22 October 1949 Arsenal 1 Blackpool 0

NO-NONSENSE ARSENAL SCORE THE ONLY GOAL

The old Blackpool story - 

NO PUNCH

Arsenal 1, Blackpool 0

By “Clifford Greenwood”

FOR WEEKS I HAVE BEEN TOLD “WAIT UNTIL THE RAIN COMES - AND THEN YOU’LL SEE CLASS FOOT BALL.”

The rain came again today to London, where there were frequent showers during the morning after sufficient of it earlier in the week to soak the parched earth of Highbury.

It was soft on top, with a glaze of grease on it, but it promised the sort of fast, attractive game which Blackpool matches in the capital usually are.

Outside Highbury were the familiar scenes of mounted police, choked streets for a quarter of a mile radius, and the threat again, even an hour before the kick-off, of locked gates for the visit of the team that Arsenal graciously announced as “the most attractive in the provinces."

It was a team at full strength again, with Billy Wardle back in the position where last week Walter Rickett played his last game for the club before a transfer which, I am told, is in the region of £6,000.

Wally Barnes, captain of Wales, was in the Arsenal defence again, and a forward line which has been shaking the net in all the recent home games was led by Don Roper, the Southampton wing-forward, who a year or two ago nearly came to Blackpool after being repeatedly watched by the club.

BIGGEST GATE 

They were thick on the slopes before 2-30, and at that time every artery to the ground was nearly impassable.

The attendance, in spite of the lowering clouds, which were massing again, was estimated to border on 60,000 when the teams appeared - the biggest gate of the season, at Highbury this season.

Teams:

ARSENAL: Platt: Barnes, Smith (L), Macaulay, Compton (L), Mercer, Cox, Logie, Roper, Lewis, McPherson.

BLACKPOOL: Farm; Shimwell, Garrett. Johnston, Hayward, Kelly, Matthews, Mortensen. McIntosh, McCall, Wardle.

Referee: Mr. B. J. Flanagan (Sheffield).

I noticed in the distinguished visitors-box - for they even have these little refinements at Highbury - one of the Blackpool MPs, Wing Commander J. Roland Robinson.

A pre-match reflection: Arsenal entered this game after playing eight games without a defeat and Blackpool with an undefeated record, in the last seven.

THE GAME

The sun, which apparently had not been on sufficient overtime this year, was out again when Blackpool took the field to the sort of affectionate reception which the team from the seaside Is always given in London.

It was a sun which, in fact, was glaring across the front of both goals after Harry Johnston, winning the toss, had taken the aid of a freshening wind. 

Tom Garrett Was content to hit a clearance over the line on Arsenal’s right wing, and from the throw-in the Blackpool goal was imperilled by the length which Joe Mercer reached with the throw.

It caused George Farm to take his first goal kick inside the first 30 seconds, but was followed by a couple of raids opened by Stanley Matthews.

SLICED CENTRE

In the first Matthews with a crossfield pass, gave Wardle a position which the outside-left lost with a sliced centre, and with the second the right winger compelled the tall Leslie Compton to concede a free-kick which also led nowhere.

It was neat, dapper football which Blackpool played in the opening five minutes. Every pass was crisp and direct.

On the right wing the elusive Matthews was as elusive as ever, which is to say that for about three of the five minutes the Arsenal left back could only speculate on where he was going - and invariably found he was going the other way.

Twice in rapid succession Hayward got to a long forward pass before the aggressive Roper could reach it, and once under pressure he could only half hit out a clearance which Reg Cox, the wing forward from ’Spurs, could only stab wide as the ball bounced awkwardly back at him.

JOHNSTON THERE

Outstretched leg saves a Logie shot

The next time Arsenal surged on to the Blackpool defence a goal was near.

Backwards and forwards the ball bounced, was shot in and repelled. On to it, as it rolled loose, the little Logie darted, shot it back, hit the outstretched leg of Johnston, guarding his goal close in.

It was great football, open and direct, by both front lines, with Wardle shooting a thunderbolt which cannoned back off the alert Barnes’ back.

A minute later Hayward lost ball which was skidding everywhere on the grease, and retrieved it with a back pass to his waiting goalkeeper.

Platt made a desperate running clearance as Mortensen chased Kelly’s long down-the-field pass, and there were other Blackpool raids succeeding this attack before Cox crossed a ball which Farm fielded brilliantly under the bar as Logie hurtled past him into the net.

