5 March 1949 Everton 5 Blackpool 0

EVERTON WERE GOAL-HAPPY IN THE BLIZZARD

'Pool’s heaviest defeat this season

OUTCLASSED

Everton 5, Blackpool 0

By “Spectator”

WINTER came to football at last today. Snow was falling in sheets when the Everton-Blackpool match opened at Goodison Park this afternoon.

This famous ground resembled less a football enclosure than a Arctic outpost, with all the open terraces empty a few thousand people huddled in the stands, and the field almost a swamp under the crusts of melting snow.

In all the years I have been reporting football I have never seen anything to approach it.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff time the curtain of snow was so thick that the stands on the opposite side of the field from the exposed Press box were almost Invisible.

INCHES DEEP

The Press box itself was almost uninhabitable with an inch of snow on the ledges and drifts inches deep beneath them.

A gang of groundsmen appeared 10 minutes before zero hour with brushes and buckets of sawdust to define the penalty and goal-lines which had disappeared entirely from view.

Five minutes later the referee appeared, walked to one goal - and gave instructions for snow to be cleared from the edge of its penalty area.

In the meantime, out. on the terraces, snowball battles were in progress. After another five minutes a couple of dozen people actually ventured into the blizzard to stand near the players’ entrance.

Every minute the storm increased in intensity. Betting, with five minutes to go, was that Mr. H. Haworth, of Blackburn, would call the game off, but it was significant that the ground staff were still at work with their brushes and sawdust buckets.

Such was the Everton baptism for Jim McIntosh, the centre-forward who was wearing a tangerine jersey until two days ago and will now in future be in Everton’s royal blue, leading a line which until early this season another ex-Blackpool centre-forward. Jock Dodds, led.

SHUFFLED LINE

Blackpool announced a 100 per cent, strength defence with Eddie Shimwell back again, but it was a shuffled and unfamiliar forward line which had neither Stanley Matthews or Willie McIntosh in it after the little war with Preston a week ago.

Teams:

EVERTON: Sagar; Clinton, Dugdale, Farrell, Jones, Lello, Higgins, Wainright. McIntosh, Fielding, Eglington.

BLACKPOOL: Farm; Shimwell, Suart, Johnston, Hayward, Kelly, Hobson, McCall, Mortensen, McKnight, Wardle.

Referee: Mr. H. Haworth (Blackburn)

THE GAME

The referee said in the end "We'll begin, whatever happens afterwards.”

Before the coin could be tossed, or even the ball centred, the head groundsman had to be summoned to clear the snow and unearth the centre circle.

Everton won the toss and immediately began to labour through the drifts towards the Blackpool goal in a slow motion raid which ended in Fielding shooting the snow caked ball over the bar.

COMEDY

Within a minute there was the inevitable comic passage, Farm racing out to a ball which suddenly halted as if it had four-wheel brakes on it.

The goalkeeper dived at it with an Everton forward in pursuit, lurched out of the snow clutching it and, before he cleared it, almost impudently brushed the crusted snow off it.

Everton's raids continued with Jim McIntosh in nearly all of them, revealing in one of them an unaccustomed speed as he darted after a pass far out on the left wing before crossing a ball which came to its inevitable rest in the snow before a man in blue could reach it.

LITTLE PROGRESS

Blackpool were not completely outplayed, but against wind and snow could make little progress for a time.

Mortensen went on one of his zigzag raids, passing two men before crossing out to an exposed wing a ball which Wardle lost, retrieved again, and in the end sliced into the side net.

None of it was strictly football at all. They should have had the Crazy Gang featuring in it instead of a couple of First Division teams.

All one could record were the comedy sequences and there were plenty of those, Ted Sagar being the principal in one as he dived in a backward somersault at a ball which was eluding him and clutched desperately at it as he skidded backwards with the elusive ball crawling under him towards the empty line.

BLACKPOOL RAIDS

Shimwell comes up to try a shot

It was amazing that twice in rapid succession Blackpool should have produced two raids almost out of the copybook.

