THREE BLACKPOOL GOALS IN STRONG FINISH
Punch a long time coming, then Albion defence reels
DRAMATIC CHANGE
Blackpool 3, West Bromwich Albion 0
By “Clifford Greenwood”
WEST BROMWICH ALBION had to enter the game at Blackpool this afternoon without two Irish internationals, centre-half Jack Vernon and centre-forward David Walsh, but included the new £15,000 signing from Port Vale, Ron Allen, at outside-right.
The Blackpool forwards were again led by 20-year-old part-time professional Jackie Mudie, and as Willie McIntosh was drafted out on to the left wing had again a front line which had three centre-forwards in it.
The defence was strength, Eddie Shimwell passing a test earlier in the day.
It was a cold afternoon, with a fretful wind blowing into the south goal, and the attendance was affected in spite of Blackpool’s continued bid for the First Division title.
FOG MEMORY
When these teams met at the Hawthorns in November fog fell and caused an abandonment shortly before time after Blackpool had established a 2-1 lead.
There were 20,000 present when the teams appeared, but the number was rapidly increasing.
Teams:
BLACKPOOL: Farm, Shimwell, Wright; Johnston, Crosland, Kelly; Hobson, Mortensen, Mudie, W. J. Slater, McIntosh.
WEST BROMWICH ALBION: Sanders; Pemberton, Millard; Kennedy, Horne, Ryan; Allen, Smith, Wilcox, Barlow, Lee.
Referee: Mr. J. S. Pickles (Bradford).
THE GAME
First half
The Albion won the toss and chose the wind.
Blackpool opened with a succession of raids, a free-kick which Kelly punted into the massed ranks of the Albion, and a high forward pass which Sanders fielded.
In Albion attacks which followed Allen was given a clear course with a long down-field pass and lost a chance as he sliced inside a pass to the waiting Crosland.
Mudie opened one left wing raid by Blackpool with a neat, pass and Johnston another, but in the early minutes both defences were reasonably firm, if a little open, and nothing to excite the people happened.
UNDER THE BAR
Nothing whatever, in fact, until Pemberton took a lash at a bouncing ball and missed it.
The aggressive McIntosh pounced on the ball, resisted one challenge, eluded a second man, and crossed a centre which Sanders held high under the bar, with a couple of Blackpool’s lightweight forwards racing in on him.
I noticed Kelly and Crosland in rapid succession make fine clearances, with the Albion forwards raiding fast on an open front
And in front of the other goal the persistence of Hobson and the calculating passes of Slater built several advances before Hobson raced away from his man, won a corner, and before it had been cleared crossed a second centre which McIntosh hammered high over the bar.
FARM IN ACTION
Allen crosses fast, low centres
There was not a lot between the teams, and within a minute of this corner, in fact, Farm in rapid succession held low centres crossed fast in front of his goal by the elusive Ron Allen.
Mudie and Hobson, after a crisp exchange of passes, sent Mortensen away to shoot a ball which Sanders held as he fell and as the offside whistle went a little belatedly on a linesman’s signal against the inside-right.
The Albion forwards were a brisk, direct line, fast on to a pass and all the time giving the hall plenty of air.
There were still as many raids by one forward line as by the other, Mortensen once with a gem of a pass making position for Hobson to cross a low centre which Sanders snatched up with perfect judgment from Mudie.
BEST RAID
Yet, the best raid of the half was worked by the Albion in the 20th minute as the tall Barlow swept across field a pass which Allen took away from Wright before crossing a ball which Lee headed low into Farm’s hands.
Within a minute the Blackpool goalkeeper was in action again as a bouncing ball eluded £am once, and was retrieved by him as he fell forward desperately and almost audaciously at the feet of Smith.
Within another minute, too, Crosland made a grand clearance, crossing from one wing to another as the Albion forwards continued their assault.
Yet, in this switchback game it was Blackpool a couple of minutes later who nearly took the lead. Hobson released the sort of pass which centre-forwards love to chase, and Mudie, chasing it, lost it only as Sanders dived full length at his feet almost on the penalty line.
PLENTY OF INCIDENT
Incidents came thick and fast in front of both goals, chiefly because the forwards raided so fast and released their passes with an equal rapidity.
The Albion’s understudy centre- forward, Wilcox, escaped Crosland once, made shooting position for himself, and shot half a dozen yards wide.
