4 March 1950 Liverpool 2 Blackpool 1

BLACKPOOL ARE OUT

Late Liddell goal settles Anfield game of cyclonic! pace

GALLANT FAILURE IN GRAND TIE 

Liverpool 2, Blackpool 1

By “Clifford Greenwood”

TWELVE MONTHS TO THE DAY SINCE BLACKPOOL WERE BEATEN 5-0 IN A SNOWSTORM BLIZZARD MATCH AT GOODISON PARK ANOTHER BLACKPOOL TEAM CAME TO LIVERPOOL THIS AFTERNOON.

This time the scene was Anfield - and what a scene it presented early in the afternoon - and this time it was a Cuptie which had been the talk of a city and a town for a fortnight.

Anfield today was a Lancashire Wembley. The people were waiting in long queues as early as 8 a.m., and I am told that there were 30,000 outside the gates before noon when the turnstiles were opened,

When the Blackpool players’ coach reached the ground from Birkdale half an hour before the kick-off I noticed that a few of the terrace gates were still open, and that through them people were still drifting in twos and threes.

Otherwise the streets everywhere were strangely deserted, thousands of cars lining the pavements and mounted police parading the quiet avenues.

Inside, in contrast to this almost cloistral peace, there was the familiar bedlam of a Cup match.

There was singing - hymns and the songs of two wars - to the conducting of a white-sweatered choir-leader on a rostrum fronting the main stand.

Repeatedly the old Blackpool chant of “Yes, we have no bananas” interrupted the ordered singing and made the bedlam greater than ever.

MASCOTS EVERYWHERE

Mascots were everywhere, and everywhere, too, tangerine was splashed on the background of the rearing terraces and slopes.

Fifteen minutes before zero hour there was no sign of movement on the higher tiers of the terraces, and the report reached the Press box that the gates had been closed and that 60,000 were locked inside them. 

One comic interlude was the unexpected invasion of the choir-leader’s platform by one of the “Atomic Boys” dressed as a caricature of a famous Liverpool MP.

Police and ambulance squads lined nearly every yard of the cinder track, presumably to close the path to the centre circle where, before kick-off time, the Blackpool mascots threatened to leave the famous duck.

LIKE WEMBLEY

Yes, this was a Cuptie in the grand manner, the nearest approach to Wembley I can recall since I went with Blackpool to the Stadium nearly two years ago.

Blackpool, in spite of the presence in the team of a few reserves, entered the match with complete confidence.

That, at least, I can reveal. No defeatists are permitted in Blackpool football these days.

“Well make a match of it whatever happens,” promised Manager Joe Smith after he had left his team in their dressing room.

Liverpool were at full strength, gave a chance to the 11 men who played at Middlesbrough last Week, in spite of a 4-1 defeat. Teams:

LIVERPOOL: Sidlow; Lambert, Spicer; Taylor Hughes, Paisley; Payne, Baron, Stubbins, Fagan, Liddell.

BLACKPOOL: Farm; Shimwell, Wright; Johnston. Crosland, Kelly; Hobson, McIntosh, Mortensen, W, J. Slater, Wardle.

Referee: Mr. B. M. Griffiths (Newport).

THE DUCK

This time the duck in a new glittering tangerine dye did not invade the field, but stood instead at solemn attention on the roof of the tunnel out of which the teams came to receptions for both of them which nearly shook the grey, lowering skies.

Harry Johnston won the toss. He made his decision instantly, but there was so little wind that no particular benefit was conferred.

THE GAME

First half

The Liverpool forwards went off as if shot out of a gun. “Hello” I said, “this is the Anfield blitzkrieg from the word ‘Go.' ” It shook the Blackpool defence perceptibly in the opening minutes, and yet this defence betrayed no signs of panic.

Johnnie Crosland was soon in the thick of it with two clearances in the first 30 seconds, the first headed away from the pursuing Stubbins and the second made with a perfect composure after Kelly had lost a ball which the little, aggressive Baron took away with him at full gallop.

W. J. Slater built one little raid with the sort of delicate footcraft one seldom sees in Cup- ties so early in the afternoon.

HEADED AWAY

It was immediately repelled, for Baron, who was everywhere in Liverpool’s forward division in these opening minutes, to cross a high falling ball which Shim- well headed away superbly as Billy Liddell thundered after it into a scoring position.

Blackpool’s retaliation was immediate, built on football as calculating as Liverpool’s game in the first five minutes was excited.

