EVERTON: Sagar: Saunders, Hedley, Bentham, Jones (T. G.), Grant, Powell, Fielding, Juliussen, Stevenson, Boyes.
Referee: Mr. H Howarth (Blackburn).
THE GAME
Alec Stevenson, the little Irishman, a Blackpool wartime guest, won the toss for Everton who defended the south goal.
It was a goal which fell in the second minute. There was a raid on Blackpool’s right, culminating in a throw-in by Johnston. Munro leaped to a high ball, headed it forward.
After it raced McIntosh who half fell under a tackle as Hedley crossed desperately behind him, was still staggering as Mr. Howarth gave a penalty which seemed to take everybody by surprise
WARDLE TAKES IT
There was a perceptible hesitation among Blackpool’s penalty- shy team before Johnston called WARDLE, Grimsby’s Penaltv man last season, out from the wing.
With a rising shot wide of Sagar’s right hand the wing forward scored his first goal for Blackpool.
Blackpool were raiding nearly all the time afterwards, but in the first 10 minutes’ play the game was curiously slow.
Now and again the big Juliussen pursued random passes into Blackpool’s defence, but it was not until the 15th minute that Farm was tested. Juliussen shot a fast low ball from 20 yards into the goalkeeper’s arms.
IN NAME ONLY
It was First Division game in name only up to now. Pass after pass went wrong until, in the end, McCall found Munro with a long forward bouncing ball which the inside-right reached after swerving his half-back and lost again to force of numbers.
In the next minute Munro appeared unexpectedly as an inside-left, shot slowly at Sagar from a narrow angle.
A couple of minutes afterwards McIntosh shot a ball which Sagar carried after Wright and McCall had created positions for the centre-forward.
The game was wakening up but it soon fell back into slow motion with no incident to excite the crowd.
As early as the 10th minute, when little plan had revealed itself, Munro and Rickett had exchanged positions. It had made no particular difference.
Munro took a pass which McIntosh put back to him, and crossed a ball which Wardle glided on to McCall but the inside-left was dispossessed as he was preparing to shoot.
FINAL PASS
It often missed the man
That sort of thing was happening everywhere - a position being created and the final pass being intercepted, or missing by yards the man for whom it was intended.
Blackpool still had nearly all the game with half an hour gone, and whenever the Everton forwards advanced Wright’s clearances were long and decisive.
Nearest Blackpool came to another goal was in the 32nd minute when, after Wardle had swerved one man and raced past another, his centre hit a fullback and was cannoning over the line as Sagar dived to stop it.
SLOW AND HESITANT
Never this season have I seen a forward line as slow and hesitant as Everton’s. Often Blackpool’s half-backs and fullbacks had time to settle on the ball and decide almost studiously where to clear it before a man in royal blue approached within tackling distance, or even approached at all.
Stevenson managed one long shot into Farm’s arms but that was about all.
A goal was a lot closer at the other end where McCall shot wide with Sagar unsighted, after Johnston had given Munro a perfect pass which the wing forward had crossed perfectly When at last, five minutes before half-time. Blackpool’s goal was in peril Hayward raced across fast to charge down Boyes* shot after the outside- left had been given a clear course.
A minute before the interval, in the best advance of the half, Rickett brushed past two men before shooting a ball which Sagar beat out in a flying dive for a corner.
The corner nearly ended in a goal for Blackpool - McIntosh missing by inches.
Half a minute later Sagar made the save of the afternoon, falling full length behind a pack of men to reach a McIntosh shot flying low and wide of him.
Half - time: Blackpool 1, Everton 0.
SECOND HALF
Everton had one chance in the third minute of the half. Juliussen and Hayward went after a loose ball together. Down fell the centre-half head over- heels under the big centre-forward’s charge.
Three Everton forwards, unmarked in a shooting position, called for a pass. Juliussen, instead, sliced it to a man in the wrong jersey.
GOAL NO. 2
Within a minute a price had to be paid for this error. A pass soared down Blackpool’s left wing. McCall chased it, beat the full-back, crossed a high falling centre.
Near the far post McINTOSH leaped to it, and with three Everton men leaping a little too late with him. headed a ball which not even Sagar could reach.
Everton still seemed to be at sixes and sevens. Under attacks which had a greater punch in them than had ever been revealed- in the first half, the Goodison Park defence began to wilt.
There had been plenty of wide open spaces earlier. They were becoming even wider now with Blackpool’s passes at last being given with precision.