Exactly on the half-hour a goal was nearer than it had ever been.
Kelly gave McIntosh a lobbed pass to chase, and the forward, chasing it, won a corner and crossed it perfectly.
In the chaos which followed in the Albion goal area Sanders appeared to be hit by, rather than to repel, Mortensen’s shot. Then Slater, darting to the rebounding ball, shot it back and found the Albion goalkeeper in his path again.
Another minute, and in this game which neither team could dictate for long the Albion were as near a goal.
FARM HURT
Awkward fall after free-kick
Smith flighted over a free-kick which escaped Farm and must have nearly brushed the far post as the goalkeeper fell, and fell so awkwardly that he had to be attended by the trainer once the raid had been repulsed.
So it went on, with a goal threatening but never coming, a man in one defence or the other always intercepting the last pass.
Even Shimwell became a wing forward in one Blackpool raid which, in common with so many others, petered out before it could reach the Albion goal.
LUCKY SAVE
Yet, this goal was fortunate not to fall seven minutes before half-time when Hobson hooked the ball over his own head, deceived his full-back, and steered inside a ball which Mudie hooked wide of Sanders, only to watch it hit the goalkeeper’s outstretched left leg as he jerked it out.
The Blackpool pressure was almost continuous as the interval approached, Hobson once heading a couple of feet wide of a post after Mudie had crossed the ball to him.
Yet a minute later it was the Blackpool goal whose downfall was near.
CLEARED ANYWHERE
Barlow took a shot from a position where the Blackpool defence obviously expected the offside whistle, and the ball bounced so unexpectedly that it hit Farm’s face as the goalkeeper fell forward to it and in the end was cleared anywhere by an unprepared defence.
It is a long time since I have seen a half in which goals have so often seemed so near without one coming.
Half-time: Blackpool 0, West Bromwich Albion 0.
SECOND HALF
It was the old story early in the second half.
In the first minute Allen raced in after Wilcox’s long downfield pass as if intent on the elusive goal, reached shooting range, but was halted by the Kelly-Wright alliance.
Inside the next 30 seconds - how this game swept from one goal to another - Mudie found himself in possession of the ball and glided it forward to Mortensen, who lost it in a position where he appeared to be offside, even if Mr. Pickles did not seem to think so.
McIntosh, unfamiliar though he may be’ with the wing position, knows how to swing in the ball from a comer. He crossed another perfectly after winning it with a do-or-die tackle on his full-back.
It was cleared and inevitably, as if this game had still to conform to a 50-50 pattern, the Albion’s front line broke away in a raid which ended in Farm holding a ball which was shot low at him by Barlow.
The defences appeared as impregnable as ever, or were being made to appear impregnable by two forward lines who raided fast on to the penalty area but once there could make no further progress.
When a goal was near at last it was nearly an “own goal,” for Horne, harassed by Mudie, decided on a back pass and hit the ball so fast and so wide of Sanders that the goalkeeper had to fall to his right to hold it.
ESCAPE - AND GOAL
Mortensen gives Blackpool the lead
Then, within 60 dramatic seconds between the 22nd and 23rd minutes of the second half, the Blackpool goal had a remarkable escape and the Albion’s defence at last surrendered.
The escape came after a corner. In a confusion of men and passes Kennedy, the Albion's right-half, leaped to a high ball, headed it forward, and watched it pass outside the reach of the leaping Farm before it was headed out of the empty goal. Shimwell and Crosland both hurling themselves at it in a desperate leap.
Direct from the clearance Blackpool front line advanced on an open front.
Mudie took a pass, half lost it as two men swooped on him, retrieved it, and appeared from the Press box either to stab it back to MORTENSEN or to leave it to him, for the inside- right to crack it past Sanders from 10 yards out before the goalkeeper could move to it.
STORMING RAIDS
It was the sort of snap goal I had never expected this match to produce, and its immediate sequel was a storming series of raids by the Albion’s forward division, interrupted by, Blackpool breakaways.
Two of these came to a premature end as Hobson hesitated and was dispossessed by a fast- tackling half-back refusing to give him any sort of freedom.
Yet the punch was at last in Blackpool’s forward line after that goal.
Hobson and Mudie won a comer in partnership almost by force of arms in spite of their small stature, and in the next minute Hobson shot barely wide of a post after making position for himself perfectly.
