UNCLE MORT: Reality? It’s all a con is that. If there were any reality in this world, there’d be no keg bitter, there’d be no Doberman pinschers, there’d be no bent collar studs, and United would hold the FA Cup in perpetuity.
I Didn’t Know You Cared, ‘After the Ball Was Over’
(Peter Tinniswood; BBC TV, 1975)
THE FA Cup was always more about dreams than reality. Never more so than in the 1970s, a time when the competition seemed to matter more than in any period before or since.
It was the first complete decade in which the final was an all-day experience shared by the whole country, with hours of build-up to the game on both major stations rather than coverage of the game only. It was an age of egalitarianism; still the only decade where the first nine finals were won by nine different teams, including two from outside the First Division.* It was a time when it was unthinkable that a television station would one day have to promote games with slogans such as ‘Don’t Mug off the Cup’, as BT Sport did in the 2018-19 season. That was a stark acknowledgement that much of football had come to think of the competition as an irrelevance. Finishing fourth in the Premier League had become of greater import than winning what used to be the most venerated tournament in the world; and while a non-League team might still enjoy the day of their lives if drawn against a top-flight club, the rest of the nation either shrugs or fails to notice.
The FA Cup of the 1970s represented more than dreams of Wembley and the potential of lifting a trophy. The real reward of a Cup run extending into May was the idea of seeing your team live on television. Even for neutrals, that thrill of watching a complete club game while it was actually happening is impossible to convey to anyone brought up in the era of daily live matches from all corners of the globe. The yearning for a late equaliser to send the game to extra-time so that we could watch an additional 30 minutes was universal.
On the day of the first FA Cup Final of the 1960s, BBC had aired a brief ‘How They Got There’ piece before showing Wolverhampton Wanderers’ victory over Blackburn Rovers. Meanwhile, ITV, which did not have outside broadcast facilities available after covering Princess Margaret’s wedding the previous day, instead featured amateur boxing, professional wrestling and the Moscow State Circus on its Let’s Go programme.
By the time the Football Association was celebrating 100 years of the tournament at the 1972 final between holders Arsenal and Leeds United, the Wembley television schedules had expanded to the hours of two-channel entertainment that makes those of a certain age go misty-eyed. ‘I remember as a kid it was always a special day, no matter who was playing,’ said Jimmy Case, a young Liverpool fan who would score for his favourite team on the sport’s biggest day before the decade was done. ‘FA Cup Final day was a television ritual: watching the teams at their hotels, interviews on the bus, It’s a Knockout, wrestling …’486
In 1972, Frank Bough introduced BBC’s viewers to Wembley at 10.45am, with Brian Clough, Bobby Charlton and injured Arsenal and Leeds players Bob Wilson and Terry Cooper to help him through the next few hours. Segments such as ‘The Wembley Scene’, the history of the FA Cup and profiles of the players and managers filled the time until Stuart Hall and Eddie Waring introduced Cup Final It’s A Knockout. Teams of Arsenal and Leeds supporters were joined by Bremner, Johnny Giles, Gordon Banks, George Eastham and DJ Pete Murray in a specially recorded version of the game show made famous by the antics of participants in padded costumes, pools of water, elasticated harnesses and the like. After 45 minutes of that frivolity it was back to Wembley for the players’ arrival and the first look at the pitch; then the Royal Marines’ marching band; a parade celebrating previous winners; Tommy Steele leading the crowd in ‘Abide With Me’; and, at last, the introduction of the teams to the Queen followed by David Coleman’s match commentary.
Over on ITV, presenter Dickie Davies and commentator Brian Moore went on air at 11.15 and were backed up by Jimmy Hill and World Cup panel stalwarts Malcolm Allison, Derek Dougan and Pat Crerand. The early part of the show featured interviews with children of the star players before it was off to St Albans for professional wrestling. The FA Cup theme was provided by two London versus Yorkshire contests featuring some of the sport’s most recognisable figures: Mick McManus against Jeff Kaye, and Steve Logan versus Les Kellett. A burst of athletics from Crystal Palace, where Olympic middle-distance hope David Bedford was the main attraction, was followed by Cup Final Comedians, a special edition of the popular show where veterans of the working men’s club circuit – including Bernard Manning, ex-player Charlie Williams, Frank Carson and Mike Reid – reeled off football-related jokes. Back inside the stadium, experts, old goals, celebrities and the on-field pageantry took viewers through to kick-off.
