Stormed into game after tame start
MISSED PENALTY
Blackpool 3, Grimsby Town 1
FOR Blackpool this was merely another League match, an interlude in the Cup-ties. For Grimsby Town, menaced by relegation, who had not won a match since December 27, it was a major crisis.
Walter Rickett played his first game for Blackpool in the First Division.
It was a mild afternoon, with the sun shining. Everything seemed strangely subdued after last week’s tempestuous affair.
There was scarcely one rattle to be heard. Yet the attendance exceeded 20,000 when the teams appeared.
BLACKPOOL: Robinson, Shimwell, Suart, Johnston, Hayward, Kelly, Matthews, Mortensen, McIntosh, Dick, Rickett.
GRIMSBY: Tweedy, Mouncer, Fisher, Hodgson, Taylor, Blenkinsopp, Armitage, Reeve, Cairns. Wardle, Pearson.
Referee: Mr. R.A. Mortimer (Huddersfield).
The Town, after winning the toss, defended the south goal. Blackpool’s football was of an ice-cold composure in the early minutes but nothing happened at close quarters until Mortensen shot a 30-yards free kick into Tweedy’s arms.
This big Grimsby goalkeeper held a high lobbed shot by Johnston with Blackpool still raiding.
RACED BACK
Then Wardle, racing back to the aid of his defence, cut out Matthews’ square pass to the waiting Mortensen with the inside-right in a certain scoring position.
Almost the first time the Town’s forwards raided, Robinson unexpectedly became a full back after losing the ball and retrieving it again with a tackle way out near a corner flag.
Immediately after a perfect raid by the Town’s forwards, Suart had to concede the game’s first corner to halt Armitage as the outside-right cut in fast to take a gem of a pass.
All this time scarcely a pass had reached Rickett. When he was called into the game it was Matthews, suddenly appearing as a centre-forward, who introduced him into it with a long forward pass which the outside- left crossed high from a narrow angle into a packed Grimsby goal area.
There were few signs yet of the big gaps which I had expected in a defence with the Town’s unenviable record.
The Grimsby forwards, too, were fast and crisp in their movements without ever seriously menacing Blackpool’s goal in the first 12 minutes.
Mortensen headed wide of a post after Tweedy had half hit another of Rickett’s high centres down to him. In the next minute Johnston shot wide from far out.
You had the impression at this time that Blackpool’s football was a little too leisurely and at times too complex, even if it continued to force Grimsby into a nearly, uninterrupted and, at times, excitable retreat.
Twice Kelly put the brake on Grimsby’s right wing and, not content with that, served passes to Blackpool’s left wing on which twice Rickett raced away from his full back at great speed.
Stanley Matthews was on one of his roving, commissions today. He was as often at centre-forward as anywhere else and now and again at inside-left.
SNAP GOAL
Pearson gives Grimsby the lead
Those folks who had been expecting a massacre were still waiting for one to develop when, after nearly five minutes continuous pressure, the Town took the lead with a snap goal in the 20th minute.
There was a protracted foray out near the right corner flag. In the end Armitage crossed a ball into a region in front of Blackpool’s goal where only one Blackpool man was positioned.
PEARSON was waiting in the gap, hooked the ball fast past Robinson before the goalkeeper could move a muscle.
That was the first home goal lost by Blackpool this year, the first shot past Joe Robinson on this ground since he came into the first team. Blackpool won a couple of corners afterwards, but except when Mortensen shot from his partner’s pass a ball which Tweedy fielded high over his head the Grimsby goal was seldom in peril.
CHANCE MISSED
It was the Town who should have gone further in front in the 30th minute as Cairns, in another big gap in the centre, shot fast and low at Robinson with all the rest of the goal to aim at.
Too many of Blackpool’s passes were straying. It was only when Matthews crossed his made-to-measure centres that the Grimsby goal ever seemed in danger of falling.
Tweedy, revealing the superb anticipation of a goalkeeper long in the game, fielded one of these centres after the England wing forward had raced from the halfway line before lobbing the ball over.
With three minutes of the half left Blackpool made it 1-1 with a goal which had class all over it.
