THE GAME
Harry Johnston won the toss to the end, had choice of goals again, decided to defend the south one.
The early football was as fast as if it had been the season’s first day, instead of the last, but there was not a lot of order in it. Passes everywhere escaped their men.
All the time the ball was bouncing high off the parched earth. Twice, Fenton halted Burnley raids before Jim Strong, the Burnley goalkeeper, who was one of Blackpool’s wartime guests, tore out to punch away a high-falling centre by Rickett which McIntosh was pursuing.
FIRST CORNER
A minute later, too, McCall outpaced Loughran, not merely by speed either, but by craft, mishit his centre, but still won a corner with the raid on the other wing.
Those two raids, however, merely prefaced a lot of Burnley pressure. In one advance by the Turf Moor men, Martindale was allowed by a retreating defence to take a pass forward unchallenged over nearly 30 yards before releasing the ball which Potts shot wide of Farm from a position so palpably offside that there was no whisper of protest when the referee refused a goal.
GREAT SHOT
Two minutes later he gave one and a great goal it was.
It followed the second successive clearance which an excitable Blackpool defence had hit high over the east side shelter roof. Direct from the delayed throw-in Wilson crossed a perfect centre.
On to it POTTS darted, shot from a 45 degrees angle a ball so fast that Farm was still in mid-air as it passed him and hit the net.
Blackpool’s retaliation was fast, furious, and at times almost frantic. Nobody would have dreamed that this was the last day of the season.
Cummings, Burnley’s new young centre-half, hurled himself into the path of a fast rising shot by McIntosh from Mortensen’s astute back-heeled pass, and in the next minute, with Blackpool Still swarming in the Burnley goal area, and with an attendance which had approached 30,000 in a state of great excitement, the centre-forward took another chance with a fast shot into the waiting Strong’s arms.
Too many centres from the Blackpool wings in the pressure which continued were cut or sliced into the waiting and alert Burnley defence, but these Blackpool attacks went on and on, interrupted only by infrequent Burnley swoops which never reached shooting distance of Farm.
There was a curious poverty of major incidents, intense and fast as the football continued to be.
Both defences were settling, even if Blackpool’s still seemed a little excitable and inclined to lose position to swift, direct raids.
The Burnley half-backs and full-backs seemed by contrast a shade faster on the ball, cut to ribbons Blackpool attacks which were built on too close and often too complex a design.
THINGS GO WRONG
With half an hour gone Blackpool’s raids were outnumbering Burnley’s by about three to one, but by that time prospects of goals were appearing a little remote.
Something was always going wrong with the last pass - the last pass was too short.
A shot came at last, McIntosh lashing it yards too high and wide before a minute later hooking another nearly as far off the target.
Still, the centre-forward was shooting and nobody else in an almost nonstop raiding line ever seemed inclined to shoot or to be in a position to shoot.
A goal was nearer a couple of minutes later as McCall took Mortensen’s pass, ran a yard with it, shot a ball which rose inches over the bar with Strong beaten by its pace.
WIDE OF MARK
Bray ended this near-monopoly of the game by the Blackpool front line by stabbing the ball wide from an impossible range. It was still seldom that the Burnley forwards were over the halfway line.
It was beginning to go a little stale with repetition - this Blackpool pressure raging on and on but arriving nowhere.
It was at least a little variety when Burnley won a corner on the left in the closing minutes of the half, but this produced nothing material in front of Farm with Johnston, who was here, there and everywhere, clearing it almost at his leisure.
Half-time: Blackpool 0, Burnley 1.
SECOND HALF
Burnley went off in the second half as though their forwards were tired of their earlier submission.
A couple of raids were built by rapid long passes such as Blackpool had too seldom employed. In the end Chew shot from an open position a ball which Farm fielded with the utmost composure.
Whereupon it all began again, with the Blackpool forwards hammering away at the Burnley defence, but making singularly little impression on it.
Once Strong had to run out a long way to collect a forward pass which Mortensen and McIntosh were chasing.
Again there was another chance of sorts when Johnston crossed a free kick. Out of a ruck of men the ball was crossing the Burnley line as Mather cleared it, and the referee’s whistle, which had been seldom silent, went for yet another minor infringement.
Otherwise all Blackpool’s raids and there were still plenty of them = were as vain as all the first half attacks had been.
BURNLEY AREA PACKED
Such was this siege at times that once there were 21 men in Burnley’s half of the field and only two of them, Blackpool’s full-backs, outside the penalty area.
