They should have scored more
TWO FOR BUCHAN
Blackpool 3, Charlton Athletic 1
THE Cup holders, Charlton Athletic, came Bloomfield-road this afternoon with a record that included the loss of four points and nine goals in the last two games.
The London team fielded seven of the men who beat Burnley in extra time at Wembley at the end of last season;
Blackpool had a reshuffled forward line, and for the first time this season played Hugh Kelly as a right half.
His only other appearances had been on the other flank as Harry Johnston’s deputy. The 2-15 kick-off. the earliest of this season, reduced the attendance, which was less than 15,000 when ' the teams appeared.
The longest pre-match queue was at the kiosk where tickets were being sold for the Preston match in a fortnight’s time.
Teams:
BLACKPOOL: Wallace, Shimwell, Suart, Kelly, Hayward, Johnston, Matthews, McKnight, Mortensen, Buchan (W), Munro.
CHARLTON ATHLETIC: Bartram, Shreeve, Lock, Fenton, Phipps, Johnson, Hurst, Vaughan, Robinson (W), McCrae, Duffy.
Referee: Mr. A. Baker, of Crewe.
THE GAME
Blackpool attacked the north goal and soon had Sam Bartram in action. He stopped a shot by Kelly in the first minute.
In the third minute Blackpool’s goal had an amazing escape. The ball was crossed from the right. The goal yawned open except for two men standing beside the goalkeeper as he fell in a heap on the line.
To the ball raced Duffy, who won the cup for the Athletic at Wembley, shot at the gaping goal, hit Wallace as he was still half crouching under the bar.
BALL HITS HIM
Then in the fifth minute came another big incident, this time prefacing a goal.
Mortensen lost a forward pass under his own impetus. The loose ball reached McKnight, who swerved his full-back and shot fast and low.
Bartram reached the ball in a lurching leap, conceded a corner as Spion Kop cheered him to a man.
In half a minute they were cheering a goal. Munro crossed the corner. Buchan leaped at it. headed it backwards. In raced MORTENSEN to shoot the ball into the net at such a pace that no goalkeeper on earth could ever have seen it.
Every Charlton full-back and half-back disputed the goal, pursued Mr. Baker to the halfway line.
They were still arguing when the delayed kick-off was taken.
The Charlton forwards were often in the game afterwards, but every time the Blackpool line advanced there seemed to be yards for every forward to move In.
Blackpool’s defence was curiously uncertain and hesitant at times. Gaps were appearing in its ranks, too. Three raids by the Charlton front line were repelled in rapid succession before the Athletic deservedly made it 1-1 in the 15th minute.
It was a curious sort of goal. Another raid was repulsed. This time the ball flew out into the inside-right position. Waiting for such a chance HURST, the wing forward, hit the ball back fast.
I had the impression that Wallace was unsighted by a full-back. Whatever the cause he fell late, was sprawling on his line as the ball escaped his reach by a foot.
PENALTY
Buchan regains the lead
IN five minutes, Blackpool were ahead with a penalty.
What exactly happened in a ruck of players could not be detected from the Press box but I think a wing half beat out with his hand a shot by McKnight which was passing a couple of inches inside the post.
In spite of all Charlton’s excited protestations Mr. Baker said it was a penalty.
BUCHAN took it, scored again as he nearly always scores from the “spot” these days.
From one of Matthews’s made-to-measure centres Mortensen headed inches over the bar, and in the next minute shot over it fast from 25 yards out.
McKNIGHT’S SPEED
McKnight, revealing greater speed than I have seen him produce, was brought to earth in a lone swoop, but Mr. Baker did not give a penalty this time.
There was one Blackpool raid after another. Few passes, however, were reaching Matthews who was in the game only in isolated spurts, even at a time when the rest of the line was moving almost continuously on the Athletic’s goal.
Direct from a throw down, after the referee had spoken to a Charlton player, McKnight raced away on his own and crossed from the line a ball which Mortensen headed wide.
Matthews was appearing in the game in all sorts of unexpected positions, once at outside left, and again at inside left, each time creating raids.
Two minutes of the half were left and it might have been 2-2.
Shimwell tore in to meet a bouncing ball, missed it completely. left Duffy all on his own.
The outside left was preparing to shoot the ball into the net as Wallace fell at his feet and smothered the shot.
Half-time: Blackpool 2, Charlton 1.
Second Half
A succession of Charlton raids opened this half. Hurst shot into the side net at the end of one of them.
Some of the rhythm had gone out of Blackpool’s football, menacing as it continued to be at times.
Too often the ball was in the air, leaving Mortensen with an impossible task against a six- foot centre-half.
Give Mortensen passes on the grass and he can do something with them. His pace left Phipps trailing yards behind as he pursued one of Shimwell’s half the length of the field clearances.