IN THE GRIP

Fifteen non-stop- minutes had gone and there was not a lot between two hell - for - leather forward lines which out in the open made a lot of progress with the minimum of passes but in front of goal were in the grip of the defences

Repeatedly, however, in the succeeding minutes, Arsenal’s three inside forwards nearly forced a goal by storm.

Garrett crossed Logie’s path and halted him brilliantly as the forward raced into a shooting position.

Then, twice in rapid succession in the next 30 seconds, with the Arsenal’s guns all blazing, Farm was in action, diving forward to two back passes from a retreating defence, losing the second and snatching it off the grass as Roper tumbled head over heels after him in pursuit of the loose ball.

Arsenal won the first corner of the match in the 20th minute, a couple of minutes after Matthews had left the field with a sponge held to his bleeding nose and a half minute before he returned.

ARSENAL LEAD

Lewis leaps to head a goal

The corner produced a goal - produced it almost direct - the second goal conceded by Blackpool in eight matches. It looked so simple, too.

McPherson crossed the ball perfectly, Farm leaped at it near the far post, leaped, I think, a fraction too late, and missed the ball, which in a big jump REG LEWIS headed past him into the net.

That was in the 20th minute. In the 21st it should have been 1-1.

There was a fast raid on Blackpool’s left wing. Compton and Mercer hurled themselves at a high centre crossed from the flank, missed it, collided in mid-air, and went to earth in a double knock-out.

The ball came in loose. Mortensen lashed at it and over it. It was still spinning under its own momentum as the ball rolled on to McIntosh, who in front of a gaping goal shot low and fast at the unprotected crouching Platt.

That was a big escape.

COMPTON HURT 

Arsenal afterwards played without Leslie Compton, who went off for repairs, leaving Arsenal centre-forward Roper at left back and the left back at centre-half.

Yet, in spite of all this, Arsenal won a corner, and could not take it until after a new ball had been supplied in response to signals from Reg Cox intimating that the old one had burst.

A second corner followed it - a corner won by 10 men all out for a second goal and playing the sort of no-nonsense football which makes goals.

Nor had this corner been cleared before Farm had made an acrobatic clearance which left him clinging to the bar like a monkey on a stick.

Immediately, Blackpool stormed into the game and in a couple of raids, which were followed by others, nearly snatched a goal.

Tom Garrett opened the offensive, ran forward 10 yards' to a ball 40 yards out and shot it so fast and at such a pace that as Platt leaped at it and punched it over the bar for the best save of the half. Harry Johnston patted the young fullback on the back in congratulation.

The corner was never cleared by Arsenal, who had abruptly become a team of nine men in defence and one lone forward in the centre circle.

In the end, as Platt cast himself at a high-flying centre crossed by Matthews and lost it in mid-air, Wardle stabbed the ball back out of the goalkeeper’s reach as he fell forward to snatch it off the grass.

This left McCall to shoot it back into a massed defence off which it cannoned, with the goalkeeper prostrate yards away.

It was all Blackpool against Arsenal’s battling 10 as the end of the half approached.

NON-STOP PRESSURE

Even with his nose encased in a bandage, Stanley Matthews was the architect of half these raids, and yet there was a purpose down the entire line which was battering away non-stop for minutes at this time on a reinforced Arsenal contesting every inch of its territory.

Yet when the London team’s four-man attack went into action for the first time for seven or eight minutes it won a corner - its fourth of the half against Blackpool’s one - as Shimwell

leaped high to head out backwards a centre which Cox was given all the time he wanted to cross.

Repeatedly again a tall defence was repelling in the closing minutes of the half a forward line smaller in nearly every position.

That, I know, is the old, old story. Otherwise it had been a fast and dramatic half which Blackpool should not have been losing.

Half-time: Arsenal 1, Blackpool 0.

SECOND HALF

Reports reached the Press Box during the interval that five stitches had been put in a gash over Leslie Compton’s left eye.

Yet this Middlesex cricketer, who is tough, mighty tough, came out with the rest of the men in the red jerseys and the white sleeves, and positioned himself at outside-right after the referee had had a solicitous word with him.

Even with a bandage so massive that it resembled an eye shade Compton was in two of Arsenal’s first three attacks, and it was, in fact, an appreciable time before the Blackpool front line could take a pass from its half-backs and make a raid at all.