Ten minutes after the second goal it was 3-0. This was a goal to bring down the house.
Johnston opened the raid with a peach of a pass into an open space. McCall glided it on. After it went RICKETT, outpaced one man swerved out to the left away from another, and hooked the ball into the far wall of the net as he somersaulted nearly into the terraces under Grant’s last despairing tackle.
Strangely, afterwards, Everton in a position bordering on the impossible, began at last to play football with some sort of purpose and pace in it.
For a time Blackpool’s defence had its first bit of hard labour during the afternoon. With 20 minutes left it seemed to be merely a case of playing out time.
Yet in those closing minutes Everton’s forwards played as they had not played all afternoon, Farm making two superb clearances from Boyes and a flying leap to another shot rising away from him. This last save won him a great shout of cheers.
Then Stevenson shot over the bar from an unmarked position.
BLACKPOOL 3 (Wardle pen 3, McIntosh 49, Rickett 59 mins)
EVERTON 0
What has gone wrong with Everton? Just about everything according to this game. Blackpool had not to play football of any particular distinction almost to dominate the first half.
Afterwards’ when the front line’s football had a few glimpses of authentic class in it, the Goodison Park men were nearly played to a standstill with Ted Sagar saving them from a defeat of even greater proportions.
Blackpool’s forwards in spurts and flashes were good with Rickett the best of the line. He was quick to take a pass and race off with it.
For the Blackpool defence it was, until the last 15 minutes, almost a holiday. In Everton’s infrequent swoops on goal Wright arid Suart were sound.
The service and passes given to the forwards by the wing halfbacks attracted notice. it was that link between half-backs and forwards which was the chief difference between the teams.
Mr. Cliff Britton will spend the weekend wondering what he is going to do about Everton. A lot obviously requires doing.
NEXT WEEK: Real football when Blackpool visit Chelsea
WHATEVER may happen at Chelsea next weekend. I expect to see a football match - and not merely an event billed as a football match, writes "Spectator.”
Twice in successive seasons I have seen Blackpool teams play their best games of the year at Stamford Bridge. It is almost as if the memory of the wartime classic played there between Blackpool and Arsenal still lingers!
Chelsea have played comparably good football, too, and the result each time has been a game not soon forgotten.
It was 2-2 last season, Chelsea retrieving a point five minutes from time when Jack Harris, the centre-half, came up in desperation for corner kick and headed a goal to make a draw.
Earlier, Stanley Mortensen had scored for Blackpool and George Farrow converted his last penalty - it was his last Blackpool goal, too - for the men in tangerine.
A year earlier George Dick was the man in the news, shooting a couple of goals in the snow in the first seven minutes of his first game as an outside-left, and persuading one critic to call him the following day “the answer to Scotland’s left wing problem.”
Blackpool won 4-1 in a game which everybody who watched - including Tommy Lawton, who sat in the Press box - called a classic.
If next week’s game is only half as good as either of these two it will still be a good game.
WANTED MORTY IN EXCHANGE
- So Wilf Mannion did not come to Blackpool
By “Spectator”
ALL is not as quiet in the Blackpool transfer market as it appears, to he on the surface. Below the still and tranquil waters there is a certain agitation.
Immediate developments are unlikely, but it would he an error to think, as so many people seem to think that Blackpool are sitting on the sidelines watching the movements in the market with a complete indifference.
Blackpool could have signed Wilf Mannion 24 hours after Middlesbrough had at last put him on the list.
Mr. David Jack, the Middlesbrough manager, had asserted few publication - as he was entitled to - that in this England forward he possessed “the best negotiable asset in football.” That is what he said for the record.
Off the record as soon as another ex-Bolton Wanderer, Mr. Joe Smith, of Blackpool, contacted him by telephone, observing the formalities which the position demanded as soon as Middlesbrough invited offers, Mr. Jack’s reactions were interesting.
All he wanted in exchange for Mannion - and “all” is the operative word - was Stanley Mortensen.
So many other clubs, with and without the best negotiable asset in football, have entertained a similar ambition. To them, as to Mr. Jack, a polite but definite negative has been the answer. It was another “No” this time.
It is strange to think, by the way, that both Wilf Mannion and Stanley Mortensen1 learned their football within a few miles of each other and that neither cost a penny in transfer fees.
It’s haywire
THAT in itself is sufficient commentary on a transfer system which long ago went as haywire as “Helizapoppin’ ” - a South Sea Bubble which one of these days will burst with a considerable reverberation.
