Blackpool two down in 13 minutes
WIDE OPEN SPACES
Sheffield United 2, Blackpool 1
EDDIE SHIMWELL, whose bruised thigh is responding so slowly to treatment that he will probably be out of the Bolton Wanderers game on Monday, came from his inn in Derbyshire to the ground where he made his name to watch Blackpool against Sheffield United at Bramall-lane this afternoon. Young Tom Garrett understudied for him again.
Playing for the United for the first time since Christmas was Jimmy Hagan, the ex-England forward, who had a preview of Blackpool at Derby on Monday.
Mounted police had to scatter the queues at the terrace gates to cut a path for the Blackpool motorcoach. The attendance approached 50,000.
Fifteen minutes before the kick-off, with thousands on the slopes where in summer they watch the Yorkshire cricket team, many of the gates were closed. Hundreds were still swarming in the streets outside.
SHEFFIELD UNITED : White; Furniss, Cox, Sloan, Jackson, Brook, Thompson, Whitelum, Collindringe, Hagan, Jones.
BLACKPOOL: Robinson, Garrett, Suart, Johnston, Hayward, Kelly, Matthews, Mortensen, McIntosh, McCall, Rickett.
Referee: Mr. R. A. Mortimer (Huddersfield).
Several Sheffield early clearances were half-hit or sliced anywhere against preliminary Blackpool pressure and high wind.
Yet with less than four minutes gone the United took the lead with a goal which never threatened to be a goal until the ball was in the net.
IT WAS SIMPLE
Hayward had raced out to repel one raid on Blackpool’s left flank of defence but the ball was never cleared.
Brook, the ex-forward who plays these days at half-back, took the loose ball, glided it forward to COLLINDRIDGE who, as if he had all the time in the world, accepted the pass, transferred the ball almost casually from one foot to the other, shot low and wide of the diving Robinson with no man within half a dozen yards of him. It was as simple as that.
Within a minute it was nearly 1-1 as Kelly crossed a high free-kick which McIntosh headed so fast that White half held the ball on the line, lost it and got it again as it was bouncing past him.
The Blackpool defence seemed curiously open for a time, its protection of its goalkeeper never too convincing.
OPEN SPACES
All the time the Sheffield forwards seemed to be taking passes in wide open spaces. In one of these spaces after the United's light wing had raced away again. Hagan shot a low, fast ball which Robinson beat out at full length for a corner.
Not a pass worth calling a pass had reached Matthews with 10 minutes gone. Yet in the lltli minute, Blackpool were near a goal again when Kelly crossed another of his long high passes and Mortensen headed it backwards into White’s arms.
GOAL No. 2
Great shot passes Robinson
Two minutes later Blackpool lost another goal. Again the Sheffield right wing escaped into a great area of unguarded territory from Hagan’s perfect forward pass.
THOMPSON took the pass 40 yards out, cut inside with no man near him, shot a great goal which flew low past Robinson’s left arm as the deserted goalkeeper dived in vain at it.
This was the first time Blackpool had lost two goals in an away game since the Middlesbrough collapse on November 26 - and it all happened in 13 minutes.
Blackpool were no longer outplayed afterwards, but there was no plan discernible for a time in the front line’s football.
HE SHOWED THE WAY
In the end Johnston showed these forwards how to shoot by nearly grazing the bar from 30 yards out a minute before Matthews had at last been given a pass and was presumably so amazed by it that he ran it over the line.
Later, with Blackpool’s pressure continuing, the forwards began to play and continued to play the sort of football expected of Cup finalists.
All the time the United, earlier in such complete command, were retreating. Twice in rapid succession White made desperate clearances from Mortensen.
Twenty-five minutes had gone and Blackpool were unlucky not to reduce the lead. Over from the left a high ball flew. McIntosh leaped at it, headed it outside the falling White’s reach, stood disappointed. as the ball hit the inside of the far post.
It cannoned out, bounced on the empty line, and in the end was cleared anywhere by Jackson racing into the open goal.
Blackpool’s raids continued, forwards and half-backs playing football almost incredible after the desultory game which had lost those two early goals.