Sidlow, after the first of these Blackpool attacks had stampeded a gap in the Liverpool defence, held under the bar a high centre crossed, as Wardle can always cross them.

HURRICANE PACE 

Mortensen chases a forward pass

A minute later the Blackpool left wing was in the game again, put in it by Johnston’s gem of a crossfield pass, and this raid was not repelled, either, until Mortensen had gone at a hurricane pace after a forward pass and had the ball snatched up from him by the deserted Sidlow.

It was about 50-50 in the first five minutes after the early Liverpool storm had subsided.

In the sixth minute came a corner for Liverpool, and with it nearly a goal.

Liddell crossed the ball perfectly. Crosland headed it out as I did not think he could head a ball.

Taylor darted to it, shot it back through a pack of men behind which Farm crouched to take the ball on his line in a position from which he must have been unsighted.

SCATTERED DEFENCE

Another three minutes, and Blackpool won a corner.

This time Bill Slater opened the raid. After his pass Mortensen and McIntosh raced and lost it between them, with the Liverpool defence in chaos and scattered to the winds.

That corner was cleared, and in fact prefaced another series of hit-or-miss raids by a Liverpool front line storming to the attack again.

In one of them Payne pursued a perfect forward pass by that intelligent centre-forward Albert Stubbins, and fell to earth a yard outside the penalty area for a disputed free-kick as Crosland and Wright closed in on him desperately.

Came another Liverpool shock assault. It was in the 15th minute.

A comer was won on the left, Liverpool’s fourth of the half. Over sailed the ball, was lost in a mass of men.

DESPAIRING DIVE

In the pack, as the raid persisted, I saw Johnston jerk out a leg and stand as if turned to stone as the ball skidded off it backwards, and appeared to hit a post, as Farm fell in despair to his left.

That was an escape for Blackpool, who for a time afterwards took a nonstop hammering.

There were breakaways by Blackpool, but they were only breakaways, even if in one Sidlow had to be alert to snatch up long clearance by Shimwell which Mortensen was chasing into a goal barely protected.

A Liverpool goal never appeared inevitable, and when it came in the 19th minute the Anfield roar rose to the skies.

LIVERPOOL AHEAD

Fagan sidesteps ball past Farm

It was a goal which was a sequel to a chapter of accidents. I noticed one crossing ball escape Farm and fly out to Stubbins, who hooked it back for two men - I think they were Wright and Crosland - to force it off the line of the empty goal.

But no definite clearance could be made.

In the end, the ball was crossed again in a raking centre, and into a pack of men FAGAN hurled himself, and seemed almost to sidestep it past the Blackpool goalkeeper, who, impeded by his own men and three or four others in red jerseys, had not the remotest chance of reaching it.

To lose a goal as early in a Cuptie as the 19th minute has often been sufficient to lose a Cuptie. Yet within four minutes, after the inevitable blood and thunder raids to increase this early lead had been repelled, Blackpool made it 1-1.

PENALTY GOAL

It was a penalty which Mr. Griffiths awarded without any hesitation and with nothing except a token protest by Liverpool.

The raid appeared to hold no particular menace. Yet as Mortensen and Hughes hurled themselves at a crossing ball the Liverpool centre-half unquestionably beat the ball down with his hand away from the Blackpool leader.

Everybody expected Eddie Shimwell to take the kick. Instead, MORTENSEN positioned himself for it, and, in a tense silence, shot a ball which Sidlow appeared to reach as he dived to his left but which he could only punch into the near wall of the net.

There was little in it afterwards except that it was still about as fast as a cyclone and still nearly every Liverpool raid was being created by Stubbins’ astute employment of the forward pass.

SKIDDING BALL

At the end of 35 minutes the census chart gave five corners to Liverpool and one only to Blackpool, and yet there had not been the difference in the teams which such figures might indicate.

Blackpool, in fact, in the 34th minute might have gone in front and probably would have done if after a perfect raid the ball had not skidded away in the mud from Mortensen as the leader darted to it.

Johnnie Crosland was not letting this battling Blackpool team down. Repeatedly he was on the heels of the elusive Albert Stubbins, and repeatedly, too, he was back sufficiently fast to intercept the forward passes in which this roaming centre-forward was still specialising.

I never wish to see a faster or finer Cuptie than this match had been in the opening 35 minutes. And - let it go in the record - there had not been one malicious tackle in it.