GOOD HALVES

Johnston a constructive star

Not that those half-backs were not in the game. All three were, and looking good in the process, with Johnston constantly intercepting the short pass and doing something constructive with the ball when he took it away.

Nothing in particular, after all the excursions and alarums of the first half, happened for a long time, except that Farm collected a series of back - passes and Compton, unfamiliar in a forward position. constantly raced into offside without, I think, the Blackpool defence setting the trap for him.

Still, Arsenal continued to attack, and, at least, were shooting, Logie and Lewis in rapid succession blazing away wide, but still blazing away. The Blackpool forwards had not, with seven minutes of the half gone, been sufficiently close to the Arsenal goal to manage even that.

SHIMWELL CLEARS

A corner came to the raiding Arsenal which Shimwell cleared with a decision there was no mistaking, but Blackpool front line could still not make a shooting position or even reach shooting range.

McIntosh once gamely chased an impossible pass from his left wing over the line.

Otherwise, there was scarcely a Blackpool challenge at all and scarcely a bit of ordered football anywhere, in spite of Arsenal's spasmodic pressure.

All the glitter had gone out of the game as the sun had gone out of the sky.

McCall had one shot into a massed defence from Kelly’s neat pass and a minute later, after Mortensen had walked out of the way of a Matthews pass and left his wing-half in a shooting position, Johnston shot a low ball which Platt held on the line.

MORTENSEN RAID

A minute later, too, it required three men, lashing furiously into the tackle, to repel Mortensen as the inside-right went on a corkscrew raid into the entire pack.

About a minute after that, Kelly, as if showing his forwards how to shoot, had the tall Platt in action again.

All these attacks were being repulsed by an Arsenal defence who could always mass under pressure into a nearly impregnable front, as Arsenal defensive for a quarter of a century have always been able to.

But Mr. Flanagan said

“No” to Arsenal

And those Highbury men were twice close to a goal in raids which followed. Mr. Flanagan properly refusing a demand for a penalty when a fast, rising shot hit Kelly’s left hand, and a minute later, Hayward halting Logie superbly, with the Scot tearing in on to a squared pass.

A couple of minutes after wards, too, 65,000 people - the official figure and a capacity attendance - were nearly cheering their heads off as the disabled but game Compton raced forward to a pass and shot a ball which Farm punched out brilliantly as it was swerving away from him Arsenal were winning by a goal on the score sheet and nearly everywhere on the field with 18 minutes left.

All chance of Blackpool escaping defeat seemed remote, with too many passes in the team's football in the front line, a line never as direct as the Arsenal’s thunder and lightning attack.

Blackpool had two chances in the last 10 minutes and squandered them both.

From the first Matthews hooked the ball too high from a position where a goal seemed certain. From the second McIntosh zig-zagged into shooting range and shot over.

Four minutes from time Hayward came up for a corner, headed down a ball which entangled itself in an Arsenal fullback’s legs on the line and was desperately retrieved by the goalkeeper.

Blackpool went down fighting, but it was a vain last bid.

Result:

ARSENAL 1 (Lewis 20 mins)

BLACKPOOL 0

Two spectators injured

ARTHUR BENHAM, aged 36. and Clifford Wood, 14, both of Islington, were admitted to the Royal Northern Hospital after a mishap during the Arsenal v. Blackpool match when part of a wall is reported to have fallen.

Woods was treated for a cut leg and Benham x-rayed for a suspected fractured leg.

These are some of the other things that happened at Highbury this afternoon:

People fainted among the crowd of 65,000.

Casualties on the field were frequent.

Leslie Compton had to have stitches inserted above his left eye.

The ball had to be changed.

COMMENTS ON THE GAME

IT was a goal which never should have counted - a goal which the Blackpool defence of recent weeks have not been in the habit of conceding - which won this game.

Yet Arsenal deserved to win it. That was indisputable.

For not only were Blackpool defeated by a team which during the last hour was reduced to a force of 10 men and a disabled centre-half, but a team which exploited the swift direct move as Blackpool too seldom introduced it into their game - a game which again seemed to have too many passes in it and too many complex moves.

It is a long time since the forwards were so mastered in front of the goal or shot as seldom. The line had not one big man in it either in the figurative or, unfortunately, in the literal sense, either.

Again the big man beat the little man nearly all the time - and Arsenal had the big men.