Blackpool, too, have assets to offer now that so many clubs are apparently discovering that love of money is, in truth, the root of all evil, and are preferring to barter players to signing or accepting cheques.
George Dick, at his own request is in this category today. It would surprise a few of the people who think there is no football in this ex-B.A.O.R. product if they knew the sort of fee which was offered for Dick during the summer.
Offers for Dick
THE player refused to go at that A time, and has since, I think, regretted that decision. Now clubs are offering players in exchange - a procedure which Blackpool would prefer, if the players are of the position and the class they require.
A Third Division club in the South, who wanted to sell Blackpool a centre-forward during the summer - a centre-forward who went elsewhere and has since set no rivers on fire -are among those interested, although Blackpool are not interested at all in the sort of terms they are attaching to an exchange.
So it goes on.
Blackpool made overtures about Wilf. Mannion, I am convinced, merely because when a player of such quality comes on the market in these lean days no club can afford to neglect the chance, however remote it may be, of acquiring him.
Quest for leader
THAT there is no imperative necessity to sign an inside-left today the football of little Andy McCall makes clearer every week.
The quest for a centre-forward still, presumably, continues, but all the stories which are in circulation that Bolton Wanderers are now prepared to part with Nat Lofthouse can be taken with the contents of an entire salt cellar, for the Wanderers again have told Blackpool that no fee can buy this front-line leader.
That is official.
And now, I suppose, there will be folk who were at Deepdale a week ago asking “Well, is a centre-forward required, anyway?”
Old ruse
I AM not inclined to commit myself on that question today, for Preston North End’s gimcrack defence fell in this match for one of the oldest deceptions in football, and there is no guarantee that other defences will tumble as easily into the trap.
Walter Rickett was told as soon as he was selected as centre-forward - a decision which set the entire coast chattering with speculation - that if the path down the middle was closed, he must wander about until it was open for Stan Mortensen.
It was most effectively closed by Preston’s centre-half, the one man in a North End jersey who will not be content to forget this match, but it opened as the North End defence chased the decoy which Rickett became and gave all that unaccustomed freedom to Mortensen which it is suicidal for any defence to afford him.
Obviously, if Blackpool can always play two centre-forwards and use the long pass with such devastating consequences for the opposition, there is no immediate urgency to sign one new centre- forward. Time alone will show if Blackpool can always get away with it.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 9 October 1948
I AM told that it was a reasonably good match In the Central League at Blackpool last Saturday. I am told, also, that it wasn’t a bad debate, either.
Nearly all the afternoon Stoke City men were calling instructions and counsel to each other until you could scarcely hear the referee’s whistle.
One of these men - no names by request - is, I know, so inclined to talk his way through a football match that folk say he is almost destined to finish in Parliament.
But, joking apart, it is about time this increasing tendency in football was suppressed by the referees.
People go to football matches to watch football - however seldom they may see it these days - not to hear a public address.
THIS season is only seven weeks old today. Yet already there is only one Blackpool forward, Andy McCall, who has played in every First Division match for the club.
The little Scot from Blantyre Celtic, who cost Blackpool only £250, and has already been called a second Billy Steel, who cost Derby County £15,000, must still be wondering how he missed one goal - even two goals - at Deepdale last weekend.
Yet already he has scored three goals this season - and he had only one in 18 First Division games in 1947-48 - and so presumably he is learning fast exactly what to do with a ball in front of a goal.
Curiosity about McCall’s career at Blackpool is that he was signed as an outside-left, but since his first game in the Central League at the end of the 1946-47 season has never played anywhere except at inside forward.
THE last time Preston North End recorded a double over Blackpool in League football was in the Deepdale club’s promotion season of 1933-34, the year after Blackpool’s relegation.
North End won 2-1 at Blackpool on the season’s opening day, and 3-0 at Deepdale. In this second match two of Preston’s three goals were scored by a forward called Bob Kelly.
A lot has happened to Mr. Kelly since those days nearly 15 years ago. His last assignment was in Portugal, where he was O.C. of the country’s leading club. Now, I hear, he is in St. Annes again in one of the civil service departments.
I hope he is soon back in football, for football in its present doldrums requires men such as Bob Kelly who on the field adorned the game and off the field could now still serve it.
THERE was a unanimity of opinion in the Blackpool team after last weekend’s match at Preston that Mr. A. E. Ellis, of Halifax, was the best referee appointed for a Blackpool match this season.