CONTRAST

Planned football and direct approach

As the interval approached all the planned football was being played by Blackpool. Liverpool still preferred the direct hammer- and-tongs approach after forward passes down the centre, and with 40 minutes gone it was paying no dividends.

Young Hobson sold a whole window display of dummies to his full-back in one advance before crossing a centre which a massed Liverpool defence repelled, and in another Blackpool raid only a great diving interception by Hughes took the ball away in mid-air from McIntosh.

All the time in the closing minutes of this half Liverpool were in retreat, appearing compact but with their earlier grip on the game completely lost.

RISING SHOT

Johnston thundered a fast rising shot wide of a post after Hobson had stabbed a centre to a waiting full-back, with three of his forwards waiting for a low pass which never came.

It was nearly one-way traffic until in the last minute of the half a too-short pass by Wardle to Kelly opened a Liverpool raid which ended in Shimwell heading over the line for Liverpool’s sixth corner as Payne raked the Blackpool goal with a fast rising centre at which Stubbins hurled himself in vain.

I call this a grand half.

Half-time: Liverpool 1, Blackpool 1.

SECOND HALF

In the first minute of the half the Liverpool goal was in peril.

Fagan tumbled Johnston to earth with a tackle for which he was rebuked with a reproving shake of the head by Mr. Griffiths.

Shimwell lobbed the free-kick into a packed goal, where as Sidlow fielded the ball under the bar McIntosh nose-dived into the mud to a penalty demand which was ignored.

A minute later, as Johnston flighted in one of his long throws, the height of Slater enabled him to head backwards a ball which escaped Mortensen only by inches in the jaws of the goal.

Again, inside another minute, with Blackpool attacking nonstop, McIntosh created a perfect position for Hobson to run on a bouncing ball in a wide open space before slicing it over the line.

IN RETREAT

It was Blackpool’s match at this time, with Liverpool going back everywhere, building so few raids that Wright opened another for Blackpool with a clearance from 30 yards inside his own half.

This was the sort of pressure which might have been producing something material. Instead, the last pass was invariably going wrong.

Still, it was a pressure which went on and on, arriving nowhere but still sufficing to outplay Liverpool, whose infrequent raids were still being created almost exclusively by the forward passes of Albert Stubbing, the centre-forward with the roving commission.

STILL PRESSING

Sidlow holds a Slater shot

With 10 minutes of the half gone, the ball had not been once within 30 yards of George Farm.

Everywhere Blackpool seemed faster to the ball, with Liverpool chasing it in vain and invariably losing it.

Few shots came - none at all for five minutes -until Slater took his partner’s neat pass, and, with the Liverpool defence waiting for the offside whistle, raced on to shoot a ball which the crouching Sidlow took on his line.

Yet in the 12th minute of the half the outplayed team nearly snatched the lead, won a corner with its first full-line raid of the half, and from the corner was nearer to a goal than all Blackpool’s pressure had been.

SHIMWELL THERE

The flying ball was loose in front of the goal as Stubbins leaped at it and headed it down.

Into its path Wright on the empty line hurled himself, lost it and was falling as his partner Shimwell crossed fast behind him and hooked it away as it was bouncing slowly over the line.

That might have been the lead for Liverpool, however undeserved such a lead would have been as the game had gone in the opening quarter of an hour of this half.

Blackpool simply went on where they had left off after that escape, and inside a couple of minutes Slater had missed a bouncing ball which Mortensen had, with great cunning, allowed to pass him.

And Mortensen himself, half a minute later, shot inches wide of a post after storming a path all on his own past three of his dogs.

THE OTHER WAY

Afterwards for a time the game began to move at last in the other direction, with Crosland and Johnston playing football of heroic quality when the full storm of Liverpool’s battering front line surged on them.

With 20 minutes left it was one of those positions in which anything could happen, and something might have happened with one of those minutes gone as Wardle cut inside after Slater had given him a gem of a pass; and shot a ball which rocked a full-back off his feet as it hit him.

The Anfield roar was beginning to thunder. Spurred by it, the Liverpool forwards and halfbacks were beginning to raid again in mass formation.

TENSION

McIntosh clearance wins Blackpool cheers

They won a corner with 17 minutes left, and, as the ball flew across with Farm impeded and unable to reach it, it was headed out without any apology for another.

With 60,000 people in a tumult, McIntosh, back to the aid of his defence, cleared this Second corner to a cheer from the Blackpool thousands which betrayed the almost hysterical excitement raging as the game approached its last quarter-hour.