But still no gap opened or could be forced in an ironclad Burnley defence which was probably made to appear more compact than it actually was by Blackpool’s persistence in the short pass or the high lobbed pass.
Davidson headed into Strong’s arms a minute after McIntosh had beaten Cummings to a ball which cannoned out for a corner off the centre-half’s knees with the Burnley goalkeeper for once almost entirely unprotected.
Yet in the end, inevitably, I suppose, the goal came which Blackpool ever since the war had been seeking in vain against this stonewall defence from Turf Moor.
FROM RICKETT’S CENTRE
And when it came it was a goal taken more or less by storm.
Little Rickett, who will still go after everything, went after a ball which Mather was convinced was his own, took it off the full-back and crossed it into a goalmouth.
In this goalmouth was such a pack of men that everybody was impeding everybody else, with the ball eluding the lot of them, until MORTENSEN pounced on it and, as he was falling with a couple of men on top of him, hooked it high into the net’s roof.
LIKE CUPTIE
No end-of-the-season about this game
The Burnley goal was afterwards under pressure which raged tumultuously.
There was nothing end-of-the-season about this. It was a cup-tie in May. Rickett lashed a shot in the side net from an open opposition with two forwards waiting for a pass, and. in another assault. Strong raced out almost to the penalty area edge, lost the ball, but snatched it up again with Mortensen harassing him.
BURNLEY ATTACK
But Burnley were not finished vet. They won a free-kick inside shooting range 15 minutes from time, but it was worthless, Bray choosing to loft it out to the other wing where it was lost.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 1 (Mortensen 55 mins)
BURNLEY 1 (Potts 10 mins)
Nobody could accuse either Blackpool or Burnley of merely playing out time to the season’s end in this match.
A lot of the football was of indifferent quality, but there was a pace and intensity in it which redeemed a lot and gave the match at least some dramatic value.
Blackpool should have won, had sufficient of the game to have finished in front by a distance, but again the forwards played football which was too close and had too many obvious and telegraphed passes in it.
Again it was too often an easy prey to a tall, never-say-die defence which towered over it in nearly every position.
The aggressive swoops of Mortensen and McIntosh were its chief and about its only scoring armament, but one had to admire the dogged courage of Rickett in his first League game for weeks.
I made Shimwell and Johnston as Blackpool’s best men, with the half-backs playing resolutely after an uncertain opening.
The defence was adequate, and if Burnley’s defence had not been something more than that, Blackpool, whatever their limitations, must have won.
At least the season has ended with one achievement - a goal by a Blackpool forward against a Burnley defence.
BLACKPOOL FC HAS £350,000 PLAN
FOR 64,000 GROUND
BLACKPOOL FOOTBALL CLUB are planning to increase the ground capacity at Bloomfield - road from 31,000 to over 64,000. Cost is estimated at £350,000.
This is an alternative to the Town Council's stadium scheme to cost £1,250,000.
The club’s scheme is planned in two stages:
1. Increase from 31,422 to 47,205.
2. Increase from 47,205 to 64,044.
Here are how the changes are planned:
Stage one, to cost £114,000: New upper deck to west stand to increase seats from 3,665 to 8,1118;
Alterations to west paddock to increase standing room from 3,242 to 3.786;
Re-stepping Spion Kop with halfway level entrance, increasing capacity by 1,290;
A new stand on east side to increase room from 6,700 to 15,036;
Re-stepping paddock on south side to increase room by 960 to 3,375.
Stage two, to cost over £230,000:
Further 1.313 seats and 507 standing for south side of ground, with new rooms for officials;
Spion Kop to have room increase by 5.471 to 19,361;
Refreshment quarters under west stand.
The scheme was before Blackpool Corporation Development Subcommittee yesterday, and explained to them by Mr. Frank M. Dickinson, LRIBA, of the architectural firm of MacKeith, Dickinson and Partners.
SEATING, STANDING
Of the total possible attendance of 64,044, there would be seating for 14,681 and standing room for 49,363 spectators.
All these people could be clear of the ground in between 12 and 15 minutes.
Size of the car park at the north end would not be affected.
Though estimates of cost were given to the subcommittee there was no discussion on how, if the plan was approved, the money would be raised.
Such a discussion, councillors stated, would come at a later date when the details of the improvements as an alternative to the stadium plan have been - fully explored.
NOT SO BAD—BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER
Home points thrown away
By “Spectator”
IT'S curtain fall at Blackpool today. The audience can go home and say “Not such a bad show” Not all of them, recalling the glamour of the Wembley season a year ago, will say it. But that, I think, ought to be the verdict.