GREAT GOAL
No. 2 was always coming afterwards. It arrived 10 minutes after the first, and a great goal it was.
The amateur, W. SLATER, took a pass out on the left wing, cut inside with it, eluded one man, swerved another, and from a couple of yards inside the penalty box with every man, I suspect, expecting a pass, shot instead a ball which passed the leaping Sanders as if it had come out of a gun.
Four minutes later it was 3-0 in this sensational collapse of the Albion’s defence.
NUMBER THREE
Two men made the goal, and a third was there to complete it Over from far out on the left wing McIntosh crossed a great r centre. Mudie, waiting near the far post for it, leaped an amazing height for a man so small to head it back across the face of the Albion’s goal, where MORTENSEN headed it down and away from a goal keeper left to his mercy.
The Albion would still not call it a day. however, and, in fact, with ten minutes left would have reduced the lead if Shimwell had not been in position to clear on the line of an empty goal.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 3 (Mortensen 68, 82 W. Slater 78)
WEST BROM 0
COMMENTS ON THE GAME
IN 14 dramatic minutes after another goalless draw had been looming on a darkening horizon, the Blackpool forwards won this game.
It took them a long time to produce a scoring plan, but once it was put into commission the Albion’s defence, which for too long had been made to appear impregnable, was torn apart.
It was a curiously in and out game that this front line played, as curious as the game itself which erupted into drama out of a stalemate.
I think Jackie Mudie deserves another game. He had not a goal this time, but he revealed sufficient football sense to make two of the three that were scored, and once the inside men came into the game was always in the position for the pass.
COPYBOOK CENTRES
Out on the left wing McIntosh was no failure either.
Refusing to play to the pattern prescribed for wing forwards - and who is to blame him? - he still in spurts was an aggressive raider and revealed a remarkable capacity for crossing centres straight out of the text book.
The defence always seemed equal to all that was required of it, its positional play being so sound again that always when one man was passed there was always another to halt the raider.
The two full-backs. Shimwell and Wright, were, I think. Blackpool’s stars in a match which in the end was one with a greater conviction than had been promised during the first hour of the afternoon.
NEXT WEEK: Test at Old Trafford
TO OLD TRAFFORD, Scarred by war, go Blackpool for the first time in postwar football next weekend, writes Clifford Greenwood.
It will be the first visit of a Blackpool team to this famous ground since a goalless draw was played there on October 15, 1938, a day when there appeared in the tangerine jersey:
Wallace; Blair (D.), Sibley; Farrow, Hayward, Johnston; Munro. Buchan (W.), Finan, O’Donnell (F.), and Dawson.
Two only of those players are still on the Blackpool playing staff, and if one of them, Eric Hayward, is still out of circulation, there will be only one survivor of the 1938 game, Harry Johnston, on the field.
I still rank Manchester United, in spite of the Cup defeat and other signs of a decline, as the best team after-the-war football has produced, and unquestionably it will be a big test for Blackpool in a match which the team cannot afford to lose if the challenge for the First Division championship Is to be maintained.
Blackpool’s visits to play the United at Maine-read since the war have been singularly profitable.
The first was lost 0-3, the second was drawn 0-0, and last season, after the United had taken the points 3-0 at Bloomfield - road, Blackpool snatched the game in the last minute in a sensational 4-3 match.
Now that WAS a game. If thousands have to stand out in the open to watch another as dramatic and exciting, nobody will complain - not even if it snows.
Clubs' meeting may be momentous
GREAT official secrecy is being maintained about the meeting of representatives of the 88 Football League clubs in London on March 27, but it is evident, from wisps of information coming to hand, that it may well be one of the most important conferences in the history of the League.
A main item will be to consider the report of a committee set up at the annual meeting last year to explore ways and means by which outside clubs worthy of League status may be admitted.
This committee, after much spade work, has decided that there are insufficient such clubs to form a Fourth Division. Consequently, they will put a proposal that the present South and North Divisions of League Three should be extended from 22 to 24 clubs.
Three up, three down
IF this is agreed, Tottenham Hotspur will suggest widening promotion and relegation to three clubs up and three down, instead of the present two teams in each case.
There seems little reason to suppose that such a suggestion will meet with any more favourable response than the “four up, four down,” ideas advocated in past years, notably by Tottenham themselves.