Fourteen of those minutes were left, and Anfield was in an uproar.

After Baron’s pass Stubbins raced, swerved one man, corkscrewed past another and was passing a third whom I could not identify as he fell to earth, diving his full length.

PENALTY DEMAND

It looked a penalty all over from the Press box. All Liverpool seemed to think so. There were frenzied demands to Mr. Griffiths to consult a linesman, whose flag may have been lifted but when I saw him was still at his side.

Mr. Griffiths said “No,” and continued to say “No,” in spite of Liverpool’s fevered protests.

For minutes afterwards Liverpool went at it as if the fate of nations were at stake. The two wing forwards exchanged positions, Billy Liddell probably in the hope that out on the other wing he would be able to escape Shimwell, whose fast tackling had unquestionably mastered him.

It was threatening to be a last-ditch rear-guard action for Blackpool with 10 minutes left.

ALL DEFENDERS

It was not another Wolverhampton retreat, but it was threatening to become one every minute, with three of Blackpool’s five forwards often among the half-backs, hurling themselves into the fray.

Yet in the end it was all in vain. Eight minutes were left, and the transfer of the Liverpool wing forwards won the match.

It had been a gamble and within five minutes it had come off.

Payne took a pass on the left wing, eluded his guard, and crossed a forward centre. On to it LIDDELL raced, reached it near the far post, steadied himself, and shot a goal which released a bedlam.

Yet, even against these odds, Blackpool refused to call it a day.

Hobson had his shorts so nearly wrenched off him in one raid that another pair had to be obtained for him, and repeatedly afterwards, with nothing to lose, Blackpool, turning the tables completely, swept on to Liverpool’s goal in a flood which at times threatened to submerge it.

In the end, however, it was Liverpool who were making the pace and playing the football with goals in it.

Almost in the last minute Liddell nearly made it 3-1 at the end of a raid almost a duplicate of the attack which had won the match.

Result:

LIVERPOOL 2 (Fagan 19, Liddell 82)

BLACKPOOL 1 (Mortensen 23 pen)

THE attendance at Anfield was 53,973, and the receipts were £6,573.

COMMENTS ON THE GAME

IF ever there was a gallant failure on a Cuptie field it was Blackpool’s defeat at Anfield in a magnificent match this afternoon.

The odds were always against the team when it entered the game under strength.

Yet Blackpool not only remained level until eight minutes from time, but I shall always think might have won during the first 20 minutes of the second half when Liverpool were in a complete retreat.

The gamble of switching the wing forwards won the match. Until that time Billy Liddell, the man who has won so many games in his time, had been completely mastered by Shimwell.

The decision to move him elsewhere became almost imperative as the sands of time ran out for the Anfield team. It was a gamble, and, as often happens in Cupties, the gamble paid.

JOHNSTON AGAIN

The Blackpool defence was compact everywhere, but magnificent down its right flank, where Johnston played a captain’s game and in its centre, where Crosland never bore the remotest resemblance to a reserve.

The football of the forwards, once the defence could give these forwards aid, had a lot of class in it. It was not restricted to as few moves as was the Liverpool front line.

W. J. Slater was always finding open spaces and lobbing or gliding passes into them, and this left wing, in fact, was nearly as impressive as the defence’s right flank.

DOWN FIGHTING

All the time, too, Stanley Mortensen was playing as one never expects a man to play who until three days ago was in bed with influenza.

That was the story of Blackpool this afternoon - a team that had to surrender in the end but might have won. and that even in defeat went down fighting to the last inch and the last minute.

That is how I knew Blackpool would lose if they had to lose.

ON THE AIR

COMMENTARIES on the second halves of the Liverpool v. Blackpool Cuptie and the Rugby Union match between Sale and Fylde were broadcast by the BBC this afternoon.

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NEXT WEEK: West Brom’s visit should clear the air

BLACKPOOL have always been convinced that if the referee had not called it all off in the fog at the Hawthorns last November the Albion would have lost, writes Clifford Greenwood.

Now at last tomes the time to prove it.

For next weekend West Bromwich Albion visit the town for the first time for nearly 12 years, and, on their away record this season - two games only out of 16 won and 30 goals conceded - must be on an outside chance.

Two only are left on Blackpool’s playing staff - Harry Johnston and Eric Hayward - who beat the Albion 3-1 in the last match of the 1937-38 season.