UNDER SIEGE
Rickett crossed a corner in the 37th minute which curled inside and appeared to brush against the face of a goal which for minutes before and for minutes afterwards was almost under siege.
There was a new confidence visible everywhere in Blackpool’s game, with every pass low and every pass finding its man.
Johnston and Kelly were serving pass after pass to the forwards. Raid after raid these forwards built.
Yet in one counter raid Collindridge took another short forward pass and shot a ball which Robinson held in a heap on his line.
In the next minute Collindridge showed how a ball should be hit when it is taken on the run, crashing it against a post from 15 yards with Robinson never within feet of it.
Direct action was paying today. That was the lesson for a Blackpool team which for 25 minutes might have redeemed a disastrous opening if there had been a forward shooting in the line as this Sheffield centre-forward shot.
Half-time: Sheffield United 2 Blackpool 0.
With the aid of the wind the Sheffield forwards were again aggressive in the opening minutes of this half.
Collindridge lashed the ball yards wide after Robinson had fielded centres from both wings. He missed another chance, too, before the Blackpool front ever seriously re-entered game.
MATTHEWS SHOOTS
Then twice Matthews given a pass and had Sheffield defence tangled in knots before crossing centres which were headed away anywhere.
A minute later England’s right-wing forward decided to shoot himself, and shot so fast that White dived and nearly cannoned into a post to punch the ball out for a corner.
The corner produced a goal. Matthews crossed it. Out of a ruck of men the ball flew to RICKETT who, with complete deliberation, took his time, steadied the ball and in the next split second shot it rising fast into the far wall of the net for his first goal for Blackpool.
TWO SAVES
That happened after 10 minutes of the half had gone. Two minutes later White hurled himself half the length of his line to hold a long fast shot by Kelly, and in another couple of minutes held high over his head a ball shot at him by McCall.
Mortensen was barely wide a minute later.
In Sheffield’s first breakaway after that goal Jones hurt himself lurching over the line after a ball too fast for him and limped to the dressing-room.
The United’s 10 men were as outplayed as the 11 had been, conceding a couple of corners against the Matthews-Mortensen wing which was definitely in the game at this time.
With 20 minutes left the United might have forfeited a penalty. Instead, blowing for a reckless tackle, Mr. Mortimer gave a free kick a yard outside the area.
The free kick was repelled as Jones limped back into the game.
STILL RAIDING
Nearly all the ordered football was still being played by Blackpool. White made a great clearance as Johnston shot brilliantly from 30 yards out. Fifteen minutes were left and Blackpool were still raiding for a goal which would win a point.
All the pressure, interrupted by Sheffield breakaways which became more and more menacing, was in vain.
Result:
SHEFFIELD UNITED 2 (Collindridge 4 min, Thompson 13 min)
BLACKPOOL 1 (Rickett 55 min.)
This game was lost by Blackpool in the first 13 minutes. During that time the defence was as open as in recent weeks it has been intact.
Two goals Sheffield’s shooting forwards scored from unguarded positions. With them went the points.
After that Blackpool played football of unquestioned class in midfield, outplayed the United, reduced the lead, but could not cancel it out.
Once they were given the ball, which was for about three-quarters of the game, the Blackpool forwards were as precise as ever in approach and in the last half hour began at last to shoot.
In the end a point was nearly snatched, and, I think, was almost deserved.
When Matthews was given belatedly an adequate service of the ball he was the maestro of the Blackpool right wing again. All the afternoon Mortensen was chasing for goals in a line which otherwise had no great punch in it.
Stars of the game, however, were not in this line, but yet again on the flanks of the halfback line where Kelly and Johnston seldom put a pass anywhere except into a position where a forward could go away with it direct on goal.
Hayward was the one man in the defence who could plead not guilty in that early fadeout by men who afterwards presented a reasonably firm front.
Forget those first 13 minutes and there is not a lot to criticise
BLACKPOOL MAKE THEIR FINAL PLANS
Win or lose, it’ll be a great Wembley weekend
By “Spectator”
BLACKPOOL’S Cup Final plans are almost complete. Soon the public will know just about everything they want to know - except who’s going to win the Cup!