One of them ended in Dugdale gliding the ball composedly away from Hobson and finding that he had glided it over an invisible line and given a comer.

The corner was cleared, but not until Shimwell had thundered on to the scene and shot from 40 yards a ball which Ted Sagar fielded on his knees as confidently as if he had been playing on Wembley turf.

That was the first shot of the afternoon and by that time eight minutes had gone.

EVERTON SCORE

Two minutes later there was a second shot and it was a goal for Everton, the sort of freak goal inevitable in these impossible circumstances.

The raid opened on the left. The ball was crossed inside by the wing half, Lello, to his wing forward, Eglington, who took it and squared it towards a mass of men.

Two Blackpool men were waiting for it, stood as it halted in front of them and with both at a standstill a third appeared to half slice it away to an open space where WAINWRIGHT shot it fast and low past Farm, who could never have seen it as it came out of the snow screen wide of him.

BLACKPOOL SLOWER

Blackpool’s forwards were often in the game afterwards without revealing anything of the pace and punch investing Everton’s football, even in this blizzard.

McCall shot wide in one raid and in another Mortensen crossed a fast low ball which Sagar clutched away from McKnight as the inside-right catapulted past him into the net.

But these raids and a few other breakaways apart were for a time Blackpool's only contribution to this travesty of a match.

Everton, introducing the long pass into every movement, and shooting fast and often, were always threatening to increase the lead and, in fact, nearly increased it in the 20th minute as Jim McIntosh took half a chance and hit from 20 yards a ball which appeared to graze a post before cannoning out of play.

WAINWRIGHT’S No. 2

McIntosh gives him the pass to get it

Three minutes later Everton made it 2-0.

Again it was a raid built on the left and this, from all that could be seen of it, bore a passing resemblance to a good goal too.

Eglington again took his wing half-back’s pass, cut inside, gave McIntosh the pass for which the centre-forward was calling in an open space.

Inside the ex-Blackpool man squared the ball to WAINWRIGHT who accepted it at the gallop, shot his second goal as. the deserted Farm dived vainly in front of him.

It was nearly all Everton afterwards.

A third goal, at the end of half an hour, completed a great hat-trick for Everton’s inside-right. This was a class goal.

FAST AND LOW

On to a forward pass 30 yards from goal WAINWRIGHT darted, sidestepped one man, and, as another crossed his path, eluded him, ran on and as Farm came out in desperation to meet him shot fast and low across the goalkeeper into the far wall of the net.

Another minute and Everton were demanding a penalty as McIntosh took a nose dive into the snow under Hayward’s tackle.

Mr. Haworth said “No” in spite of a linesman’s lifted flag, and on went a game raging all the time on to Blackpool’s goal with the snow and the wind at the aggressive Everton forwards' backs.

In 36 minutes it was 4-0.

This was a goal against his old team for JIM McINTOSH and the sort of goal that could only have been scored on such a day.

Out of the snow curtain a ball fell from the right wing. Two men darted to it, the Blackpool goalkeeper and the man who was a Blackpool forward until two days ago.

The forward won by half a yard, shot high into the roof of the net a split second before Farm could reach the ball.

It might have been 5-0 two minutes later as Suart missed completely a ball which left Higgins on a clear course and left him, too, to cross the pass into the crouching goalkeeper’s arms instead of to his partner, Wainwright, who was waiting unmarked to shoot his fourth goal of the afternoon.

HIT BAR

Two chances only came to Blackpool’s forwards in. the last 15 minutes of the half.

With the first McCall could only stab the ball slowly into Sugar's arms from the sort of position where Everton forwards had been shooting goals.

The second nearly produced a goal, Hobson taking Mortensen’s pass and shooting a ball which scraped the snow off the bar with even the acrobatic Sagar beaten.

Half-time: Everton 4, Blackpool 0

SECOND HALF

The Question when the second half opened was; “What could Blackpool do with the blizzard's aid?”