And that was not because Blackpool had won. either.
He was, in my opinion, as good referee as I have seen in action this season. He was always level with the play and yet never was his presence obtrusive. His decisions were given without hesitation and with a finality which forbade dissension or protest.
Unlike good little boys, Mr. Ellis was not often seen, but he was often heard, for he had to blow his whistle a lot, but he never blew it unnecessarily.
He gave the impression all the time of a strict self-confident efficiency.
It had become almost a legend - until last weekend’s game - that Blackpool could not score from corners. Then Blackpool won only two earners in the first 52 minutes and scored from both of them, while North End in a similar period were winning four and not scoring at all.
One of Mr, George Sheard’s famous charts reveals the surprising fact that in this match which Preston lost 3-1 Blackpool forced only three corners against North End’s eight, and that the Blackpool goalkeeper took 12 goalkicks and his opposite number only seven.
Yet, strangely, it was always a game which Blackpool seemed to be winning.
***
IF ever there was a team that appeared to require a battling never-say-die man in its ranks it is Preston North End.
Why, in the Deepdale club’s present circumstances, such a player as Bill Shankly was not recalled weeks ago almost passes comprehension.
The perpetual motion wing-half has passed his zenith, I know, but when a team is as obviously under the weather as North End are, it is such men as Bill who are demanded. Big hearts are sometimes more than all the little refinements.
If Shankly is not soon in the team I can predict a “Bring Back Bill!” crusade at Deepdale.
BILL LEWIS, the Blackpool full-back, enters a nursing home for an operation on Monday.
A final breakdown in training last week compelled another visit to a specialist, and this time it was established that there was a chipped bone in the right knee. It will be about Christmas, I suppose, before Lewis is fit for football again.
He will be, I should think, during his convalescence, about the most impatient patient in medical history. For if there is anything which Bill Lewis, that 100 per cent, clubman, prefers to a football match a week it is two football matches a week.
***
IT’S an even-money bet that Stanley Matthews and Stanley Mortensen have been subjected this week to a close examination about Blackpool football.
With the rest of the England team they will have been to Newcastle, Co. Down, to play golf on the links where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.
And there, inevitably, they will have met Jack McLachlan, the Royal County Down professional, who was once on T. R. Fernie’s staff at Royal Lytham and St. Annes and has ever since been a long-distance fan whose first question every Saturday night during the football season is “How’ve Blackpool gone on? ” and whose first question every Monday morning is “Has The Green’ come yet?”
***
SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE CAPTAIN
A GOOD sportsman, Harry Johnston, says "Spectator.”
A damaged ankle, which has put him out of Blackpool's team for four matches this season - only two fewer than he missed all last season also cost him the captaincy of the Football League team the other week.
Yet, when I was commiserating with him this week and thinking how often new men have stepped into crippled men's boots in representative football - and stayed in them - he said, “Why, it's all in the game.
If I'd taken a chance and played for the League and faded out because I was unfit, I'd never have been invited to play again. And I shouldn't have deserved to be invited.
Never mind about your reputation. You’ve to think of the team, to be sure before you go on a field that you're not going to let the other lads down.
It's good to hear a professional footballer talk like that - after all the ignorant snobbish clap-trap I hear talked sometimes about professional footballers.
***
HIS HOPE
MR. CLIFF BRITTON, who has been appointed manager at Everton, told “Spectator’ before the match “It will be like going home again, reporting at Goodison Park. All I can hope is that with my advent happier days will dawn for the club for which I once played.”
Mr. Britton met the Everton players for the first time at Preston on their way to Blackpool.
***
COME TO THE DANCE
OUR Ladies’ Committee are holding’ them first big winter event on Wednesday, October 27, at the Jubilee Theatre.
They have arranged a dance until 11 p.m. Tickets are on sale on Saturday afternoons at the club hut at Bloomfield-road ground.
Whist enthusiasts should not forget that the ladies hold a weekly drive every Tuesday evening in the Liberal Club at 7-30.
OUR big dance will be held at the Tower on Friday, November 5. It will be another great evening. Come along and join the fun.
.***
Our membership is at last showing a satisfactory increase. The more members we have the more we can help the parent club.
Popular side and Spion Kop fans are reminded that the club hut at the east corner of the ground is open both before and after matches and their inquiries are welcome.
***
ORGANISED trips to away matches are proving most successful. The trips to Bolton and Preston were splendidly supported.
If you want to follow the Pool away from home go with the Supporters
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