Calmly Bartram waited for the shot, beat it down and cleared it.
Blackpool continued to raid afterwards. Another goal was near as McKnight again raced away from his man, cut inside and crossed to Buchan, in the jaws of Charlton’s goal, a pass which Johnson intercepted at the last moment.
LEAD INCREASED
In the 20th minute of the half Blackpool made it 3-1.
This was a Mortensen goal in everything except name. Revealing amazing speed, the centre-forward took a pass out on the right Wing where Matthews was absent, raced to the line, swerved two men and crossed the ball inside.
BUCHAN was waiting for it, Shot it past Bartram from 10 yards out.
A minute later the inside-left nearly put a hat-trick to his name with a backward header from Matthew’s comer kick which Bartram punched out for a second comer.
Another minute and Wallace made a great clearance as Hurst escaped Suart and crossed a centre which the goalkeeper punched out backwards with three Charlton men challenging him.
Yet another minute and McKnight, with Mortensen waiting unguarded in front of an open goal, shot slowly into Bartram’s arms when a fourth goal should have been certain.
Charlton were still making a game of it. and a scrupulously clean game, too, but with 15 minutes left the odds against them were mounting every Second.
In the closing minutes Bartram made an astonishing clearance to deprive Buchan of his third goal.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 3 (Mortensen 5 min, Buchan (pen) 20, 65 mins)
CHARLTON 1 (Hurst 15 min)
There were four goals in this game. There might have been nearer a dozen. Chance after chance was surrendered to the two forward lines who might have had and should have had a joy day.
Not that either front line was a failure anywhere, except inside the penalty area. Munro was at half speed nearly all the afternoon after being hurt in the first half and was excusably indecisive.
But the two new inside forwards, Buchan and McKnight, definitely warranted their inclusion by football which had purpose in it and opened raid after raid.
For a long time, I made McKnight the best forward in the line - and always, too, there were the little audacities of Matthews and the aggressive raids of Mortensen - when he was not given the ball in the air.
But it was the half-backs who chiefly impressed today - Johnston as the complete footballer, Hayward always there in a crisis, and not least Kelly, who is not out of his class in the First Division.
It was one of those games which you left with the reflection, “Well, they won and deserved to win, but they ought to have won by another goal or two.”
Not for a long time will the Blackpool forwards meet a defence as generous in its presentation of unmarked, scoring positions.
CINDERELLA CLUB NOW AMONG ELITE
War turned tide of Blackpool football
By “Spectator”
ONE of the biggest riddles in contemporary football is: “How do Blackpool do it?"
I was asked the question again when I was up in the North-East last weekend.
The Blackpool public may not realise it, but the entire football world has never in recent years been able to understand how a club with the second smallest revenue in the First Division has been able to recruit a team which since the war has been among the first half-dozen in the land, and which today, with the exception of Arsenal, is the biggest box-office attraction in the game.
It is taken for granted in Blackpool - but nowhere else where big-time football is played.
Consider the circumstances. They are sufficiently remarkable in a day when £ s. d. dominates professional football, when the clubs with the moneybags buy fame over the counter - and sometimes under it!
Greatest team
FROM the beginning of the century, even between the two wars - when Blackpool twice won promotion - this club on the North-West coast was always among the football Cinderellas.
Now, at last, it has gone to the ball and stayed there until longer after the chimes of midnight.
It was in the war years that the tide turned. Circumstances decreed that the North-Western area should become one of the chief R.A.F, training bases.
Dozens of football stars went into R.A.F. blue and on Saturday afternoon into Blackpool tangerine.
There was built in the process the greatest team of the war years, a team which won the Cup and the all-England championship in 1943 and was in the Final again a year later.
Overdraft went
THE turnstile receipts even in those days would have been dismissed by a few present-day clubs as petty cash, but in the end they sufficed to liquidate an overdraft which had soared to £33,000 when war broke out.
That enabled Blackpool to begin all over again from scratch, not from one of those plus handicaps with which the directorate had become too familiar.
Two men only have been signed since the war - Stanley Matthews and Eddie Shimwell - who are in the big-money class, and yet for a season and a half a Blackpool team has never been out of the top half of the First Division table and for several weeks last season led the Division.
Not cheapest, but-
I AM not pretending that the present Blackpool team is all class, for plainly it is not, with a forward line which is not scoring the goals it should score.
Nor is it the cheapest in the First Division - a distinction which belongs to the magnificent £7,000 or £8,000 team they have mobilised at Burnley - even if the team defeated at Middlesbrough a week ago cost less than Tommy Lawton-and-a-half.