In the commentary box, Moore, Coleman and, later, John Motson,† understood the importance of their words and, like the players, felt the pressure of the event. ‘You’ve got to try and make it sound like the great occasions it is,’ said Moore. ‘You must capture the mood and the action as well. If you are concentrating on all three, it’s impossible to look at the game as a tactical exercise. That’s why I always have an expert sitting alongside me. It’s 90 minutes of live television and you know there is no chance of rubbing out any mistakes.’487
Apart from its year off in 1960, ITV had been covering the FA Cup alongside BBC since 1958. But it was in 1969, Moore’s first year on the microphone for them, that Wembley literally became a battleground for the two networks. With Jimmy Hill as head of sport on London Weekend Television, the ITV network was becoming increasingly self-assured and set out to beat its rival to the big-name interviews when Manchester City took on Leicester City. This included Paul Doherty, a Granada TV producer, taking advantage of City coach Malcolm Allison being banned from the touchline by grabbing a seat close to him in the stands and secreting a microphone up his sleeve. Meanwhile, Peter Lorenzo hovered close to Leicester manager Frank O’Farrell to get comments during the game.
The most cunning part of the plan was to put production assistants into Manchester City tracksuits so that they could position themselves in the tunnel and be the first to grab players after the final whistle. Yet the BBC believed they had an exclusive contract worth £1,850 to ensure that they got the first Manchester City interviews, which became more imperative once they won the game. As ITV’s troops scrambled to get their men, BBC producer Alec Weeks sent out a war cry of ‘Stop those bastards’.488 What transpired was little short of a brawl as rival broadcast crew members pushed, punched and kicked, with players looking on incredulously. LWT outside broadcast manager David Yallop, later to become a renowned writer, was among those who lost teeth.
Both sides proclaimed their innocence, with BBC head of sport Brian Cowgill calling events ‘a rather undignified attempt to break the contract which had been genuinely given to the BBC’. The response from Hill was a claim that ITV had their own contract with Manchester City and went on to accuse BBC workers of ‘physically interfering with and manhandling our operators – pulling out plugs and trying to grab players away from us’. FA secretary Denis Follows condemned both networks and described it as a ‘shameful exhibition’. The romance of the FA Cup, indeed.
At the Centenary Final, the greater fears were about what people might see inside the 90 minutes. ‘I think I’ll go to the pictures,’ Goal writer Eric Nicholls said when the semi-finals threw up the likelihood of a rematch of the Arsenal–Leeds 1968 League Cup Final. ‘Anything – just ANYTHING – must be better than that,’ he said. ‘More fans are likely to be carried out suffering from boredom than all other sundry injuries put together.’ Nicholls wasn’t that far off the mark. The first foul was committed before the ball had left the centre circle; the first booking arrived inside two minutes. When Alan Ball and Billy Bremner weren’t kicking lumps out of each other, or when Allan Clarke wasn’t yanking Charlie George’s hair in a defensive wall, there was just enough football for Clarke’s diving header to win the game. BBC Radio commentator Peter Jones captured the nature of proceedings by describing Peter Storey going in for a tackle like an ‘earth remover’. The image that fitted more appropriately into the lore of the FA Cup was Leeds centre-forward Mick Jones being helped up the steps in agony to collect his medal after the elbow he dislocated in the closing seconds had been strapped to his side. Even in the midst of banality, the Cup could deliver a moment of romance.
It was why the weekend in early January when the third round rolled around was truly one of the highlights of the sporting calendar – 32 matches, all kicking off at 3pm on Saturday; the sense that anything could happen. Modern-day efforts by broadcasters to perpetuate that sense of anticipation have been undermined by the dilution of the Cup itself and the spread of matches over multiple time slots across four days. When George Best said, ‘The FA Cup is something special – even the most battle-hardened professionals get keyed up about it,’ it was not just a soundbite designed to promote a live game on TV.489 Goal magazine wrote, ‘The FA Cup is something special. Under its banner you could play two teams of monkeys on the side of a mountain and still get a good crowd.’490
What other competition could feature – as the 1974 final did – Brendan Foster winning a pre-match 3,000 metres race before Bruce Forsyth pranced on to the field and booted the ball into the goal in front of the Liverpool fans before conducting the pre-match community singing?