There cannot he a Wembley for a club every year. There cannot be for a club in Blackpool's position glory all the time.
It is a sufficient achievement that Blackpool have held a position of tolerable security in the First Division without spending beyond the club's limited financial resources, and in spite of a plague of casualties which has had no equal in the 20 years I have been reporting Blackpool football.
I am convinced that Blackpool will have to spend, but in reason, I hope, in the close season.
Priorities during the summer sales will have to be a goalkeeper to understudy for George Farm, and not fewer than a couple of forwards, one to serve as the front line’s tactician - another Jimmy Hagan or Peter Doherty would be very nice - the other to score the goals which the present line has not been scoring in sufficient numbers.
Hope for the future
I THINK those men will be signed - if only they can be discovered, and if only half the earth is not asked for them.
But, as I wrote a week ago, Blackpool’s chief hope for the future is not in the transfer market but in its own backyard, where the club’s young recruits are maturing on a long-term plan which has completely justified itself this season.
"It’s been one long headache since last August,” says Manager Joe Smith. “But, at least, glad as I am that this season’s finished, it’s served one good purpose. It’s given several of our young players a chance in first- class football for which otherwise they might have had to wait a year or two.
Some of them have had to come in a little too soon, I know, but the experience will have done them, good, and not one of them, think, has ever let the team down. If for no other reason the season has been no fiasco.”
Too generous
NO, it has not been a fiasco. It could, in spite of everything, have been a minor triumph if the team had been a little less generous in its treatment of its visitors.
Before today’s match with Burnley, five visiting teams had won at Blackpool this season and seven drawn. Three times only since the beginning of 1949 has the Blackpool public seen its own team win.
And in 20 home games the Blackpool forwards have been so near total disarmament, shooting so little, that they have scored only 23 goals, which is only little over an average of a goal a match and fewer than every other front line in the Division except Birmingham and Huddersfield Town.
Better away
WHY, this line has actually scored seven more goals away from home than it has scored on its own ground.
That makes no sense at all, and not even the casualty epidemic can explain it. It is one reason, probably the chief reason, why Blackpool have ended the season in the lower half of the table.
The defence, I think, is adequate. It has lost 24 goals at home and 42 away, but the signing of George Farm from the Hibernians - and this transfer at £2,700 was one of the best bargains of 1948-49 - and the proved efficiency of the reserves who can be called upon almost ensure that it should present no great problem in 1949-50.
It’s those forwards who will have to learn that all the best football in the world out in the open is worthless unless it produces goals.
Week's sensation
ONE of these forwards has made the sort of news he would have preferred not to make this week.
The omission of Stanley Matthews from the England team to tour the Continent has been the week’s sensation not only in Blackpool but wherever else football is played.
Speculation is thick in the air. Why have the selectors left out the man who is still the game’s biggest box-office personality?
I should think the question answers itself. My opinion is that no invitation went to Matthews because for a couple of months he has for all practical purposes been out of the game, and, as he played at Stoke a week ago, is still not 100 per cent fit and a lot less than 100 per cent self-confident.
Short memories
BUT of course, the gossip-mongers will not be content with such a theory.
The public - or, at least, some of them - have short memories. Today the gloating, almost the exultation of a few of them, is almost indecent.
The game, I know, has rewarded him, and rewarded him richly, but, as I see it, football in this generation will always be under an obligation to a player who has proved that even in all the hurly-burly and insensate speed of the modern game football in the strict sense can still be played.
Stanley Matthews can and will ignore the uncharitable jubilation which in certain quarters has greeted the week’s event. What should concern him seriously is the implication in the writing of several informed critics that for him this is the end, that the day for a decent abdication has come.
My opinion is that there are still at least another couple of seasons of football in this artist among footballers, that he could and probably will re-establish himself before the end of this year, not only in the England team but in the affections of all those who seem now to have forsaken him.
Congratulations!
IN the meantime, there must be compliments to Eddie Shimwell on his selection for the continental tour, which is a recognition of a full-back who week after week plays strong, resolute games for his club and seeks no personal glory.
Compliments, too, to Harry Johnston on his belated restoration to the Football League XI, which is no less a recognition of a half-back who is now about as good as be has ever been.
And Stanley Mortensen - well, they couldn’t keep him out, for as long as there’s an England, which the song assures us will be a long, long time, an England team will always require such a swashbuckling forward as on his dav he still is.
So, “Good luck, Stan,” to him, too,
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 7 May 1949
NOT THERE THIS TIME
STRANGEST directors' box in the League is at Stoke, where the visiting directors watch the game - or what they can see of it - from a pew in the corner of the main stand opposite one of the corner flags.