Even those First and Second Division clubs which favour the League competition being made yet more competitive are liable to shrink from their own increased prospects of a drop in status. Another body of opinion feels that already the tension of League soccer is so great that it tends to lower playing standards, and this would oppose the move.
Tottenham are also the instigators of a plan to start and finish the season about a fortnight later than at present.
Many will agree with their argument that by so doing the players will be spared those gruelling “heat-wave” openings of the season. More may be swayed by the fact that the early season midweek evening games are bigger money-spinners than those at the tail-end of the campaign, when so many games have little bearing on championship, promotion and relegation questions.
Matters concerning the inflated transfer market may also be aired. There is a move afoot to encourage the loyal player by introducing a £1,000 benefit after 10 years with one club besides the present £750 which may be paid after five years.
MUDIE MAY SOLVE BIG PROBLEM
Treatment that inspires loyalty
By Clifford Greenwood
THEY are off again already - the headline merchants who build reputations in a day and sabotage them the day after.
I would not want to discourage young Jackie Mudie, the 20-year-old centre-forward from Dundee, who waited patiently for three years for a First Division game and, when he was given it at Liverpool this week, scored the sort of baptismal goal which is often scored in the pages of the boys’ magazines but not often on a football field.
It was not the goal itself, but the circumstances in which it was scored which made the news.
This young man spent an afternoon at Anfield instead of up a ladder painting. He plays in the centre for a First Division forward-line.
He plays without the remotest sign of being out of his class, circulates his passes to both wings, reveals the footcraft which is the Scot’s birthright at football, and seven minutes from time has a chance made for him which he takes with supreme confidence.
A grand goal
THE goal came - and it was a goal which was obviously a destined for the headlines. For it shattered an undefeated home record for a team that, until a fortnight ago. was leading the League.
It avenged a Cuptie defeat four days earlier. And it ended a goal famine in the Blackpool forward line which had assumed such dimensions that, part from Stanley Mortensen’s penalty last weekend, there had been only one goal to the line’s name in six successive matches.
So, almost inevitably, there was the hue and cry in a few of the newspapers that another Hughie Gallacher had arrived, and, in fact, sufficient of a hullabaloo to have made almost imperative by Thursday morning a new size in hats for Jackie Mudie. If Master Mudie had been born that way.
All of which is a little too familiar. They boost them up - and they knock ’em down. It has become almost an occupational disease with a few of the present generation of football critics.
THIS must not be Mudie’s fate.
And I do not think it will be. There is infinite promise in this Scot. Small he may be, but he is built on the four-square model, can take punishment, as, unquestionably, he will have to resign himself to taking it if he is to make his name in big-time football.
But one had the sense, watching him at Anfield, that he is alert in every movement, that he can time a leap to a flying ball, and that he has a shot in him of explosive qualities.
I am waiting before expressing an opinion, but he may be the man who will solve Blackpool’s major problem - the problem of how to complete good football with goals.
What he does
HE is apprenticed as a painter and decorator at the present time, can train only in the evenings and while he is in this occupation will, presumably, be exempt from the call-up.
And he is, withal, as I soon learned, a modest young man, with no sense whatever of his own importance.
The football will remain in his feet, and nothing else will go to his head.
But, by the Lord Harry, some of these writers would spoil him, if they had their way, while those feet are still only on the lower rungs of the ladder.
Second favourites
THAT goal of his can mean a lot to Blackpool.
It has left the team second favourites in the championship race. The match at Manchester next weekend is the key to the riddle. Winning it; or even forcing a draw in it - either would be a major achievement and Blackpool would have a chance of a First Division title for the first time in their history.
That would be some compensation for the Cup defeat. Now, in fact (to coin a phrase) they can concentrate on the League.
One prophecy
THERE has been nothing demonstrative or grandiloquent about it, but, whatever’s happened, it has cultivated among the players- an affection for the club which has meant such a lot on the field.
Blackpool may have lost at Liverpool this afternoon. I am making only one prophecy. And that is that if Blackpool have gone down they have gone down with the guns still firing.
***
The story of Anfield is the story of good losers
ANOTHER Lost Weekend, they called it at Liverpool. But somebody had to lose, and, at least, Blackpool lost with good grace and no weeping and wailing, writes Clifford Greenwood.
Visit the dressing room after the match. Stanley Matthews is acting as valet to the team. It may have been that his last chance of a Cup medal has gone.