Matthews took Johnston’s short pass, centred the ball to Kelly as the wing half stood all on his own On to Mortensen and from Mortensen to McINTOSH the ball went in fast crisp passes, the centre-forward completing the raid with a low fast shot on the half turn which Tweedy could not reach in a dive to his left.
Blackpool went all out in the next two minutes, forced three corners against a rattled and scattering defence which nearly lost another goal when McIntosh snot a ball which Tweedy beat out.
Half-time: Blackpool 1, Grimsby Town 1.
Second half
Rain was beginning to fall as the second half opened. A corner for Blackpool and a Wardle shot which missed by inches the angle of bar and post were the first big incidents.
There were few others for a time. The Town, after weathering that just-before-half-time storm, were in the game a lot.
Rickett came out of one little clash with Tweedy with such a limp that Dick took the resultant corner for him.
DISALLOWED
That prefaced an amazing five minutes. It began in the ninth minute of the half when Blackpool had a goal disallowed.
Suart made a long crossfield clearance. Mortensen leaped at it, seemed to head it out of Tweedy’s hands as the two men hurled themselves at it.
I had the impression that Mr. Mortimer gave a goal, but on a linesman’s signal reversed the decision to silence the Kop’s cheers.
Another minute and Mortensen, his back to goal, headed another long lobbed pass out of Tweedy’s reach and missed the post by inches.
Another minute and there was a penalty. Again Mortensen was in it, fell under a tackle as he was chasing yet another forward pass, took the kick himself and shot a ball which Tweedy beat out superbly as he fell to his left.
It was in front of the Kop that all this drama was happening and the Kop by this time was in a rare old ferment.
Blackpool’s pressure continued. Tweedy making another full length clearance from McIntosh, snatching away the ball as Mortensen raced into the scene again.
Mouncer cleared off the line of his own goal after McIntosh had swerved the other full back, cut inside and crossed a centre in front of a gaping goal.
MORTENSEN ATONES
Such pressure had to make a goal. It came at last in the 21st minute of the half. Another of Shimwell’s long clearances made position for it.
Half-a-dozen men went after the flying ball. MORTENSEN came out of the ruck with it atoned for his penalty miss by gliding it away calmly from Tweedy as the deserted goalkeeper came out to meet him.
Immediately the Town shuffled their forwards with Pearson in the centre and Wardle and Cairns on the left wing.
The shuffle produced a couple of corners in the next three minutes, the first conceded by Robinson in a full length dive into a pack of men almost under his bar.
Both goals had amazing escapes with 15 minutes left. Fisher found himself in the path of a Mortensen thunderbolt which was flying outside Tweedy’s reach, and while they were still talking about that escape Reeve hit a ball which nearly splintered the Blackpool bar with a shot on the half volley which no goalkeeper on earth could have known anything about.
SETTLED IT
Five minutes later and 10 minutes from time McINTOSH settled it with a goal from Mortensen’s pass, beating Tweedy in a race for the ball and shooting low into the net as he collided with the goalkeeper.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 3 (McIntosh 42, 80 mins, Mortensen 66 min)
GRIMSBY TOWN 1 (Pearson 20 min)
Once Blackpool began to forget the Cup and play a league match as though it was at least of some sort of importance this match was over.
It took the Cup-quarter finalists not less than half-an-hour before they cut loose.
Then there were times when Grimsby were scarcely in the game at all, with their goal escaping repeatedly less by design than accident.
Yet these Grimsby men made a match of it such as nobody expected and apart from a few signs of panic in front of Tweedy, still a great goalkeeper, there was little of the foot-of-the-table about them.
For a long time Blackpool were making too many passes, were too leisurely about everything and in the first half nearly every raid was built on the right.
Afterwards the entire line came into the game with Rickett. when passes reached him at last, cutting away fast with the ball but playing in the last half hour with an ominous suspicion of a limp.
Kelly was the best half-back in a line not as composed as it invariably is, but Shimwell was magnificent always.