The fact remains that, with all the odds against them, the men directing the destinies of Blackpool - the manager, Mr. Joe Smith, and a board which will be selecting a new chairman next week - have given to a town with the smallest population within a five-mile radius of a First Division club a team which has become one of the game’s aristocrats.
Bouquet is due
MANAGERS and directors of football clubs are the Aunt Sallies of the game. Everybody hurls something at them - and invariably they hurl brickbats. The men behind the scenes at Blackpool would be embarrassed by the presentation of bouquets.
But it is, I think, about time that somebody gave them one They have achieved one of foot ball’s minor miracles, and here at last - and about time, too - it is set on record.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 29 November 1947
Farrow wants transfer
LEFT out of the Blackpool team for this afternoon’s match, George Farrow, the Blackpool right-half, has asked for a transfer.
It is the second time he has asked Blackpool to release him. The first was at the end of the 1945-46 season. He was reinstated in the team and all differences were resolved.
“I understand the request will be considered at next week’s meeting of the board,” he told me.
Farrow came to Blackpool before the war from Bournemouth and still ranks as one of the best attacking half-backs in the country.
***
THE London Press has suddenly discovered Stanley Mortensen, are singing his praises in every issue.
One critic writes: “He chases the ball all over the field and yet always seems to be in a position to take a pass in his own position.”
We’ve noticed that at Blackpool a long time ago.
It is nice to have reported of him, too, that he is not only a first-class ' footballer but an irreproachable sportsman. The two are not always, alas, synonymous. They have still not forgotten at Highbury how the Blackpool forward lost a goal a week or two ago by leaping over George Swindin as the Arsenal goalkeeper fell in front of him.
If he had taken the ball he would have hurt the goalkeeper. He preferred to swerve away - and miss a nearly certain goal.
I THINK these autograph hunters must have a bush telegraph.
Few people even in these parts knew that Blackpool were spending the night before the Middlesbrough match at Saltburn. Yet all the little boys of Saltburn, which is so small that it’s nearly off the map, appeared to be in possession of the information in advance.
Swarms of them besieged the hotel. There was almost weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth when it was learned that neither of the “Two Stanleys” were present, but the boys still finished the day with a few other treasured signatures.
AN anonymous visitor left a copy of a Northampton paper at the office this week.
Marked for special attention was the report of a Birmingham League match, Kettering Town v. Cradley Heath.
And one of the Kettering forwards, Henley, the centre-forward, who scored two goals in a 6-0 game, had an asterisk against his name, and the note in capitals: “THIS MAN IS GOOD.”
Worth watching, Blackpool?
STRANGE that one of the best inside forwards in the game today, elusive Wilf Mannion, has not yet scored a goal this season.
Not that anybody is complaining at Ayresome Park, where I heard a whisper last weekend that this fair-haired inside-left of England, who did not cost Manager David Jack a penny, is no longer insisting on a transfer at the end of the season.
He has met a Middlesbrough girl, who one day, again according to rumour, may be Mrs. Wilfred Mannion, and she has persuaded him that the North- East coast is not so bad as all that.
It was an open secret at one time that Mannion had expressed a preference for the dustless breezes of Blackpool. But could Blackpool have ever afforded to pay the fee?
COME people tell you that nothing good ever came out of the Northern Section.
Apparently they have forgotten - among a few others - the great Jimmy Hampson, who walked straight cut of Nelson’s front line, and as an inside- right, too, into the centre of Blackpool’s attack, and ultimately became an England leader.
Now the despised “Northern” has produced another star, Cecil McCormack is the name.
Middlesbrough paid Gateshead £6,000 for him - and he’s been worth every penny of it.
He has still six weeks to serve in the R.A.F. Harry Bell, the Middlesbrough wing-half, will be in Air Force blue for another three months.
***
ONLY nine of the 22 men who played in last year’s dramatic Blackpool-Middlesbrough Cuptie at Leeds were in last weekends teams at Ayresome Park.
The four Blackpool survivors were Jock Wallace, George Farrow, Stan Mortensen and Ronnie Suart.
The Blackpool team in that match in February 1946, was: Wallace, Burke, Lewis, Farrow, Suart, Kelly, Buchan (W), Mortensen, Dodds, Blair (J) and O’Donnell (H).
Strange that the two men who were fielded at centre-half in this game both played at left back a week ago.
Their names? Ronnie Suart and George Hardwick, who scored the extra-time penalty last year.
***
STANLEY MORTENSEN will soon be accustomed to playing in white instead of tangerine.
In four of his last five games - twice for England and twice for Blackpool - he has worn a white jersey and only once a tangerine.
In summer he will be in white again - on the cricket field and probably at Old Trafford for a minor counties match. He has, I hear, been invited to play a trial as a wicketkeeper by Lancashire.