When journalist Brian James wrote his classic book about the 1976-77 competition, Journey to Wembley, he said in his introduction, ‘In the past 105 years, the Cup has evolved from almost casual roots to the very essence of intense competition. In England, it is established as the competition. For the world, it has been the model for them all.’491
Even Bremner could not help but admit that ‘there’s nothing to match the spellbinding magic of the competition’,492 although his Leeds team were on the wrong side of some of most memorable FA Cup storylines of the 1970s. And the epic duel against Chelsea in the first final of the decade was not even one of them.
The air of invincibility that Leeds carried – at least up until the final step of too many journeys – made it unthinkable that Colchester United, a middling Fourth Division side, could pose any serious threat to the First Division leaders when they arrived for their fifth-round tie in the 1970-71 competition. Previously in charge at Crystal Palace and Orient, manager Dick Graham had put together a team that relied on organisation and experience, with six of them over the age of 30; men Graham said he had ‘resurrected’. His close-cropped grey hair gave him a look of the parade ground that was not totally out of place, but along with a firm approach to discipline was a strategic mind. Not that you needed to be a tactical genius to recognise that if Leeds had a weakness it was their goalkeeper. In the days approaching the game, Graham had his forwards working on ways of placing Gary Sprake under pressure via high balls into the box.
Among the men hoping to capitalise was Ray Crawford, part of Alf Ramsey’s championship-winning team at Ipswich Town a decade earlier and owner of two England caps. At 34, Crawford had been at Southern League Kettering Town and looking for one last shot at League football when Graham came calling. ‘Dick was good enough to have managed at a higher level,’ Crawford remembered. ‘He was a great motivator and his training was hard but brilliant.’493
A crowd of more than 16,000 squeezed into the ground for a match that Leeds chairman Percy Woodward felt should not even have been necessary, having suggested to a reporter that lower-division teams should not be allowed in the FA Cup. In The Times, Geoffrey Green described it as ‘the sort of match that is sure to attract all the vultures sharpening their claws and their pencils in the hopes of an upheaval’.
After an hour, those pencils had been worn down to nubs. Colchester were three goals up and no one could get it down on paper quickly enough. Crawford, who had pointed out that he ‘always’ scored against Jack Charlton, had headed the first after Sprake flapped at Brian Lewis’s delivery. Just inside the half-hour mark, he found the net again while on the deck. Ten minutes into the second half, Dave Simmons headed the third goal when Sprake failed to deal with a long bouncing ball. At this point Colchester fans were almost falling off their perches in the trees outside the ground in their excitement. Revie’s men had allowed themselves to get sucked into a physical battle and Simmons and Crawford had unsettled the Leeds defence to the point where Green observed that they ‘reduced the lanky Charlton to a dithering novice’.
Leeds began to look like their true selves when Hunter headed in from a corner. A finish from Giles left Colchester with 15 minutes to survive, and a late save by Graham Smith to deny Jones was the final action.
While the nation processed its shock, Graham fulfilled a pre-game promise to scale the walls of Colchester Castle if his team won. They were duly dispatched 5-0 at Everton in the quarter-final, but Graham’s boys were not done yet, winning the Watney Cup in late summer. By the end of that season, however, the fairytale was over. Graham resigned, claiming to be ‘the victim of a witch hunt led by a shareholder who had won five shares in a raffle’. He decided that his ‘lousy job’ was not worth the strain on his family and complained that he was working for ‘people who expected miracles without any thought of the professional and financial limitations I was working under’. When you beat Leeds in the FA Cup, people come to expect miracles.
If there is one day that encapsulates all that the FA Cup represented in the 1970s it is the meeting of Leeds and Sunderland in the 1973 final. The team of the era showing their infamous vulnerability; a massive upset; a stadium backdrop of passion and urgency propelling the players into 90 minutes of unrelenting, breakneck action; and iconic images that would endure for decades. As Sunderland fan and author Jonathan Wilson asserted, ‘It’s the best example of the golden age of the FA Cup when shocks were shocks and this was the big event that everybody watched and everybody cared about.’494
Having at last won the trophy the previous season, Leeds were back for their third final in four years. The mental hurdle of previous disappointments was behind them, which meant that they were expected to meet with little resistance. Meanwhile, Sunderland’s four-month odyssey to Wembley represented an unforeseen turnaround in the club’s fortunes; a journey that began with the appointment of 42-year-old Bob Stokoe as manager in November 1972. A northeasterner who had won the FA Cup as a Newcastle United player and now looked 20 years older than he was, Stokoe replaced Alan Brown, whose second spell as Roker Park boss had seen the club relegated from the First Division. ‘We Geordies are a clannish lot,’ Stokoe said as he launched his new role. ‘That’s why this job is a bit special.’ Having managed at Bury, Charlton, Rochdale, Carlisle and Blackpool, where he won the Anglo-Italian Cup, he declared, ‘I’ve earned the right to come home. I went away to learn my trade.’495 So confident was he that he could get Sunderland into the First Division in two years that he’d refused the offer of a five-year contract.