Here was a full-back who converted defence into attack with one mammoth clearance after another. Blackpool, always palpably playing within their resources, played in the end sufficiently aggressive football to win.
AND WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE PLANS?
Blackpool will have one for next cup-tie
By “Spectator”
ALL the wise boys have been guying Ted Fenton about the last of his famous Plans since the 'M' blueprint was torn to tatters at Blackpool a week ago.
What is there so excessively comical about it?
It was my view - and I told Fenton so a day or two before the match - that when he released to the Press the first plan - the “F” Plan - immediately after the Cup defeat of Huddersfield he was inviting a spate of publicity which would become an embarrassment.
That is what happened. He played the “Plan” headline to excess until it even became one of the “Twenty Questions” in the radio show, and gave music-hall comedians all over the country a new joke at last.
If its purpose - and I suspect this was the case - was to give publicity to a club which is seeking it in its campaign for election to the Third Division, and, incidentally, to make the name of Ted Fenton known again in football, it succeeded completely.
The blackboard
IN that it had its justification, Football is the greatest popular entertainment of the day. It cannot survive without the big drum. Ted Fenton was entitled to beat it on his own and on his club’s behalf.
Where it went wrong was in its implication that a football match can be won by theory, by diagrams on a blackboard.
A team can rehearse a plan in advance, can work in private practices to a plan designed to play certain men out of a game and to exploit the limitations of others, but to assume that it will all come off on the field is to reduce football to a chess problem.
That is absurd. That is where all these plans so often go wrong.
Not so fantastic
BUT is it so fantastic, so uncommon, to make them? I have been behind the scenes in football sufficiently long to know that it is not.
Arsenal have not produced their present defensive system by accident. Blackpool have not at last found an answer to the earlier - neglect of Stanley Matthews merely by chance.
The relentless shadowing of Peter Doherty in the Colchester-Huddersfield sensation, which, according to the United, was the chief reason for the Town’s dismissal from the Cup, was no mere haphazard circumstance.
It was all planned in advance - and in these cases theory has been translated into practice.
Blackpool plan
AS I revealed earlier this week there has been no “S” (for Smith) plan at Blackpool in the Cup-ties this season. Nobody has given it such a headline name. Yet a plan there has been.
All three teams defeated at Blackpool in the Cup this season have entered the game knowing that their one chance of upsetting the form book was to stampede the Blackpool defence in the early minutes, to snatch a lead and to hang grimly on to it.
That, in its essence, was all that the “M” Plan amounted to - that and the task which has baffled teams of greater attainments than Colchester - the blotting out of the all-England triangle on the Blackpool right flank.
The answer
'THERE was one obvious answer to this one obvious gambit. That was to allow these three teams’ forwards to batter away for half an hour on a defence which the Blackpool forwards were under orders during those first 30 minutes to reinforce if necessary.
“They’ll run themselves out - if only you can keep ’em out - in the first half-hour,” the Blackpool men were told.
It was a simple elementary strategy - and each time it served its purpose.
Some other plan will be required in the next round, whether it is at Fulham or Everton. At Blackpool they realise that.
Mr. Joe Smith, the Blackpool manager, went to Goodison Park this afternoon, chiefly, I think, to watch Fulham, in case the London team have won, for the Craven Cottage men are an unknown quantity in these parts.
The next time
BUT on all that he has seen this afternoon a plan will be based. It may not become the subject of blackboard demonstrations. It will not - if I know Blackpool - be the subject of newspaper ballyhoo.
But that a plan, in however simple outline and subject to however many revisions on the field, will be evolved for the next Cup-tie can be taken for granted.
There was nothing at all funny in Ted Fenton’s “M” Plan - unless you can find cause for laughter in a gallant little team finding that as a plan it simply would not work. All that was wrong was that too much of a hullabaloo was made about it in advance.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 14 February 1948
SALUTE TO SPORTSMEN
A LAST WORD to Colchester United: It was good while it lasted - your month of glory.
When it ended there was no whining, no talk about “ifs” and “buts.” You were convinced, I know - players and all those thousands who came to town - that you could win at Blackpool. Anybody who said anything else was called a defeatist.
