendency to wait for the raiding forward instead of going to meet him, and at times in an obsession with the off-side trap.
In attack the inside men are no longer linking up with the wing half-backs, and as a consequence it is seldom that a Blackpool raid is being built on the fast, smooth exchange of passes which made this Blackpool front line during the second half of last season one of the most penetrative forces in the League.
Too soon
SERIOUS? It could be. And yet it is too soon yet to be dogmatic about it, and a lot too soon to talk about remodelling the entire team to achieve a reformation in its football.
One is glad, in fact, that in the town there are still those, such as a correspondent in Ailsa-avenue, who have retained a sufficient sense of proportion not to be as gravely disturbed as all that by certain apparently ominous signs and portents in Blackpool’s football during the season’s first three weeks.
This correspondent recalls the days only a year ago when the people who are today acclaiming Stanley Mortensen as the one forward with a goal punch in him in the front line were singing his swan song, were saying that his days were done, that, in short, he was finished.
He’ll come back
AND he asks, too, for less uncharitable treatment of Allan Brown, although, to be frank, I have met nobody in the town or anywhere else who has been anything except charitable in his observations about this forward.
Brown had all the breaks against him at the end of last season and is playing today, excusably, I think, as a man plays who is convinced that all the dice are still loaded against him.
It requires no expert psychologist to diagnose his case. It is lost confidence and nothing else. Once it comes back so will a footballer who revealed for Blackpool last season great qualities as a constructive inside forward.
Temperamental
NO, not everybody is yet down in the depths. It would require, in fact, such a little to send them all soaring up to the heights again, football being what it is and the football public everywhere being as notoriously temperamental as it seems to be.
All is obviously not as it should be. But it is not yet irredeemable.
Outside scenes
'THOSE were remarkable scenes I witnessed outside Deepdale on Wednesday evening.
Not fewer than a couple of thousand people were left massed in the approaches when the gates were closed, and I should think that the majority came from Blackpool in coaches which for three or four miles outside Preston were reduced to such a crawl that they reached the ground only on the dead-line. And that was too late.
Amongst those who either never entered the ground, or, having entered it were able to witness nothing except the ball flying high in the air, were nearly all the Blackpool reserve players.
What went wrong I don’t know. But something, I think, must have done, for it was perceptible that in front of the paddocks and the terraces there was no close packing, and it is a fact that as recently as January of this year, when Huddersfield Town played a Cuptie at Deepdale, there were 39,552 people through the turnstiles before the gates were closed.
And there have been 42,000 people inside this ground, even if admittedly, the new Home Office regulations would no longer permit such a number today.
Absent packers
THE truth is, presumably, that, being a midweek match, and not played on Preston halfday holiday, either, the part-time packers who are engaged for all the big games at Deepdale could not be mobilised at full strength.
The result was that the gates had to be closed before the ground’s capacity was reached and, as a result, there were hundreds of people who never saw the match at all.
It was the replayed semi-final at Goodison Park all over again. All that was different was the result. But Blackpool’s football, of course, was different too.
By Clifford Greenwood
Not once has he scored in a Cuptie for Blackpool. It’s a puzzle that would leave Sherlock Holmes in the dark.
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FROM GOAL TO GOAL
NOTICED how George Farm these days is repeatedly putting a wing forward into the game by hurling the ball to him instead of clearing it anywhere with a long-range kick?
He has been criticised for it, I know, and I know, too, that in the Portsmouth match he took too many paces with the ball before he cleared it and had an indirect free-kick in the penalty area given against him.
Yet, indirectly, it has produced one goal this season - the first against the Wolves.
It was his throw to Bill Perry which opened the left-wing raid which ended in the ball being crossed into an unprepared defence and Jackie Mudie scoring.
In common with every other move in the game, conventional or unconventional, it can be played to excess. But it can serve a good purpose - good for Blackpool, at least, and it has served one already.
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AND No. 4?
RECORDS - we have ’em and we break ’em.
They’ll soon have to be putting that line on the bills at Bloomfield-road.
Consider what has happened at the first three matches played on the ground this season.
No. 1. - Chelsea win on the ground for the first time since 1938.
No. 2. - Portsmouth win a point on the ground for the first time since 1933.
No. 3. - Wolverhampton Wanderers lose on the ground for the first time since 1946.
The Villa are here next week - and the Villa have not won at Blackpool since September 10, 1938, in a First Division match.
A “2” for the coupons?
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Bill Slater finds Blackpool a full-back of promise
BILL SLATER did Blackpool a good turn when he recommended Frank Leyland to the club, writes Don Creedy.
Frank made his bow in Central League football on Monday and delighted the spectators with his brisk, two-footed tackling and his quick, intelligent clearances.
This 20-year-old amateur full-back shows promise of developing into a first-class defender, and it is lucky for Blackpool that Slater was quick to note his abilities, as undoubtedly some other League club would soon have been on the track of this young man from Wigan.
It was at Leeds University that Slater met Leyland. He saw him play for the Varsity side, and was immediately impressed by the full-back’s composure when his team were thrown back on the defensive.
It was, in fact, Leyland’s cool play that made him so conspicuous during Monday’s queer game.
Match in a million
T'HIS was a match in a million - an entertaining mixture of thrilling football and freakish incidents which even had the players laughing at times.
The climax, of course, was the four-goals-in-four-minutes spell in the second half. The last of
the four was one of the finest I have seen scored for a long time.
The marksman was that tireless leader Willie McIntosh, who somehow retrieved the ball a split second before it could roll out of play and screwed it into the net from an amazingly narrow angle.
Four-goal habit
SPECTATORS at Blackpool Reserve home matches this season certainly have had full value for their money so far as goals are concerned.
In each of their first three games at Bloomfield-road, Blackpool have shot four goals.
They beat Burnley Reserve 4 - 1, Sheffield United Reserve 4 - 1 and Liverpool Reserve 4 - 3. Twelve goals in three matches are enough to satisfy their most avid critics.
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STAR RESPONSE
STANLEY MATTHEWS and Harry Johnston, the two who introduced the act, “ Football Tennis ” to the stage - their baptism was in a Tom Moss production on St. Annes Pier - are in the cast of a charity show which is to be presented at Halifax at the end of the month on behalf of the dependants of the two police officers who were killed in a recent shooting affray.
Half the stars in Blackpool’s present star-spangled firmament are also in a programme which will be almost a provincial Royal Command.
I was asked to assist in the recruiting of the all-star team. Not one of them, when told the object for which the show was being promoted, hesitated at all.
“We’ll be there,” they said.
There is no business like show business - or professional football business, either - when signals of distress are flying. In no other business are there bigger hearts, or even, I sometimes think, hearts as big.
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