BLACKPOOL lost four goals in an away match last weekend for the first time since the visit to Stoke on December 7 last year.
That 4-0 defeat at Middlesbrough was the team’s biggest on tour in First Division football since the war.
The last time in a First Division match outside Blackpool that the team finished four goals in arrears at the end of an afternoon was at Everton on Christmas Eve, 1938.
That was exactly a fortnight after a 9-1 defeat at - yes, at Middlesbrough.
ONE curiosity about the w Middlesbrough forward line - apart from the fact that it knows how to score goals!
All the corner kicks are taken by the outside left from Bradford, Geoffrey Walker. He took all seven which the Blackpool defence surrendered at Ayresome Park last weekend - and four of them were conceded on the right wing.
BLACKPOOL often played Jimmy Blair as an outside-left during his years in these parts.
Now Cardiff City are fielding his brother, Douglas, who has always been recognised as an inside forward or a wing-half, in this position. He was there at Newcastle last weekend and, from all I hear, as little in his element as a wingman as his brother always seemed to be.
Jimmy Blair is still impressing the critics at Bournemouth without setting the Channel on fire.
EDDIE SHIMWELL, the Blackpool full-back, and the Middlesbrough centre-half, Bill Whitaker, meet every day. Both train at Chesterfield.
Bill was married a couple of days before he played against Blackpool last weekend.
A grand centre-half he is. That was another bargain when Manager David Jack paid £6,000 for him.
NO VISIT to a music-hall or a cinema by the Blackpool men on the evening before last weekend’s match at Middlesbrough.
This time there was a departure from routine. They went instead as guests to the North Skelton Youth Club and had an hour or two with the younger generation at darts, billiards and - the team’s latest craze - table tennis.
Everton and Huddersfield were visitors to the club earlier this season.
IT was only the ninth game he had missed in Blackpool Reserve's goal when Joe Robinson was absent from last weekend's Central League match at Blackpool.
Considering that it was as long ago as the summer of last year that he was signed on a nominal fee from Hartlepools this is a grand record.
Only the other goalkeeper, Jock Wallace, can beat it. The big Scot has not been out of Blackpool's team once since they began to play First Division football again after the war. Last weekend's was his 60th successive match.
Mr. Joe Smith’s Irish visit
No immediate developments are probable after the visit to Ireland on Saturday of Mr. Joe Smith, the Blackpool manager, who was present at the Glentoran match, reported to be watching a centre-forward and a wing-half.
Nothing definite to report,” said Mr. Smith, back at his home base today.
NEXT SATURDAY: Blackpool have a date with United.
PLAYING the first of the season’s two visits to Maine-road, Blackpool will meet next Saturday a Manchester United team which has still to play all its first team games on the City's ground.
It will be a long time before Old Trafford is fit for first-class football again.
Last season, I recall, writes “Spectator,” Blackpool had about two thirds of the game against the United in the corresponding match - and were beaten 3-0.
Jack Rowley scored two of the three goals in the last four minutes - one from a penalty.
The Blackpool frontline was: Nelson, Munro, Mortensen, Dick, and Blair.
The match opened in a snowstorm, and was played on a pitch which resembled an ice-rink.
For several weeks during that period matches were seldom played on anything else - when they were played at all.
BLACKPOOL SUPPORTERS’ CLUB had a grand meeting at the Jubilee Theatre on Tuesday when there was a large attendance for a most interesting Sports Quiz.
The secretary, Mr. F. W. Coope. JL.P., was question-master, and on the platform were W. Capel Kirby, Archie Ledbrooke, Arthur Ward, Stanley Mortensen and Harry Johnston.
Untiring worker
DURING the meeting the chairman, Mr. H. Markland, thanked the committee for their work and keenness.
I should now like to thank the chairman, on the club’s behalf, for all he has done this year. He is keen and hardworking, and the success ^of the club is due in no small measure to his untiring efforts.
Badges ready
THE badges are now on sale (price 1s. each) at the club hut at the ground each Saturday. By now all members should have received their membership cards for the current season.
Snooker match
THE hard-working ladies’ committee are promoting a challenge snooker match next Wednesday, December 3, at the South Shore Hotel, between Harold Morris and Mendel Showman. This should be a grand evening.
The players’ snooker tournament is progressing favourably, and it is hoped to announce soon when the semi-finals and final will take place.
Make it 2,000
THE club’s membership is now approaching the 1,000 mark. To all who are not members we say, “WILL YOU HELP TO MAKE IT 2,000?”
Next Saturday Blackpool “A" have a most attractive match when they meet Lytham at Ballam-road in a Richardson Cup-tie.
Now you south-end-of-the-town supporters, roll up to Ballam-road and give these lads some encouragement.
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