Everton nearly answered it in the first minute as McIntosh almost deliberately created position for himself as Hayward fell in the quagmire in front of his goal, and passed to Higgins, whose shot was brilliantly parried by Farm as the goalkeeper fell to his knees.

The Blackpool forwards were in the game a lot afterwards but always one had the impression that these forwards and the wing half-backs, too, were still intent on playing studied, designed football when it was impossible to play anything resembling it.

SHORT PASSES

Short pass after short pass was intercepted-before Mortensen shot a rising ball into Sagar’s hands.

Everton’s long passes were still making the scoring positions.

One of them left such a position for Eglington who, left all on his own, cut inside and with the goal almost open sliced his shot at such a right angle that in the end Hayward intercepted it and stabbed it back to his goalkeeper.

Repeatedly, the Blackpool men were guilty of working the ball - or trying to work it - almost laboriously on the thickening carpet of snow.

It all led nowhere until one raid which as nearly produced a goal as any Blackpool attack during the afternoon, Jones breasting down Mortensen’s shot at the centre-forward hooked it inside with Everton’s goalkeeper out of position and half the goal wide open.

EMPTY GOAL

Higgins misses chance for Everton

A minute later there was nearly another Everton goal as Suart headed back a ball which came to a standstill in front of Farm and left the goalkeeper at an Everton forward’s mercy until this forward, Higgins, ran full tilt into the ball and watched it cannon off his chest over the bar of yet another empty goal.

Sagar lost one centre which Wardle crossed fast at him, but retrieved it again as it curled out of his clutching fingers.

Otherwise, except when Johnston made a corkscrew solo raid past half-a-dozen men before losing the ball in a drift in front of the Everton goal, all Blackpool’s pressure amounted to little.

CHANCES MISSED 

When at last a Blackpool forward shot, McCall hit another forward, McKnight, and when at last another chance offered itself with a free kick half-a-dozen yards outside the area, Shimwell thundered the first shot against the pack of men in front of him before Mr. Haworth ordered the kick to be retaken and Mortensen lobbed it a long way wide.

The course of the wind was dictating the game as it had dictated it in the first half, but Blackpool's front line was never - making the shooting positions which Everton’s open football had created earlier.

One grand solo raid by Mortensen ended in Hobson winning a corner with 15 minutes-left, but the corner produced nothing material except an Everton breakaway in which McIntosh looked an infinitely more aggressive leader than he has been at Blackpool for a long time.

WAINWRIGHT AGAIN

With 13 minutes left, and the snow ceasing at last, it was merely a case of playing out time.

No sooner had I written that line than Everton made it 5-0.

It was another freak goal. McIntosh had half a chance and missed it.

A loose ball skidded out to WAINWRIGHT, who must have considered this to be a carnival afternoon, for he shot the ball back again, but shot it so slowly as it crawled over the line past the motionless Farm that he seemed almost ashamed to claim a goal and brushed away all the congratulations.

The match had been settled an hour earlier. That merely underlined Blackpool’s biggest defeat of the season.

With five minutes left, Johnston showed his forwards how they should have been shooting a lot earlier, hitting the bar from 30 yards out as Sagar leaped too late at a ball which took the snow off the wood with it.

Result:

EVERTON 5 (Wainwright 10, 23, 30, 77 McIntosh 36 mins)

BLACKPOOL 0

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COMMENTS ON THE GAME

It was a football match in name only, but Everton served to win because with aid of the wind and snow in first half their forwards played fast, open, aggressive football which tore Blackpool defence apart.

When Blackpool front line entered the game after internal it was always io close and laboured, shot too seldom, and built too few raids on the wings.

Blackpool defence had impossible assignment before half-time, but both Everton wings were left exposed repeatedly with goalkeeper left to Everton forwards’ mercy.

Blackpool never mastered the day; Everton did. Attendance 25,548.

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NEXT WEEK: IT SHOULD BE A FOOTBALL MATCH

NEXT week’s match at Blackpool should be a game of football with the accent on the football. So every Blackpool - Chelsea match has been since the war.