Yet when you lost you took it on the chin - from Ted Fenton to the drenched hordes up on Spion Kop with their rattles and bells.
You know how to lose. A few teams of greater fame have not learned that lesson yet.
***
THE Press photographers close to the south goal at Blackpool last week report an incident which reveals the good manager - and good loser, too - that Ted Fenton is.
It happened immediately after goalkeeper Harry Wright had made Blackpool a present of the first goal.
It was a death blow to the United - and Ted Fenton must have known it.
But, as the disconsolate goalkeeper came out of the net with the ball, “Never mind, Harry,” he said.
“Just forget all about it.” Do you wonder this team idolise their manager?
IF my telephone bell ceased ringing for hours before the Sixth Round draw in the Cup was announced it must have been when I went out for a walk round in the block in search of a minute’s peace.
Because the Fifth Round games were announced before noon everybody took it for granted that the Sixth Round ties would be out as early. The reason for the a.m. publication of the Fifth Round was that the F.A. Council made the draws for the Fourth and Fifth on one day and delayed the announcement of the Fifth until after the fourth round had been played.
The man who telephoned at 11 a.m. on Monday with the news that Queen’s Park Rangers were coming to Blackpool and asking if the tickets were on sale was in possession of information unknown to even the game’s chief legislators.
NECK and neck as Blackpool’s chief marksmen before the Grimsby Town match today: Stanley Mortensen and Jim McIntosh.
Each has scored 18 goals in all games this season.
The goal that made news: Alec Munro’s against Colchester United. It was his first of the season, his first since the Sheffield United match at Blackpool on March 15 last year.
From the wings Blackpool have scored only five goals this season. Stanley Matthews has had one and Murdoch McCormack three.
BLACKPOOL’S fixture list will soon look a bit chaotic at the present rate.
A match at Sunderland has had to be postponed. Now the visit of Burnley - next to Preston the big match on Blackpool’s home list - will have to be deferred on February 28.
When will these games be played? Probably late in the season as midweek evening matches.
The authorities are not inclined again to extend the season beyond the first week in May, but are expected to give permission for midweek matches when the days are longer.
IF there are no travel restrictions Blackpool are almost certain to tour the Continent again this summer.
An invitation to visit Malta has been declined - not because the club are averse to a Mediterranean cruise and a call at the George Cross Island, but because an earlier promise had been given that if a tour were permitted Blackpool would go again to Denmark - and probably Sweden.
That promise will be redeemed.
***
WHAT was the famous “M” Plan? It was so simple.
Ted Fenton decided after watching the Villa game that the Colchester attacks should be massed on Ronnie Suart. The Blackpool left back said “Check” by repelling them all with all the new confidence discernible his game nowadays.
Phase No. 2 was to play out Stanley Matthews, and to assist in this major operation Harry Bearryman, the ex-rear gunner in Berlin bombing planes, was crossed over at the last minute to the left wing of the half-back line.
He is reported never to have left Peter Doherty when the United beat Huddersfield. Mr. Matthews often left him at Blackpool.
So the Plan blew up. But it was still a nice line in ballyhoo while it lasted.
***
JOE ROBINSON has had a remarkable record since he was introduced as Blackpool's first - selection goalkeeper.
In five games, including three Cup-ties, he has conceded only one goal - and that goal, which Johnny Hancock's shot past him at Wolverhampton, was the sort that no goalkeeper on earth could have done anything about.
Robinson’s first seven and a half hours’ football - and only once beaten. If that’s not a record in the first-class game it must be near it.
COMPLIMENTS to the Charlton fans who at Huddersfield carried off their goalkeeper, Sam Bartram, shoulder high.
That has often happened when a team has won. This is the first time that I can recollect it happening after a team has lost.
The Charlton goalkeeper defied the Manchester United forwards for nearly 90 minutes. Twice they had the ball past him.
But when the end came the thousands from London cheered him and chaired him.
That’s how games should be played - and watched.