Blackpool have gone from six-to-four to evens in the pre-Cup betting since the sensational defeat of the Arsenal last weekend, when the team played football of a quality I have not seen approached for months.
To expect a repetition of such football in the tense and turbulent atmosphere of Wembley would be unreasonable. But that Blackpool have been able to play it once has at least silenced a few folk who, during the last week or two, have been talking as if there could be only one team in it in the Final - and that team not Blackpool.
As if a Final were ever played according to the form books!
Present Final week plans are for the team to leave Blackpool by train on the Thursday - chiefly, I think, to escape the adulatory hordes who would otherwise give the players no peace - and to be quartered until the morning of the match at an hotel close to a famous racecourse and not many miles outside London.
London banquet
TWO evenings later, always assuming that there has not been a draw with a replay on the last day of the season, the Final will be played all over again when the United and Blackpool meet in a postponed First Division match.
Then down will come the curtain at the week’s end with a visit to Deepdale for the Preston North End match.
A fortnight later, if the necessary permits are granted, the team will embark for another fortnight’s tour of Denmark, where a great number of Danes are already in a great state of excitement about the visit.
Blackpool have had invitations to visit Malta and nearly every civilised - and uncivilised! - country in Europe during recent weeks.
But a promise was given months ago that if the team went on tour they would return to Denmark, where last close season they were treated with a generous hospitality which has not been forgotten.
That promise will be redeemed.
Players’ magazine
THIS weekend the players’ own magazine - and it is the players’ own product, not a club publication -should be on sale. Advance orders are already considerable.
I can tell you now that even before the team won at Fulham in the quarter finals I was consulted by Stanley Matthews on the subject of this celebration book.
‘There’ll be no great sale for it,” I told him, “if you’re not in the Final.”
‘I know,” he said, “but we’re going to be in the Final.”
That sort of confidence, which is not to be confused with conceit, reveals the superb self-assurance of the first men ever to take Blackpool to Wembley.
Big demand
I BEGAN to assist in the drafting of the articles before the Tottenham semi - final. Everything was almost prepared for the printers a couple of days after the ’Spurs had been defeated in that sensational extra-time match.
The contents of the book will ensure a demand which may soon exhaust the first edition of 20,000. There are autographed photographs of all the players, articles by “The Two Stanleys” and by the Blackpool captain, Harry Johnston.
“Blackpool to Wembley” they have called it. All the profits will go to the team.
What they will total cannot yet be calculated, but at least they will augment the mere 100 guineas a man which is all that a Cup-winning team can make out of the Cup in bonuses and talent money from the Third Round to the Final.
Golden, but-
GOLDEN WEMBLEY they call it. “Golden” - but "for whom? Not for the players who are on the ordinary £12 maximum wage with an additional £20 bonus if they win.
Not for the clubs, either, for Burnley and Charlton Athletic last season took less than £4,000 each out of a Final which the public paid £43,000 to watch
Golden for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who benefited by nearly £20,000 in entertainment tax - but not - definitely not golden -for the men who make the match and play it.
It is for that, reason that I admire the decision of the Blackpool players not to demand fees for the pre-Final photographs. They could almost have been excused if they had exploited their present fame to the limit.
“Our friends”
“YET,” as Harry Johnston said - and he was speaking for the entire team - “the Press have been our friends, have built up our reputations. When we were not in the headlines we were glad to have them taking our photographs. How can we say ‘It’ll be so much now’ when they want to take them because we’re top of the bill?”
The Blackpool men have preferred to work their own passage. That is why this magazine of theirs deserves a big sale. But it will command it, I think not on sentiment alone, but on its intrinsic worth. For it happens to be a good magazine.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 3 April 1948
O.C. of the Blackpool first team for the first time at Derby on Easter Monday was Mr. Sam Jones.
He has often been with the second team since he entered the managerial department o f the club he served with such loyalty on the field.
This was his first Division One assignment He passed the test with honours.
The players gave everything they had left in them at the end of the Easter marathon. They’ll give it any time for Sam who has become “Mr.” Jones.