Replay victories over Notts County and Reading did nothing to suggest that Manchester City had anything to worry about at Maine Road in the fifth round, especially when Tony Towers gave them the lead. Yet after goalkeeper Joe Corrigan gifted Mick Horswill an equaliser, a marauding Billy Hughes scored a fine solo goal to give Sunderland the lead. Hughes called it one of the most important goals he ever scored, giving Sunderland a belief that they could win the tie, even after City forced a replay when Jim Montgomery knocked Mike Summerbee’s corner into his own goal. Montgomery, regularly described by media as the country’s best uncapped goalkeeper, would make amends later in the tournament.
On a night that went down in Roker Park legend, Vic Halom gave Sunderland the lead in the replay by completing a slick passing move with a fierce shot from wide on the right, catching Corrigan unawares. ‘Even through the din, I could hear Corrigan scream at his defenders to leave it,’ recalled Dennis Tueart. ‘He got a right mouthful from his team-mates afterwards. He probably didn’t think Vic would do a whole lot of damage from out there.’496 It was Hughes who administered the further damage, his two goals sending Sunderland through 3-1. Coach Arthur Cox praised the patience Hughes displayed to score the second goal and called him ‘unplayable’.
Aged 24 and hailing from the Lanarkshire town of Coatbridge, Hughes’s dark hair and features made him look like a younger version of Alex Harvey, the singer who’d grown up only a few miles down the road and whose Sensational Alex Harvey Band were at the start of a period of commercial success in the glam rock genre. Hughes, who was friends with chart-toppers The Sweet, shared something of Harvey’s penchant for the theatrical, attacking from wide with enough pace, verve and skill to have Tommy Docherty describing him in 1974 as ‘the most exciting forward in the country’ and making himself a cult hero at Roker Park.
After the game, Stokoe went home and watched the highlights – broadcast in black and white on ITV – before walking his black Labrador, Jed. Malcolm Allison, meanwhile, faced up to the end of his first spell at Manchester City. Struggling to reproduce the title challenge of a season earlier, he looked back on the defeat at Roker Park and admitted, ‘That, I suppose, brought the curtain down on me.’497 A few weeks later he had one argument too many with the City directors over their reluctance to spend any more money and departed for Crystal Palace.
Meanwhile, Sunderland faced a home quarter-final against Luton Town, although Halom, up against his former team only weeks after being signed by Stokoe, dismissed fears of complacency by promising, ‘If we were playing a Presbyterian Boys club we wouldn’t take them lightly.’ Defenders Dave Watson and Ron Guthrie scored from set pieces to give Sunderland a 2-0 win. Watson, a giant figure whose heavily-fringed dark hair framed features that looked like they’d been shaped in the boxing ring, displayed enough ability in front of goal that his career had featured various spells spent as a centre-forward. Stokoe was done with all of that. ‘He is like a steeple among defenders,’ Stokoe argued. ‘I saw him as a platform on which to build the defence when I came here.’498
Arsenal, pursuing a second Double in the space of three seasons and eyeing a Wembley rematch against Leeds, would have loved Watson in their side for the semi-final at Hillsborough. Instead, Frank McLintock’s injury meant the reinstatement of Jeff Blockley, the £200,000 signing from Coventry City, who himself had been injured. ‘He wouldn’t have played if Frank had been fit,’ Gunners coach Steve Burtenshaw admitted. ‘Jeff wasn’t at his fittest.’499 Blockley’s lack of sharpness was exposed after 19 minutes when he fluffed a back-pass to Bob Wilson, allowing Halom to steal in and score. Blockley was substituted after 56 minutes. ‘It was my fault,’ the defender admitted of his blunder. ‘I was probably wrong in offering to play.’ At the other end, Montgomery made a save every bit as brilliant as the one that would bring him fame a few weeks later, an instinctive change of direction to keep out a George Armstrong shot that took a deflection. A second-half header by Hughes during more Arsenal defensive confusion increased Sunderland’s lead and George’s reply was too little to keep Sunderland from Wembley.