CAPTAIN’S PART

One admired the tireless resolution of Harry Johnston, playing as a captain should play with the tide surging against his team, and the half-back line, in fact, was about as impressive as it invariably is.

Nor could one blame the defence, which may have lost position now and again under tempestuous pressure but was never stampeded.

No, it was the old story of a forward line which could not score and which today seemed to possess less front-of-goal punch than ever.

It was Blackpool’s first defeat since September 3, when the Wolves won at Bloomfield-road.

And Blackpool could not complain about it.

---

NEXT WEEK: Bolton like the seaside air

UNTIL last season Bolton Wanderers’ only question whenever they visited Blackpool for a League match was “Will it be a couple of points or only one today?”

In First and Second Division football, and in the Cup, too, no Bolton team lost at Blackpool from the first world war until February 12 this year. Even then it was not until four minutes from time that Willie McIntosh scored the only goal - his first for Blackpool - to end this remarkable and almost incredible sequence.

The Wanderers, therefore, will, I suppose, writes Clifford Greenwood, come to Blackpool next weekend for the second successive all- Lancashire game on the ground persuaded that there is something a little bigger than a sporting chance for them in spite of the fact that they have yet to win a game away from Burnden Park this season.

Blackpool’s chief interest will probably be in Nat Lofthouse, the centre-forward, who, according to rumour, has been signed not, fewer than a dozen times by Blackpool during the last couple of years.

Blackpool, who have already played four home draws this season, a figure which no other club has equalled or particularly wants to equal in the First Division, should in theory be able to take all the cake instead of half.

But with a Bolton team at Blackpool anything obviously could happen, for there seems to be something in this seaside air which suits the Wanderers of Burnden.

---

AND NOW THE MORTENSEN STORY 

- In 1938 a pale shy boy came to Blackpool...

By Clifford Greenwood

A BOY from the north-east coast, about as thin as a hop-pole and pale as a ghost, walked into the office of the Blackpool Football Club on Easter Monday, 1938, half an hour after he had played in a schoolboys match on the ground.

There he met, in his own words, “a short, broadly-built man with an eye like a hawk’s,” who said to him “Are you the inside-right?" and, before he could answer, barked at him  

"You looked bigger on the field”

Then the man, who was called Col. William Parkinson, Justice of the Peace and Blackpool FC chairman, uttered eight words which made all the joy bells ring for the shy little boy of 16.

“Would you like to become a Blackpool player?” asked the Colonel.

And the boy, who was Stanley Mortensen, the vest - pocket dynamo, destined to become an England forward a few years later, said “Thank you, sir, but I’ll have to ask my Mum.”

That was Stanley Mortensen’s introduction to football in the bigtime. He tells about it in his book, “Football Is My Game,’ which will be on the bookstalls and in the shops next Thursday.

The wastelands

IT is a story which ranges from the wastelands of South Shields to Wembley and the glittering panopied stadiums of the continent, with princes and dictators in the Royal box, and it is told in prose as unaffected as the man who writes it.

In the first sentence of the preface he apologises for the frequent intrusion of the first personal pronoun.

"And,” he said when I was talking to him about his first essay in authorship this week. "I'm not certain now that I should have written it while I’m still so young in the game.

"Do you know what persuaded me to write it in the end? It was just to show how a lad can come from a humble home, and, given the breaks, but chiefly if he’s prepared to work . . . and work . and work at it, can reach the heights in football and in everything else.

“That,” said Stanley Mortensen, as if he ought to apologise for it, “is what you’d call my philosophy.”

Played, dreamed

HE has never been ashamed to tell you that he was not born in the purple.

The early chapters of “Football Is My Game” take you into the back streets of a north-eastern seaport, where a little boy played and dreamed and lived football, one of the two sons of a woman widowed when Stanley was five, the woman of whom in his dedication he writes “My mother who worked that I might play,” who, as he reveals, has only once seen him in action on the field.

Few people who watch him now know of the sweat and toil and tears which were spent in the evolution of Stanley Mortensen, the England footballer.

Blackpool were less interested in this grandson of a Norwegian sailor than in his partner in the South Shields schoolboys’ team, Dick Withington. And for a year Blackpool were not impressed by their new inside-right in the colts.

Too slow

"I WAS sometimes played in the ‘A’ team, but as often as not I was in the ‘B’ XI - and that, perhaps, because there was no ‘ C ’ team,” he writes.