On contemporary form this should be Blackpool’s match, even if the Albion still field - as West Bromwich teams always seem to field - a forward line which on paper packs a punch.

It is because this punch has not been so evident on the field that the Albion are in the lower half of the table. A solid sort of defence at home has alone ensured that the position of this Midlands club is not more precarious.

As it is, the Albion are still sufficiently close to the danger zone to make a fight of it at Blackpool, and probably a good match too.

Somebody asked me the other day “What do you think of the Albion after seeing them?” My answer was “But I didn’t see them when they played Blackpool.”

Nobody could see anything for the fog.

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BLACKPOOL - THE HAPPY-FAMILY CLUB

Treatment that inspires loyalty

By Clifford Greenwood

THERE CANNOT BE A LOT WRONG WITH A CLUB WHICH INSPIRES SUCH LOYALTY AS W. J. (“BILL”) SLATER HAS SHOWN TO BLACKPOOL THIS WEEK.

Every little boy who plays football dreams of the day when he may take the field for England against Scotland - unless he is born in Scotland when he is not visited merely by dreams but possessed by a consuming passion to play for Scotland against England.

Bill Slater achieved one of his greatest ambitions when he was nominated for the England team in today's game.

Yet, as soon as he learned that Manager Joe Smith was beset by a plague of casualties, he had not to be asked - and nobody would have asked him - but immediately volunteered to renounce the match of a lifetime to play for Blackpool in the Cup at Anfield this afternoon.

And all he had to say about it, this young amateur, not being at all addicted to the dramatic or theatrical, was, “Well, Blackpool have done a lot for me. It’s the least I could do for Blackpool!

Encouragement

NOT a soaring flight of oratory.

I know, but eloquent of the good and intimate relationships between a club and a player who has won fame while in the club’s service and appreciates that without the club’s encouragement and counsel he might never have won it.

In common with every club in the land, Blackpool have their critics. I have been among them at times. But one has to acknowledge, once he has been admitted behind the scenes, that there is probably not a happier family in football than is on the club’s staff today.

Fighting football

NEVER, I think, in all the years I have been reporting Blackpool football, has the club had a first team - and it is no less true I am told, of all the other teams - so prepared to play fighting football to the last minute, as fit as good trainers - and Johnny Lynas and Jack Duckworth are good - can make them, and never inclined to surrender, whatever the odds.

This was demonstrated in the Wolverhampton replay, and, in a lesser degree, during the closing minute's of the Sunderland match a week ago.

It is, I am convinced, no mere accident of circumstances. It is not that Blackpool with or without intention happen to have recruited at the present time the sort of players who specialise in last-ditch stands, or neck-or nothing offensives.

Fragile line

THE forward line is a singularly fragile instrument for such engagements, and the defence has created new records for the club not by mass-packing tactics but by an intelligent adherence to a sound positional game.

Nor are they just playing for the bonuses. Mercenaries they may be, according to the tenets of the untouchable purists, but it must be some innate sense of fidelity to the club engaging them which has actuated them in a few of the games I have seen them play during recent months.

The case of Bill Slater merely illustrates and confirms the theory.

How has it happened?

NOBODY climbs on to a soapbox and delivers ennobling speeches to the troops.

Nobody, either, when a player is the subject of a projected transfer to Blackpool, conducts this player, his wife and all his intimate relations on a tour of housing estates.

Blackpool for a long time had not the money to engage in certain little practices calculated to induce a man to choose one club in preference to a few others, and, now that the money is in the bank, could not be persuaded to employ them for such a purpose, within the strict letter of the law though they may be.

The truth is, I think, that the Blackpool manager, Mr. Joe Smith, and his directorate, have gained the playing staff’s confidence by their considerate treatment of every man on it, whether he is a first team star or an “A’ team apprentice.

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 bogey man

WHEN they see Len Shackleton, the Blackpool men will soon begin chanting, “Here comes the bogey man!” He is constantly scoring goals which mean points to Blackpool.

His two goals at Roker Park last season won Sunderland point in a 2-2 draw, and the last, which came when Sunder1and seemed doomed to defeat, was one of the best I saw all the season.

And in the return at Blackpool, with his team losing 3-2 and the closing minutes ebbing away he snatched another point with a goal of impudent audacity, almost tee-ing up the ball in the mud before lobbing it over the deserted goalkeeper’s head.

And now he has done it again.

***

NO-NONSENSE REF

MR. J. S. PICKLES, the Bradford referee, had to submit to a lot of criticism after the famous - or should it be notorious? - fog match at the Hawthorns last November. Some of it was on this page, writes Clifford Greenwood.