Five times the clubs have met. Not one of the five has been a bad game. Four were almost classics on present assessments.

Last October’s meeting at Stamford Bridge was in the true tradition. Blackpool were leading 3-1 four minutes from time.

Then, with Ronnie Suart limping on the left wing, Walter Rickett was drafted into the fullback line, forgot - and who could blame him? - that he was not in a forward position, left his flank open, and enabled that fine footballer, Roy Bentley, to make shooting chances which were converted into a couple of goals for a 3-3 draw.

A year earlier, John Harris, the Chelsea centre - half, roamed far upheld to head a goal from a corner-kick two minutes from time to snatch a point in a 2-2 draw, and it was at “The Bridge” that Blackpool played one of their greatest postwar games in 1946-47 to win 4-1 in a match which opened with George Dick scoring twice in the first eight minutes from the outside-left position.

Games at Blackpool have not been comparable in drama, but they have still not been commonplace.

Chelsea have not scored a goal in either of them - it was 1-0 in 1946-47 for Blackpool and 3-0 last season -  and, in fact, this London team have yet to defeat Blackpool since the war anywhere.

But the football has always been good - and, after what happened last weekend, a football match of any sort of quality would make a nice change.

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STERNER MEASURES NEEDED AGAINST UNDISCIPLINED PLAYERS

Barracking does not explain it all

By “Spectator”

SO many people are so fond of making referees the scapegoats for all football's present sins that I am reluctant to enter the lists against them.

Yet in match after match this season I have watched referees tolerating conduct on the field which the men of an earlier generation would have punished without mercy,

The present-day referee has as expert a knowledge of the laws of the game as ever the giants of the past possessed, and is, I think, as efficient as ever they were in his interpretation of them.

Infallible he may not be, but then no mortal is. But his competence is not, or ought not to be, in question.

Where so many contemporary referees go wrong is in their failure, their singular reluctance, to exercise the authority which is vested in them. That I can understand, but I cannot condone it.

After the brawl

NOW that last weekend’s brawl at Blackpool is over, and a mail denouncing one player or another is subsiding, and I have been reading all those letters again and recalling all the comments I have heard on the match, I find that there is one common denominator in all the miscellaneous criticism.

“What,” I am asked, “ was the referee doing to allow it?” That’s what everybody wants to know.

Mr. A. E. Ellis, of Halifax, ranks deservedly among the best half-dozen referees in the country today.

He had the Blackpool-Spurs Cup semi-final at Villa Park last season, and after it I wrote “The 23rd man on the field was one of the best - Mr. Ellis, of Halifax, the referee.”

Lone voice

I PRAISED him again after the first of Blackpool’s two Cup-ties against Stoke City, in spite of the fact that I was almost a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

I cannot, therefore, be accused of prejudice against him - or against any other referee.

But it must go on the record that at Blackpool a week ago Mr. Ellis showed that almost benign toleration which, as some football is being played today, is merely exploited.

Football is a man’s game. It is no namby-pamby pastime. A player who can’t take a bit of a rough-and-tumble every now and again when tempers are a little frayed should be out of it.

Playing the man

I HAVE no patience whatever with the referee - and I watched one in action less' than a month ago - whose whistle plays a non-stop symphony, who forbids even the good old-fashioned shoulder charge, who seems to be intent on seeking out sin.

But when men play the man repeatedly instead of the ball, when they specialise in stop-’em- at-any-price tackles, when, in short, they play as one or two Preston North End men were playing from the first minute of last weekend’s match, the referee has an obligation to put an end to it immediately.

There was one man playing at Blackpool a week ago who would not have remained on the field longer than the first 20 minutes if - to take one master from the past - Mr. J. T. Howcroft had been in command.

No malice, but

NOBODY can assert that there was a malicious intent in him, for no man can in such circumstances know another man’s motives I am prepared to think there was no malice.

But that there was an unpardonable recklessness in his tackles, admits of no question whatever.