'‘Something was wrong , something which threatened my whole football future,” and the forward who was so soon afterwards to become the fastest raider over 20 or 30 yards in the game confesses, “ I was the slowest player on Blackpool’s books!”

"Too slow to attend a funeral,” he titles one of the chapters, and writes how when the staff reported for training in July 1939 for the season which Hitler interrupted in its first fortnight he was told, “You’re lucky to be re-signed,” and, in fact, played the few games of that abbreviated season as a wing-half.

The climb

STANLEY MORTENSEN took no fast elevator to the top floor.

He climbed, floor by floor, and he acknowledges the aid of the men who encouraged him and tutored him, from Bill Tremelling, the Blackpool 1929-30 promotion team centre-half and Preston North End Wembley captain, to Manager Joe Smith, "the boss who has been through it all, and for whom the players will always willingly go through it all, too.”

"Football is My Game” is packed with stories of great matches and the trivia of the dressing room which make such fascinating gossip.

Secrets are revealed, one of them that the famous equalising goal against the ’Spurs in the Cup semi-final of 1948 was the product of a move rehearsed weeks earlier with Stanley Matthews, for whom, devoting an entire chapter to him, this other Stanley betrays a veneration only this side of idolatry.

Laughter, tears

THERE are laughter and tears in this book - the tears which Stanley Mortensen unashamedly admits he shed when, as he left the field, in a bedraggled line of Blackpool players, in the wake of the jubilant Manchester United conquerors after the 1948 Wembley, he lifted one arm in salutation to the Blackpool thousands packed in the terraces over the players’ entrance.

“The effect was magical,” he writes. “With a thunderous roar they let loose all their hot fanaticism for us and for the game of Soccer ... It wasn’t because I was on the losing side, but as I passed from their view and waved again, they could still see me, but I couldn’t see them, for my eyes were filled with tears.”

But the book’s chief charm, I think, is in its revelation of the little intimacies - the wrestling for exercise with Sable, his bull terrier; the deliberate walking through the teeming thousands on the Promenade to practise a body swerve; the insomnia which for years racked him; his devotion to his mother and his pride in his Blackpool home and n his wife, Jean, whom he calls in the dedication, “ Blackpool’s most enthusiastic supporter and keenest critic.”

It is the man as well as the footballer who comes out of these pages; the man who can write as his last line, “ Football - it’s a great life - if you don’t weaken,” the man whom fame has not spoiled.

---

Jottings from all parts

BY "CLIFFORD GREENWOOD" 22 October 1949

THE UNKNOWN IN GOAL

THERE are certain matches in Blackpool’s history which are repeatedly the subject of argument and almost inevitably the subject of questions submitted to this writer to settle the arguments.

There is another this week about the famous Blackpool - Oldham Athletic match which on Good Friday 1930 broke the ground record at Blackpool 23,868 - and resulted also in a few of the Blackpool gates being literally broken as a few extra thousand swarmed in.

Who, asks Mr. W. Singleton, of 6, South-square, was in the Oldham goal in that match? It should have been Jack Hacking, the ex-Blackpool goalkeeper, who went to Boundary Park via Fleetwood and ultimately played’ for England, but he was taken ill on the eve of the match.

An unknown understudy - “F. Moss ” was the name in the programme - appeared - and F. Moss was Frank Moss, who afterwards went to Arsenal and four years later was himself in the England goal.

***

JACKIE ROBINSON’S transfer from Sunderland to Lincoln City will cause no particular depression in Blackpool. For now it is improbable that he will ever play against Blackpool again.

This talented forward’s record in Blackpool matches both for Sunderland and Sheffield Wednesday is littered with goals. He is one of those forwards who always seem to have a joy day against a Blackpool defence. He scored four goals - and almost faster than you could say Jackie Robinson - in the sensational 5-0 home defeat of Blackpool by Sunderland early in 1947, and had another in last season’s 3-3 match on the ground.

And it was Jackie who nearly deprived Blackpool of the War Cup in 1943 with one goal for Sheffield Wednesday in the first match and another in the second in a Final which Blackpool won by an aggregate of 4-3.

***

AS GAME as they come is Willie McIntosh. Critics he may have - and has - but David might have been as justifiably criticised for not being a little taller and heavier when he faced Goliath.