It must have been the bitterest afternoon of his career to sit and watch it happen.
He prowls the room with a jug of tea and pours it into the cups and for every man has a “Bad luck -don’t worry!” And he has a few whispered words of commiseration for his understudy, Albert Hobson.
Manager Joe Smith has been there, too, and Chairman Harry Evans.
There were no recriminations.
BROKE THE NET
DON’T let it get you down, says Joe Smith, who, probably, as he watched his forwards swooping so often on the Liverpool goal but so seldom making shooting position, must have recalled the day when he went to Anfield in the long ago - the last time his wife had been on the ground - and scored with a shot of such ferocity that it broke the net.
But he never mentioned that to his team, said instead “It‘s just one of those things - but, you know, you can still win the League!”
They know how to lose these Blackpool people. I learned that after Wembley two years ago.
They even have a joke in the dressing room before they go out to the coach when one of the team begins searching for his dentures, complains that they have disappeared, and realises at last that they are in his mouth, that for the first time - and without knowing it - he has been playing in them all the afternoon.
IVOR THE GUEST
QUEST for the day was Ivor Powell, the Aston Villa wing half, whose wife, daughter of Tommy Browell, has been ill recently and who has had a week at Blackpool, where the Villa - a very considerate club, man,” says the Welsh captain - have allowed Ivor to train.
"They should never have lost,” he says. That’s the theme song all the way home.
One of those who walked sadly away from Anfield was David Craig, the wing forward signed from the famous Merseyside amateur club, Marine, shortly after the war. He is one of football’s unfortunates.
Two operations he had while at Blackpool - and when he left his health deserted him.
He is still young, but, when I met him before the match, admitted “I’ve had it - I’m out of the game now.” But he had come to watch his old club’s team.
ANNIVERSARY
EVEN Jimmy McIntosh was there - only for a few minutes, time only to call in the dressing room to wish them “All the best,” before he raced off to neighbouring Goodison Park to play for Everton Reserve in the Central League.
It was an anniversary date for the former Blackpool centre-forward, but he had forgotten it. Twelve months to the day he had made his first appearance for Everton. By a coincidence it was against the club he had left only two days earlier. A blizzard raged all the afternoon, and Jimmy scored one of the five goals shot past a Blackpool goalkeeper blinded in the snow.
Earlier on Saturday, too, there had been a reunion at Birkdale with two other men who once played for Blackpool.
Hull City were at Birkdale, en route to Preston for a second Division match, and with the City were Joe Robinson, the goalkeeper who was in Blackpool’s 1948 Wembley Cup team, and Eddie Burbanks, the guest wing forward who played for Blackpool in the war years and was in the team that won the War Cup and the championship of England in ’43.
CRITIC’S SMILE
THEY all said before the match, “You’ll win.”
That is what they were saying in the Press box, too, where one writer smiled at the good-natured caricature of himself which one of the “Atomic Boys” presented, but resented, I think - and I am not blaming him - the ill - mannered barracking to which he had to submit from a few Anfield fanatics.
Perched on the players’ entrance tunnel, the famous duck wore a new coat of glittering tangerine dye, drank primly from the bucket of one of the trainers, but is evidently a Prohibitionist, for when he was offered a glass of stout he upset the glass with an outraged jerk of his long beak.
I have not heard for years such a cheer greet a Blackpool team as rose to the skies when Blackpool appeared.
LIKE WEMBLEY
THE waving of the tangerine ribbons on all the chattering, raucous rattles in the packed roofed terrace behind the goal to which Harry Johnston led his men recalled the day at Wembley two years ago when the thousands fluttered their programmes to the tune of “John Brown’s Body....”
It was a game played at a relentless pace, and yet if there was one relentless tackle all the afternoon I missed it. Nobody gave any quarter - after all, football is not a parlour game, and a Cuptie is a grim battle for survival - but there was not one incident with a trace of malice in it.
That may have been because Mr. B. M. Griffiths, the Welsh referee, who had the England-Scotland match at Wembley last season, never allowed tempers to flare. Yet, to be frank, there were no signs that they ever would flare.
- AND THE REF
THIS efficient referee was given a compliment as the teams left the field which he will not forget for a long time.
I noticed Billy Wardle, the Blackpool wing forward, go to him, shake his hand, speak to him What did he say?