***
HOW time marches on. . .and interest in football soars. Eighteen years ago, on the first day of the famous Easter weekend which ended in Blackpool’s first promotion to the First Division, they closed the gates - a few of them were broken open again before the Oldham Athletic match started - and created a new attendance record for the ground.
And the figure was? It was 23,868. In those days, there was no Spion Kop. The old motor stand was still behind the north goal. The “Kop” was built during the following summer.
***
TIMMY HAGAN who was, and in the opinion of a few experts still is, one of the best inside forwards in the game had a day off from Bramall-lane to watch Blackpool play at Derby.
There was no significance in his visit - “only a busman’s holiday,” he said, when I asked him - unless it was to take a preview of Blackpool before this afternoon’s match at “ The Lane.”
Yet a few folk would have said a few weeks ago that there was a definite significance in it, for all over Yorkshire there was rumour that the Sheffield United forward was coming to Blackpool.
Blackpool had made no offer, but they still said he was coming. Well, he hasn’t - not yet.
Blackpool have a partiality for Sheffield United men. There was Jock Dodds before the war, and since it ended there have been Eddie Shimwell and Walter Rickett.
QUOTE from an article in the v Derby County programme:
“ Every manager will tell you that the real test of a player is not so much what he does when he is in possession of the ball, but what he does when he’s not in possession.”
That ought to be framed and put on the wall of every dressing room in the country.
Watch Horatio Carter, Peter Doherty - and half a dozen others. When they take a pass they’re always in the famous open space. They make their football look so simple. Which is what it ought to be.
WHO would be Stanley Matthews’ understudy? Young Albert Hobson has no objections whatever.
This little outside-right who fears no man, who all afternoon on Easter Monday was hurling himself pell-mell at the big Derby full-backs and half-backs, and, in the end, eluding them once or twice, will be out of the Army in fortnight and may, make professional football his career.
It has always been his lot to play with the famous - he played 18 games one season with Blackpool’s wartime team-of-all-the- talents.
Employed in an engineering works in Manchester before he entered the Army, he may return there - or he may make football his profession. He cannot decide yet. That there is great promise in him admits of no doubt whatever.
THEY were quoting Blackpool - and the - good relations between the parent club and the supporters’ club - at a meeting in Derby during the weekend which decided to form a supporters’ club at Derby, in spite of the County directors’ refusal to give it official recognition.
There has been' discontent in Derby over the allocation of tickets for the recent Cup semi-finals. “At Blackpool,” said the founder of the new club at the inaugural meeting, “it’s different altogether. The club made a definite allotment to the supporters’ club - and everybody is happy.”
Are they? I’ve not noticed It particularly. Yet, definitely, I agree, the Blackpool directorate and the supporters’ club are today on the most amicable terms - and it was not always so.
YOU have to admire Billy Steel, the Derby inside forward. So many men commanding such a transfer fee - £15,000 - as the County had to pay for his signature would be content to come into a game only when positions had been made for them by the hard labour of the common herd.
Not this little man. He’s playing all the time in the thick of it, finished the Easter Monday match with a lovely black eye, but had no complaints whatever.
Now I saw two famous men in the Arsenal match who too often gave the impression that every decision against them by the referee was a personal indignity, almost an insult, and were fretful and petulant all the afternoon. Fame spoils some men. Others - and Billy Steel is one of them - are utterly unaffected by it.
***
MlDDLESBROUGH defeat Blackpool 4-0. It was Blackpool’s biggest defeat of the season. Arsenal defeat Middlesbrough 7-0, which was Middlesbrough’s biggest defeat of the season.
A day later Arsenal come to Blackpool, and are beaten 3-0, which was Arsenal’s biggest defeat of the season.
Yet there are folk who still talk about form in football.
***
THE FOOTBALL LEAGUE want Blackpool to play the club’s First Division games with Manchester United and Preston North End before the Cup Final. Blackpool. I hear, have declined.