It is only just, therefore.

that the man who was blamed for the West Bromwich fiasco should now be praised for his control of the match at Blackpool last weekend.

Nobody is pretending that all his decisions were correct or his judgment infallible. 'Tis human to err -and referees, in spite of several theories to the contrary, are human.

What I admired about Mr. Pickles last week was his strict control of the players. After the free-for-all which the Wolverhampton Cuptie became, it was good to notice a referee who soon let both teams know that he would tolerate no nonsense.

One result was that the whistle went sometimes when it might have been silent, but that is preferable to permitting two excitable teams to “get away with murder.”

***

YET I am tired of ail these headline boys who are stigmatising the present-day race of footballers as men without a decent instinct among them.

Listen to Mr. James Guthrie, chairman of the Players’ Union: “The game’s no rougher .... Barring a few black sheep it’s nonsense to say professional footballers are kicking chunks out of each other.”

I wrote that - or something similar to it - months ago when the stories about football’s crime wave were in full spate. It was about time that the union which represents the maligned professionals authorised one of their executives to say it, too.

In the passion and excitement of a big game, with tempers frayed and the crowds often inciting the men to violence, there are unfortunate passages in too many games which can neither be excused nor should be tolerated by the referees.

One admits all that, but to assert that the majority of professional footballers are Bowery thugs is an outrageous slander on men who in the mass are as decent as you’ll find anywhere in or out of sport.

***

ONE man whose telephone at home and in his office has never ceased ringing this week - and he’s not the only one - is Manager Joe Smith, of Blackpool. Everybody seems to think he has a batch of Cup tickets for circulation.

“And the truth is,” he complains, “that the distribution of Cup tickets - or any other sort of ticket - is outside my province altogether.”

It’s worse, he says, than when he was Bolton Wanderers’ captain. But, then, in those days, there were no tickets and people were content to stand in queues if they wanted to watch the big games.

***

First visit for 12 years

"WHEN West Bromwich Albion come to Blackpool next weekend, it will be, as I report on another page, the first visit by the Hawthorns club to Bloomfield - road for nearly 12 years!

Blackpool won the 1937 - 38 match -the last match of the season and the last the Albion played in the I First Division until this present season - by 3-1, and one of the three goals was scored f O’Donnell by a young wing half-back who was being played as an experiment at outside-left. His name? Harry Johnston.

This was the Blackpool team that won on April 30, 1938:

Roxburgh; Blair (D). Sibley; Farrow. Hayward. Jones (S): Munro, Buchan (W). O’Donnell (F). Finan, Johnston.

There has been a high mortality rate as first-class footballers among those 11 men. But, then. 12 years is a long time in a professional footballer’s life span. It is, on the average, almost the complete span, writes “C. G.”

***

DISTINCTION for Sunderland. The Roker Park club are the only one in continuous membership of the First Division since the war who have not lost at Blackpool in postwar football.

Of the four games played three have been won and one drawn. Yet at Roker Park Blackpool have not lost for a couple of years, playing in succession draws at 2-2 and 1-1.

Funny game this football. As if, after studying your coupons, you didn’t know!

***

HISTORY has been written at Blackpool - and nobody has noticed it. For the first time since the war Stanley Mortensen has been deposed as Blackpool’s leading marksman in the club’s first and second teams.

Little Jackie Mudie’s two goals at Preston last weekend - if he were only two or three inches taller and a few pounds heavier - gave him a total for the season of 17 and put him out in front of Mortensen by two goals in League games, not counting Stan’s couple in the Cupties.

***

VISITORS OF NOTE

DISTINGUISHED gathering in the Press box for the Sunderland game at Blackpool last weekend. says “C. G.”

On my right: Mr. Andy Cunningham, the ex-Glasgow Ranger, who played 10 games for Scotland in the '20’s and now assists the Scottish selectors.

On my left: Mr. Tom Mather, the man who has managed half a dozen League clubs, who lives in these parts nowadays and was the man who discovered Stanley Matthews for Stoke. (He is one of several who make this claim, but he is the only one entitled to make it.

And with them Mr. Bert Fogg, the former League referee, who is now a writer on the game.

Extract from the conversation:

Mr. Fogg: A pity there aren’t more players like you today, Andy.

Mr. Cunningham: And a few more referees like you, Bert.

A mutual admiration society? Maybe, but they were speaking the truth.