“I told him,” said the man who in his last previous Cuptie had been sent off by another referee, that he’d had a fine match, that it had been a pleasure to play under his orders.”
“That,” said Mr. Griffiths afterwards, “coming from one of the losers was about the nicest thing I’ve ever had said to me on a football field.”
A Lost Weekend? Yes, if you're concerned only with results. But not such a bad weekend if you love football as a game and don't think of it or are influenced by it as if it were a holy crusade.
***
THE MORTENSEN STORY — No. 16
PLAYING FOR ENGLAND
I WAS a proud lad that day,” writes Stanley Mortensen of September 16, 1944, the day he first played for an England team in a wartime match against Wales on the Anfield ground where Blackpool lost last weekend’s Cuptie.
Continuing his serial version of “Football Is My Game,” the Blackpool forward tells of the ups and downs of an international player’s career, recalls how he was discarded by the England selectors and chosen again, tells of the first time he played against an Irish team containing Peter Doherty.
“It was only then, " he writes, “ that I came to a full realisation of Peter's genius.”
The ups and the downs
By Stanley Mortensen
UPS and downs are part and parcel of a foot bailer’s career.
The downs can be as useful as the ups, if they provide the urge to do better and to remedy faults -
As an example, it may well be that when Huddersfield Town thought so little of Jock Dodds that they gave him away they did the one thing needed to make him go all out for success.
In the international class, setbacks are apt to be the lot of any player. The higher you get, the keener is the competition.
I myself went through the experience of being chosen for England, dropped, chosen again, dropped again, and of missing a whole season’s international matches before I at last managed to do well enough to be given an extended run in the national team.
Great day
THE 16th of September, 1944 was a great day, and I was a proud lad when I stepped out to play in my first international match - against Wales at Liverpool.
I was selected at inside-left with Mullen as my outside partner, Tommy Lawton in the middle, and Carter and Matthews on the right wing.
Swift was there in goal, Scott and Hardwick were the backs, and the middle line was made up of Mercer, Fie win and Welsh, suppose Flewin, the Portsmouth centre-half, and myself were the two men on trial. All the others had big reputations already.
In the Welsh side were such giants of the game as Sidlow, Hughes (playing out of position at centre-half), Burgess, Leslie Jones, Lowrie and Cumner, so, although this was only a substitute for the real thing, the general quality was pretty high.
Wrong date
INCIDENTALLY, this match does not count in the records as an international, and no caps Were awarded.
When peacetime internationals were resumed, with caps being given again, the Football Association had the kind thought of recognising these wartime appearances, and all players who had been selected were presented with handsome illuminated addresses.
My own illuminated address Was hung in the hall in my house, quite properly being accorded a prominent place.
Hundreds of pairs of eyes must have scanned it, yet it was there for fully two years before some one spotted that one of the matches had been mis-dated by a whole year!
The game at Liverpool was a 2-2 draw, Carter and Lawton scoring after Wales had taken a two-goal lead with shots by Dearson and Lucas.
Close calls
MY own share in the game did not disappoint me, although I was not among the scorers.
On one occasion I thought I had Sidlow beaten, and so I had - but Lambert, the Liverpool full-back, bobbed up from nowhere and kicked the ball away. Near the end I went close again, but this time Sidlow was on the spot and brought off a grand save.
There’s always the other fellow to draw the thin dividing line between success and comparative failure.
That was my first game for England. Others followed it. was in and out of the team.
The Victory internationals came. The first was at Windsor Park, Belfast, and early in the following September I was overjoyed to find myself selected. Stan Matthews and Raich Carter formed the right wing, the new left-wing pairing being myself and Leslie Smith, with Tommy Lawton in the middle.
Doherty genius
THIS game brought me to full realisation of the genius of Peter Doherty, my opposite number.
At that time Peter was very unsettled, because he had practically decided not to resume his old association with Manchester City, but this did not affect his football.
There was scarcely a blade of grass he did not cover in the course of a game in which England attacked almost constantly but were held up by a fine defence in which Peter took his full share.
For 80 minutes we hammered away without being able to put the ball into the net.
With 10 minutes to go, Stan Matthews secured possession, beat one man, drew another, and centred.
I was able to run on to it in the manner footballers like best.
I took it in my stride, the ball running perfectly for me, and into the net it sailed.
Next week
DROPPED AGAIN. . . .AND BACK TO FAVOUR.
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