COMPLIMENTS of the Press - 20 or 30 newspapers at the Blackpool-Colchester Cup-tie - to the Blackpool Press steward, Mr. George Sheard - and to the member of the Supporters’ Club who gave the box a spring-cleaning in advance for the tie.
Never have so many newspapers sent their reporters to a Blackpool match. Every man had his own seat allotted to him, the name of his paper on the bench in front of it, a steward to direct him to his few square inches of writing space.
George Sheard worked it all out days before. The “M” Plan went west. The “S” (for Sheard) Plan was a little triumph.
Thank you, George.
ON “Radio Newsreel” a couple of hours after the Blackpool-Colchester United match: Ted Fenton, the Colchester manager, and Harry Johnston, the Blackpool captain.
The interviews were recorded in the two dressing rooms.
***
Cup-tie tickets
APPLICATIONS REFUSED
AN SOS comes from Blackpool Football Club today, asking people not to send in applications for tickets for Blackpool’s sixth round Cup-tie.
A club official said: “No applications for sixth round tickets can be accepted until an announcement has been made in “The Evening Gazette."
“All applications so far received have been refused and the staff is busy returning them.
“We have been swamped with requests for tickets.
“Not until we know what quota of tickets will be available can we make an announcement.”
***
City - the last time
ONLY two men who were were in the teams the last time Blackpool played Manchester City at Maine-road in the First Division will be playing next weekend when at last they meet again.
One is No. 1 for the City, Frank Swift, the England goalkeeper. The other wears No. 11 for Blackpool, Alec Munro, the little Scottish outside left.
When the match was played on October 9, 1937, the City held the title of League champions, and yet ended the season as one of the two relegated clubs, a record, but one which no other club covets.
Blackpool were beaten 2-1. Dick Watmough equalised Eric Brook’s first-half goal soon after half-time, but within five minutes Alec Herd put the City in front, and in front the City remained, in spite of being without Frank Swift for half an hour after he had collided with Tom Jones, the Blackpool forward, and gone off the field on a stretcher.
These were the teams in the 1937 match:
MANCHESTER CITY: Swift; Dale, Barkas, Percival, Marshall, Bray, Toseland, Herd, Clayton, Doherty and Brook.
BLACKPOOL: Wallace; Blair (D ), Witham, Hall, Cardwell, Jones (S.), Watmough, Hampson, Finan, Jones (T. W.) and Munro.
***
High pressure tactics
THIS is a believe-it-or-not A story, but its accuracy is vouched for by a Blackpool F.C. director.
Among the thousands of disappointed fans locked out when the gates were closed at last Saturday’s Colchester Cup-tie were three Manchester men.
Determined to see the match, they marched brazenly through the players’ and officials entrance saying, “Press.”
The doorman, who did an excellent job under trying circumstances, asked them what Press they represented.
“Hydraulic,” they said - and disappeared in the crowd.
Then one morning this week a letter was delivered at the Bloomfield-road ground.
It apologised for a certain gate-crashing act and enclosed “conscience money” for admission never paid.
The letter was signed, “Representatives of the Hydraulic Press.”
THE dance organised by the ladies’ committee and held at the Jubilee Theatre, on Tuesday night, was a great success. A large gathering, including many of the players, had an enjoyable evening. To the ladies’ committee we extend our thanks.
The next major event will be the big St. Patrick’s Night dance at the Tower on Wednesday, March 17.
Tickets will be on sale shortly, and we say, “Book the date now and get your tickets early!”
In last eight
FOR only the second time in the Blackpool club’s history the team have reached the last eight of the Cup. It was a grand match last Saturday, and our friends from Colchester, whose enthusiasm knew no bounds, were the first to admit that Blackpool were a good team.
And now we look forward to the game on the 28th.
Membership appeal
EACH month I seem to have to stress the appeal for membership.
Colchester tell me that their club is over 9,000 strong - a non-League club at that. Our membership is still short of the 1,000 mark.
All old members who have not renewed their subscription are asked to send their 2s. 6d. today.
Other ’Pool fans far and near should join the club by sending their membership form and money to Mr. T. Newton, c/o Bloomfield-road ground or handing it in at any of the canteens on the ground at the next match.
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