If only this little Scot were an inch or two higher off the ground.

Few people knew it - and probably only a vigilant referee suspected - that he played the last half-hour of the Liverpool match dazed after a collision.

As soon as the game was over - and hey was not even certain of the result when it was all over -McIntosh required medical attention, and when I left the ground two doctors were diagnosing a case of mild concussion.

These big present-day defences may hammer him down, but he refuses to stay down. He has not scored the goals he expected to score when he came back into training during the summer after a minor operation on a knee, but how he’s tried to beat not only heavyweight centre-halves but Mother Nature herself.

If he’s not done it, I for one am not disposed to blame him.

***

CHEERS FOR REF

COMPLIMENTS to Mr. J. Williams, of Bolton, on his efficient, unostentatious control of the Blackpool - Liverpool match.

As 23rd man on the field he was one of the game’s big personalities, exercising his authority without any dramatics, writes Clifford Greenwood.

In fact, he attracted notice to himself only when early in the second half he was so solicitous about Willie McIntosh when the Blackpool centre - forward was hurt, that when the player returned to the field he was not content until he had gone to the Scot and been given his own assurance that he was fit for the fray again.

They cheered him when that happened. They could have justifiably cheered him when he left the field.

One of the older school is J. Williams, but he can teach a few of the younger exhibitionists how to conduct themselves and how to conduct a football match.

***

IN ANSWER to all those correspondents who have written “Blackpool are supposed to want an outside-left, and yet Hughie McLaren, who was released by the club a year or two ago, has now been transferred from Kilmarnock to Derby County. He’s an outside-left, and if he’s good enough for Derby he should have been good enough for Blackpool”

That’s almost unanswerable logic if Hughie McLaren had ever been a Blackpool player. But he never was. It was another left-wing forward of his name who went from Blackpool to Scotland.

***

NEVER, I think, was the standard of football higher among the young players of the Fylde, whatever it may be among the elder brethren. One midweek Lancashire League match was sufficient to convince me of that.

Now I hear good reports of B. Dewhirst, the left-half of Blackpool Boys’ Club, who was in the recent Lancashire youth trial at Blackburn.

He played clever constructive football and his passes generally were to advantage, while he was quick at getting back to help the defence,” writes Mr. J. Barnes, secretary of Blackpool and District Amateur League - the league on whose recommendation Michael Johnson, the ex-St. Annes Athletic inside forward, was given a Lancashire trial.

B. Dewhirst is not yet 18 - and Blackpool are, I am told, interested, even if the club have at present and apparently for many years almost an embarrassment of talent in the half-back line.

Now if only he’d been a wing forward - or a scoring inside forward . . .

***

Tip for Cap

WRITES a contemporary: “W. J. Slater, of Yorkshire Amateurs and Blackpool. is a certainty for an amateur international cap this season.”

No “ifs” or “buts” about it.

Bill Slater, according to this writer, is already in the England team, which has never contained a Blackpool amateur since the days before the war when W. W. Parr was the country’s best unpaid outside-right.

***

Blackpool team magnet

THE amazing pulling power of the Blackpool football team in London is revealed today in a statement made by Mr. Bob Wall, Arsenal box office chief, to Mr. John Thompson, as reported in the “Daily Mirror.”

Said Mr. Wall:

“Three weeks ago we had four times more applications for tickets for this match than we could accommodate. Since then 8,000 letters have been returned.

'‘Matthews’s name on the team list is responsible for many of these extra spectators.”

***

SOLD

LATEST tale they are telling in the northeast is about the director of a certain famous club which is always on the scout for new players.

Weekend after weekend this director was prospecting. In the end he went to one match, was greatly impressed by the visiting team, recommended the signing of three of its players.

No action was taken. He had been watching his own team!

***

TEAMS DOING WELL

COMPLIMENTS to the two senior Blackpool teams who came out of their games on Saturday without defeat; to the two junior sides, who continued to do well, and to the Lancashire Midweek League team, who had a resounding 8-0 victory over Oldham Athletic.

Congratulations, too, writes “Supporter,” to Stanley Mortensen on opening England’s scoring account against Wales last week, and on playing such a grand game, though in the wing half position for most of the time.

Arrangements are now complete for the Supporters Club Guy Fawkes dance at the Tower Ballroom on Wednesday, November 2.

Tickets are on sale at the Supporters’ huts and from committee members.