It was nice, by the way, to meet Mr. Albert Booth, of the “Daily Herald” again. It was his first match at Blackpool for a long time.

He has been seriously ill. Sports journalism in the North has again one of its shrewdest judges and best writers now that be is back.

***

Won 10, drawn 5, lost 0

THAT was a nice record Blackpool had built at home before Sunderland sabotaged it a week ago. Since Wolverhampton Wanderers won at Bloomfield- road on September 3, the results for Blackpool including Cupties had been:

P  W  D L  F A 

15 10 5 0  24 7

Seven goals only in 15 games had the defence surrendered, and three of those were in one game, the Manchester United match in November. In 11 of the 15 not one goal had been lost.

If only the forwards had scored more . . . But that’s an old story.

Liverpool 0, Blackpool 1

CAN MUDIE SOLVE BLACKPOOL GOAL FAMINE?

By “Clifford Greenwood” 9 March 1950 

It was eight minutes from time when Liverpool won the Cuptie at Anfield. There were exactly seven and a half minutes left when Blackpool won the League match there yesterday afternoon.

This is called a Roland for an Oliver in those circles where they introduce classical Quotations into the conver­sation. In this case it was a Mudie for a Liddell.

A grand goal it was that this 19-year-old part-time profes­sional, who paints houses by day and trains in the evening, scored to win this match and to end Liverpool’s undefeated home record.

HOW HE DID IT

It was, admittedly, made for him when McIntosh crossed to an unguarded wing a pass which Wardle lifted back again as the Liverpool centre-half left the field’s centre to close the gap. On to this ball Jackie Mudie raced, steadied himself, killed its bounce with one foot and with the other calmly glided it wide of the goalkeeper.

Simple? Yes, but I have seen so many Blackpool forwards miss from such positions.

This young man looked the part from the opening minutes when twice I noticed him deftly work the ball into position before steering it out low and fast to the wings.

COME TO STAY?

And twice, in spite of his few Inches, he was first up to corners and headed over the bar.

This Scot from Dundee, who has been waiting three years at Blackpool for this chance, may have come into the First Divi­sion to stay.

Blackpool completely redeemed the Cup defeat against a Liver­pool team whose defence was as close-packed as ever, but whose forwards played a gamp of immeasurably higher quality than they ever played in the Cup­tie.

Gone was the eternal stereo­typed move of the downfield pass with the line chasing it like a pack of hounds. Both wings were in the match, with Liddell nearly played out of it again by Shimwell, but Jimmy Payne at last justifying his title of the Merseyside Matthews by the variety of his cunning manoeuvres.

Yet he, too, finished only 50-50 with that grand fast-tackling full-back Wright.

CROSLAND

The Liverpool inside forwards, nevertheless, still required a lot of holding. Crosland again was magnificent - swift to close an open space, once halting Stub­bins with a razor-edge tackle from behind which even the ranks of 33,000 Anfield customers could scarce forbear to cheer.

Add a goalkeeper of infinite resource, Farm, who was always confident and often brilliant in Liverpool’s storming first-half raids, and this was again a four­square Blackpool defence, with Johnston a peer among wing half-backs again - when will England recall him? - and Kelly, in spite of a spate of off-the- beam passes, as incisive as ever in the tackle.

I am glad to report that Hob­son atoned for his Cup failure by the sheer pertinacity of his foot­ball in the first-half, when, revealing a lot of neat footcraft, too. he made with the aggressive, toiling Mortensen a wing which was not, as so often is the case in modern football, a wing only in name.

LOT OF PROMISE

It was for a long time the stronger partnership flanking the understudy centre-forward, but afterwards the other two, McIntosh and Wardle put him often in the game, and when he was in it this Jackie Mudie, small, but so compact in build, revealed a lot of promise and, in the end, was the opportunist Blackpool have so long been seek­ing.

He may be the man who will end the Blackpool goal famine. It’s premature to write it yet, but he could be that man.

THE MORTENSEN STORY — No. 15

"You were unkind to the giant killers" said the letter-writers

STANLEY MORTENSEN reveals in this instalment of his book, “Football Is My Game," which is being serialised in “The Green,” that after Blackpool had defeated giantkilling Colchester United in the Cup two years ago, several people wrote to the team abusing it for scoring so many goals.

The Blackpool and England forward writes of dressing room episodes which never appear an print, of the behind-the-scenes life of the present- day professional footballer.