And a mere reprimand or two, which apparently was all that was given, was not sufficient to discourage him, and never will be sufficient to discourage a few others in the game today whose zeal in a club’s service is greater than their discretion and greater than a referee should ever permit.

What might have happened last weekend if Blackpool’s retaliation had not been on a relatively small scale - and for that fact the Blackpool men deserve credit - one hesitates to think. There might have been a free-for-all.

If a warning - 

AND it could all have been averted if a stricter discipline had been exercised, if the warning had been given “The next offender is off the field!”

I am not asking for the referees’ list to become a bench of hanging judges. I want no strutting dictators, for we have had sufficient of those in Munich beer cellars and on Roman balconies without being cursed by them in football.

But the time has come when referees will have to take sterner measures against players who cannot discipline themselves in the ever-increasing tension of League football.

It is no longer enough to rebuke sin. It will have to be punished.

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Jottings from all parts 

BY "SPECTATOR" 5 March 1949

I AM always being told that Blackpool's reserves are not as good as they ought to be. Yet when a reserve has been introduced into the first team this season he has never let the team down.

There was Ewan Fenton and Jack Wright early in the season. Then Johnny Crosland had one game as Eric Hayward’s deputy.

Rex Adams had a match when Stanley Matthews was off and showed infinitely greater promise in my opinion than most people seem to concede.

Now Gordon Kennedy has had his chance and confirmed the views of those folk who watch the Central League matches regularly and have been saying for weeks that he has come on a mile.

Obviously he has. It’s not every reserve full-back who could play his first game of the season in first-class company against England’s Bobbie Langton. and have as good a match as this Scot had last weekend.

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MANAGER JOE SMITH did not watch the Blackpool-Preston North End rough-house a week ago.

He went with the second team to Stoke, where I am told he was considerably impressed by the football of his reserves, who have now contracted one of the first team’s habits and won three successive away games.

Present at the match, which may have been the reason for the Blackpool manager’s visit, was a representative of Notts Forest, who was watching Jim McIntosh, fielded in this game at the Forest’s own request.

There have been no developments yet, and from this particular source it is not likely that there will be.

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THE HERO OF SPION KOP

THERE was an unnamed hero at Bloomfield-road this afternoon.

An elderly man, muffled in a heavy overcoat and with a trilby hat pulled down over his eyes, he was in solitary state in the vast expanse of Spion Kop at the Blackpool Reserve v. Burnley Reserve match.

At 3-20 the man on Spion Kop no longer had the terraces to himself.

There was a minor cheer from the other shivering customers as a second hardy spectator took up position against a crush barrier halfway up the bank, almost hidden from view in the snowstorm.

At 3-45 the man on Spion Kop was still there, alone again. His companion, deciding that there were better places in a snowstorm, had beaten a retreat.

At 4-5 the man on Spion Kop had disappeared.

Four youths who had taken his place for a moment or two retreated to the east-side shelter, and at last the Kop was deserted.

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Ron the only one

ONLY one player is left in this casualty - ridden season who has not yet once been out of Blackpool's first team this season. Man with the distinction is Ronnie Suart. The last time he was out of the Blackpool team was for the Cup Final which merely confirms the view that this full-back is one of the unluckiest players in the game.

That he is also the most improved player on Blackpool books this season also admits of no doubt. He finished fifty-fifty with Tom Finney in last weekend’s match at Blackpool. Any full-back who can manage that is not a bad full-back- must be, in fact, a good one.

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X should mark these spots

FOR all those people who are fond of a 1s. on the treble chance line on the coupons:

Liverpool have played 12 draws this season in the First Division and Blackpool and Manchester City 11 each.

Blackpool have already been in one more drawn game than during all last season, and in five more than in the whole of 1946-47.

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Harry is so lucky

BLACKPOOL have played nine games, including three Cup-ties, since the beginning of 1949, and Harry Johnston, the Blackpool captain, has won the toss in seven of them.