Not that the City are inhospitable. It’s about the only square yard or two of space they can allot in a stand which is probably a generation older even than the out-of-date models at Blackpool.
It was so quiet behind the scenes at the Victoria Ground last weekend. When last I was there for the January Cuptie the boardroom was packed to the doors. Last weekend it was almost deserted.
Where, I asked myself - but asked nobody else, for I knew the answer - were all those Blackpool people who were swarming in this sanctum a few months ago, telling everybody who cared to listen to them that they never missed a Blackpool match.
That, of course, is true - if the Blackpool match is a Cuptie or some similar big game.
Not that I blame them for going to Wembley last weekend. It is more or less a free country, and, after all, football is a game and not a holy crusade. But I do wish that these people wouldn’t protest such fanatical loyalty when it just happens to be convenient.
Methinks they do protest too much!
***
HUGH KELLY must think Cup Final Day has a hoodoo in it for him.
Exactly a year by the football calendar after the Wembley match in which he was one of the principals in a free-kick incident that probably decided the game for Manchester United, this accomplished Scot, who has risen into the front rank of wing half-backs since the war, broke his nose at Stoke.
Nobody suspected how serious the accident - a mid-air collision - had been. Few people knew that he was playing the second half as a half-speed wing forward under such a disability.
Kelly was one of the few men in Blackpool’s tangerine jerseys who had not been in the wars all season.
Then, a week before the season’s end, and, incidentally, only 10 days before his wedding, this happened.
"I never knew such a season for casualties,” complains Manager Joe Smith. And, to be fair to Blackpool, I didn’t, either.
THE few hundred people who watched the match between the schoolboys of Blackpool and Bristol at Bloomfield-road a week ago must have wondered why the visiting team ran off the field a few minutes after they had gone on it for the prematch kick- about.
No, there was no crisis behind the scenes.
The Blackpool FC team had reported at the ground before boarding the coach which was to take them to Stoke. The Bristol manager said, “My lads would love to meet your lads.”
Said Manager Joe Smith “Well, if they’ll come off they can meet ’em.”
So off the Bristol boys trooped, were introduced to the First Division men, and were given a few words of encouragement by Stanley Mortensen, who is as good at these little social courtesies, as any player I know in the game today.
FRIC SIBLEY, the full-back from Blackpool. is on Grimsby Town’s transfer list.
At Grimsby this year he has played in both full-back positions, at centre-half and at left-half.
Now he wants to leave, to play for a club nearer his home, which is still in Blackpool.
***
WHEN you talk to Neil Franklin, the England centre-half, you realise that it is one pf football's modern miracles that so often he should dominate the centre of the field.
For there is not such a lot of Mr. Franklin.
A couple of Stoke directors said after last weekend's match when I was in conversation with them that Neil stands 5ft. 10in. I should think that now and again even he must wish that he did. For if he’s an inch over 5ft. 9in. I should he surprised, and that in these days, when such a lot of football is played in the air, is no height at all for a centre-half.
Yet this man takes the ball high or low, is today as a centre-half out all on his own among all the men playing in that key position. And yet he is so modest, so unassuming about it.
But, then, I find that all the star men invariably are, in football and every other game.
THIS (as they are saying in “ Ignorance is Bliss’) is a coincidence.
Eddie Shimwell’s penalty at Stoke last weekend was scored on the anniversary of the only other penalty he has ever converted for Blackpool. The other one was in a certain match at Wembley in April, 1948.
It was, by the way, the first penalty which had produced a goal for Blackpool since the match at Portsmouth on November 13.
Since then three have been awarded but all three were missed.
I know that Eddie Shimwell consented to take this one only after a lot of persuasion.
He never fancies himself at all as a penalty king and, in fact, said he would never take another after he had shot wide with one in Blackpool’s opening match of the present season on the ground of his old club at Bramall lane,
A year after Wembley
A football. What was happening last weekend to a few of the men who were in Blackpool’s Wembley team a year earlier?
Joe Robinson, the goalkeeper, was playing for Hull City’s second team in the Midland League.
Johnny Crosland was captaining Blackpoo1 Reserve against Bury Reserve at Bloomfield-road.
Alec Munro was away on a scouting mission for Blackpool.
George Dick was in West Ham United’s second team in the London Combination. He has been playing a few recent games for it as a centre-half.
Walter Rickett was watching Blackpool against Bury after learning two days earlier that he had strained knee ligaments.
How soon the glory fades!
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