And, writing of “The Boss,” the Blackpool manager, Mr. Joe Smith, he says “He is the best loser and winner in football, never up in the air, always with both feet planted firmly on the ground.”

He writes of the people who address letters on every conceivable subject to professional footballers - the autograph hunters, the folk with cures for all a footballer’s ills, and the amateur critics who once accused him of deliberately supplanting Eddie Shimwell as the man who should take penalties for Blackpool.

“Yet,” he writes, “something would have gone out of our lives if the postman stopped knocking every day at Bloomfield-road.”

FOOTBALL KEEPS THE POSTMAN BUSY

By Stanley Mortensen

THERE is always fun at the ground in opening letters. The things people write about! How to win, how to play better, how to improve your kit, for autographs, for tickets, and so on.

One is apt to grow annoyed at times about this flood of correspondence, especially when an autograph album arrives badly packed and without a stamp for its return.

Yet the player realises that it is just a reflection of public interest in the game and in the players - in us, in fact - and that it would be wrong to discourage it.

Professional footballers are public entertainers.

So the best thing is to grin and bear it when the telephone rings at midnight and an unknown voice, claiming RAF or schooldays friendship, asks for two tickets for tomorrow’s match; or when a stream of letters begging for autographs piles up and stamps have to be purchased for the return of books and souvenir programmes which it would be heartbreaking not to send back to the sports-lovers who ask for the signatures of the men who perform for them on Saturday afternoons.

Trickle-then flood

I PERSONALLY, was given a wonderful and moving demonstration of the enthusiasm of football fans when, in the autumn of 1948, I suffered a bad ankle injury.

At the time I was writing a series of articles for a Sunday newspaper, and when my ankle “went” for the second or third time in a couple of months, and I was unable to turn out for Blackpool (and missed a couple of international games, too), I wrote:

“Do you want to make a fortune in an ankle competition? Anyone can enter. All you have to do is to let us know how footballers can avoid ankle injuries . . . . they are like the common cold - just as common and just as impossible to prevent.”

I didn’t realise what I was letting myself in for. Twenty-four hours later came a trickle of letters and postcards; and within two or three days there was a flood.

Sea bathing

THE kindness expressed in those letters was touching. Everyone was genuinely anxious to join in helping me first of all to cure my bad ankle, and then to prevent it happening again.

Skilled nurses, matrons, masseurs, men, women, children - all classes of football supporters were represented in this well- nigh overwhelming avalanche which piled itself up. At home we had letters in the lounge, letters in the kitchen - everywhere.

Yet, strangely enough, only a small proportion of these enthusiastic pen-friends struck the remedy from which I gained so much help - sea bathing. That’s a course of treatment all players have learned to appreciate, and I am sure it is a fine thing.

Missed penalty

AMONG the professional footballer’s other correspondents are people who are not at all complimentary.

There are those who are quick to drop me a few lines when I have missed a penalty. They say - and it is hard to deny - that a professional should be able to hit the net at 12 yards range. But they do not always write with full knowledge of the facts.

For instance, Eddie Shimwell took the penalty for us in the Cup Final and scored. The following season I missed two in succession, and in came the inevitable letter which practically suggested that I had taken the kick over Shimwell’s head!

Nothing of the kind, of course. In any case, manager, captain and players decide before a game who shall take any penalty kick awarded.

Then there's abuse

IN Blackpool’s case, what the critic had forgotten was that since the Final, Shimwell had missed one too, and so our great full-back asked to be relieved - temporarily, at any rate - of the job.

There is the occasional abusive letter also.

In our Cup Final season we met Colchester, who had knocked out Huddersfield Town and Bradford and so justly earned fame as giant-killers.

Well, the truth is that when they came to Bloomfield-road they were a far different team from the side which had performed so well on their own little ground, and we scored five times without reply. Jimmy McIntosh and I each bagged a couple.

”Rubbing it in"

WE thought we had done well - until a day or two later I got a couple of letters abusing me no end because Blackpool had  rubbed it in.” It was suggested that after we had scored one it would have been a kindness on our part to have eased up.

The writers could not have played games much themselves. Even a two-goal lead is not safe in football. In any case, should a football team ease up - stop “rubbing it in” - when they have a match in their pockets ? I’ll leave you to argue that one.

One thing is certain. When the postman stops bringing the daily batch to Bloomfield-road, the Blackpool side will feel that something has gone out of their lives.

Next week

PLAYING FOR ENGLAND