When he beat Tom Finney of Preston last weekend it was the sixth time in successive games that he had won it. He has lost the toss this year only at Barnsley and in the home game with Sunderland.

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WHY JOE WAS SIGNED

NOW you know why Hull City came to Blackpool to sign Joe Robinson.

I was told at the time that Billy Bly was one of those goalkeepers always in the wars - some players are like that - and that an experienced reserve had to be signed.

Now the luckless William has broken his nose and will be out of the game for a week or two as he has been out of it during the last two years for a variety of reasons, among them a fractured finger, a fractured thumb, a fractured bone in a foot, a broken toe and a broken wrist, and, to complete the dismal catalogue, a few weeks in bed with influenza and another few weeks with mumps.

Acting as understudy to Billy Bly you know that you’ll not have to wait long before being called into service.

***

EVERYBODY knows that there was one ex-Blackpool player, Willie Buchan, the £10,000 Glasgow Celt, playing for Hull City in last weekend's Cup quarterfinal against Manchester United.

But few know that there was another man in the City team who might have been ex-Blackpool, too.

I learn - for I was in the great majority unaware of it - that Allan Mellor, the Hull left-half, was once given a trial by Blackpool on the recommendation of my informant, Mr. W. (“Bill”) Willett of Great Carleton, Blackpool. He played one game in August 1939, but was not retained.

A coincidence is that when Harry Johnston, the Blackpool captain, left Droylsden schools team the man to succeed him at centre-half in the side was Allen Mellor, who. after the war. played for Audenshaw United, went to Ashton United where he signed his first professional contract, and two years ago was signed by Hull for a £23 fee.

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Bad luck reaches Peak

BUXTON FC, the club which recently signed Frank O’Donnell, the former Blackpool, Preston and Villa centre-forward and lent their ground to Blackpool for training when the team had a week in the Derbyshire resort in January, were in a dilemma last weekend.

Fire destroyed half the dressing room accommodation and the referee’s room - and up in flames went the jerseys and the boots and everything else for the club’s two teams.

Last Saturday morning was spent by the Buxton directors searching the neighbourhood for new kit for the first team who were at Altrincham in a Cheshire League Cup replay and not unexpectedly, in the circumstances, were beaten 3-1 and for the second team’s home match in the Manchester League.

All of which - the losses caused by the fire and the loss of revenue from the Cup - is serious for a club whose finances are at a low ebb.

Such a grand lot of sportsmen they are at Buxton, too.

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Long-throw expert

NEWS of Frank Bokas, the wing-half who played for Blackpool in the between-the-wars years and was specialising in the long throw-in long before George Farrow came to these parts.

He is playing at right - half for Gainsborough Trinity, who are leading the Midland League and are prepared, I am told, to go on record with the report that Frank is about as good as ever he was.

And as it’s approaching 20 years since he played for Blackpool, and after his years here had two or three seasons at Barnsley, that’s a notable compliment. Soon at this rate they will be calling him Peter Pan Bokas.

He will always be assured of a paragraph in the record books for the goal he once scored with one of his titanic throws for Barnsley against Manchester United in a Cuptie.

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SNOOKER FINALS ON TUESDAY

AT the Albert Hall, Blackpool, next Tuesday evening, the semi-finals and final of the players’ snooker tournament organised by the Blackpool Supporters’ Club are being played.

Tickets (Is.) can be obtained from any member of the committee who hope that members will support this effort.

During an interval Mr. Harold Holt, the well known local player will give an exhibition of trick shots.

Best wishes for future happiness to Willie Wardle, who was married on Monday, are extended.

We also wish speedy recoveries to players who are on the injured list

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Badges here

THE new supply of badges is now to hand, and they are on sale each week at the Supporters’ Club hut at Bloomfield-road.

Old members are again reminded that renewals of subscriptions became due on January 1.

 

Subscriptions of 2s. 6d. should be sent to the registration secretary, Mr. F. Cross, 1, Wyre-grove, Blackpool, as soon as convenient.

Mr. Cross will also welcome inquiries from new members.

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