Yet what will happen if there is a draw in the Final? The replay would be a week later on the last day of the season, May 3, and on two evenings of the week those two games would have to be decided. That would mean three matches in seven days with Manchester United - and a visit to Deepdale in addition.
Some strange teams will be fielded in those two midweek, games - if they should have to be played in those circumstances.
And they may have to be played. There has not yet been a draw at Wembley - not after extra-time. It will happen some day.
FIRST conversations between Horatio Carter and Hull City were at Blackpool behind the scenes after the Good Friday match.
Four of the City’s directors I talked with the former England forward for an hour, made an offer which with certain reservations was accepted as soon as the Derby people had given the City permission to negotiate.
At Hull, in the meantime, the City’s other big signing, Willie Buchan - and the Blackpool transfer fee, by the way, was not £8,000, but £4,500 - is still on the transfer list, but still playing. He scored on Easter Monday his first goal since his opening match in which he converted a couple of penalties.
JOCK WALLACE has gone to Derby County, but he has just as much affection these days for Blackpool as ever he had.
He met the Blackpool team on Monday morning, and, except when he faced the forwards for an hour and a half in the afternoon - and he made no errors this time and one or two theatrical clearances - he was with them until they left in the evening.
They even employed him on the coach as guide to the Baseball Ground.
“It’s grand to meet them all again,” he said. I know he meant it, too.
BLACKPOOL'S BEST - Says Danny
VISITOR to Blackpool’s dressing-room at the end of the first two Easter games: Danny Blair, the little fullback from the Villa, who was in Blackpool’s last promotion team.
He still often calls in before or after a match. His opinion of the Arsenal game? “The best match I have ever seen a Blackpool team play.”
I am nearly inclined to agree with him, writes “Spectator,” and I have been watching Blackpool teams for 20 years - and longer.
***
THE CUP FINAL MAGAZINE
I HEAR that the Blackpool players’ celebration Cup Final magazine will be on sale for the first time at Blackpool’s home game with Bolton Wanderers on Monday evening.
Boys are to be invited to volunteer as sellers. General expectations are that the first edition of 20,000 copies will soon be sold at 2s. 6d. each.
***
M.Ps will be there
BRIGADIER A. R. W. LOW, C.B.E., D.S.O., M.P. for Blackpool North, told delegates at a Blackpool conference today:
“It is not often the Mayor and the two Members for Blackpool stand on the same platform.
“I think the next occasion on which we shall be together will be at Wembley on April 24” (Applause).
And Wing Commander J. R. Robinson, M.P. for Blackpool South, later said “he hoped some of those they had welcomed today would be along to welcome them at the Cup Final.
“We have no doubt at all about the result in this town” he added.
***
Three games next week - and there are big stakes
IT is Blackpool’s football festival next week - Bolton Wanderers on Monday evening, Burnley on Wednesday evening, Middlesbrough on Saturday afternoon. In every game except the last there will be big issues at stake.
Bolton, who will be desperate for points to escape relegation, should enter Monday’s game with plenty of confidence, for it is a remarkable fact that no Bolton team has lost at Blackpool in League or Cup since the end of World War No. 1. It was the almost inevitable 1-0 for the Wanderers last season.
Burnley two days later, still out for No. 2 in the Division, will be playing a League game at Blackpool for the first time since Blackpool’s last promotion season nine years ago - the first game in the First Division the clubs have ever played on the ground.
The last Second Division meeting at Blackpool between these Lancashire rivals was on October 17, 1936, when goals by Bob Finan and Dick Watmough gave Blackpool the game 2-0. The teams
were:
BLACKPOOL: Wallace; Blair (D.), F Witham; Hill, Cardwell, Jones (S.), Watmough, Hampson, Finan, Jones (T. W.), and Cook.
BURNLEY: Hetherington; Richmond, Hubbick, Robinson, Woodruff, Clacher, Gastall, Brocklebank, Lawton, Miller, and Stein.
Yes, the Lawton was “Tommy.”
Middlesbrough on Saturday will recall last season’s most amazing game at Blackpool, where the north-east team ran riot arid won 5-0.
You never know what these Middlesbrough forwards will be up to. They’re either very good or not so good at all.
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