For ten minutes after the final whistle, the Sunderland fans chanted for Stokoe to appear. When he emerged, his tears made it clear what victory, and such a reception, meant to him. He had to depart before he broke down completely. While his players adored him and the Sunderland fans saw him as ‘The Messiah’, the cameras had now captured enough to turn Stokoe into a national treasure. The desire of the country to see Sunderland win at Wembley ran deeper than the fact that Leeds would be the opponents. ‘This unashamed reaction summed up Stokoe,’ wrote author Lance Hardy in Sunderland, Stokoe and ’73. ‘Those who saw it later on national television – regardless of which team they supported – could only warm to the man. Football neutrals got completely caught up in it. From this moment until the Cup Final four weeks later, Stokoe was a popular hero throughout the country.’500
Stokoe had beaten Don Revie at Wembley once before, when they were players for Newcastle and Manchester City respectively in 1955. Now he had a personal reason for welcoming the opportunity to put one over on him again. When Leeds had been fighting relegation late in the 1961-62 season, two of their final four games were against Stokoe’s Bury. As part of the Daily Mirror’s investigation into Revie in 1977, Stokoe would claim his rival manager offered £500 for Bury to throw one of the games. In the run-up to the 1973 final, Stokoe contented himself with trying to make sure referee Ken Burns was not influenced by players renowned for their haranguing of match officials. ‘I was staggered during the semi-final at the way Bremner went the whole 90 minutes disputing every decision,’ Stokoe said. ‘I don’t want any favours … just a fair crack of the whip.’
Stokoe’s players had no grudges to bear – if you discount the broken leg Bobby Kerr suffered against Norman Hunter six years earlier. They were too busy doing what all Cup final teams of the era did; enjoying their moment of celebrity and watching the cash mount up. Along with the great unsaid, unofficial act of selling their spare match tickets, the ‘players’ pool’ into which appearance fees were deposited was the annual windfall for those bound for Wembley.
The previous year it had been the injured Wilson’s duty to arrange the Arsenal finances. Charging between £50 and £350 for interviews and appearances and £2,000 from Adidas and Umbro for boots and kit, the Gunners fell a few thousand short of their £17,000 target and ended up making about £650 per man.
Twelve months on, the traditional Cup final record, ‘Sunderland All the Way’, failed to trouble the charts, but a Top of the Pops audience invite was still forthcoming for squad members, along with modelling photoshoots in London and promotions for the Milk Marketing Board. The traditional practice was that whatever was earned was shared, whichever players fulfilled an engagement. With Tueart and Ian Porterfield taking care of the accounts, Sunderland’s pool accrued around £19,000, plus a set of pots and pans for each player from a local manufacturer. ‘I remember one of the shipbuilders on Wearside put £800 into the pool,’ said Tueart. ‘They were just delighted we’d got there. It was money well spent by their management as during the Cup run they had the highest work attendance ever.’501
According to Tueart, Sunderland’s players were so busy enjoying their ‘surreal bubble’ that they were unaware of the soft spot they occupied in the nation’s affections. As guests at the Footballer of the Year dinner two days before the final, they were taken aback when people such as actor Michael Crawford, a Chelsea fan, visited their table to tell them how much they were behind them.
The morning of the game found British trawlers being threatened with arrest for fishing in waters claimed by Iceland, and US President Richard Nixon trying to restrict colleagues’ testimony on Watergate before a grand jury. English television viewers, meanwhile, were captivated by a group of Sunderland players who clearly had not a care in the world. They joked their way through hotel interviews with Barry Davies, interrupted by Hughes’s introduction of a ‘laughing policeman’ toy, and then hammed it up for the ITV cameras on the team bus. Even as they marched out for kick-off, grinning in tracksuits emblazoned with their names, it all seemed like one glorious giggle to them, not a suggestion of pressure. After all, no team without a single international player had won the FA Cup since Barnsley in 1912. ITV’s panel of experts had all picked Leeds to win on Friday night and Frank McGhee in the Daily Mirror was typical of those who felt Eddie Gray would be the match-winner. Interestingly, a dissenting survey was buried at the bottom of the preview in The Times, where a panel of their own writers and TV commentators had come out six to three in favour of an upset.
Leeds looked uneasy. Within a few minutes, the usually reliable Hunter, Giles, Bremner and Madeley had all misplaced passes, as though the combination of pouring rain and a gold-coloured ball had made them queasy. In attack, they were restricted to Giles’s hopeful diagonal crosses from the right. ‘We knew we had to snap at them and suffocate them – get in their faces, and not allow them to boss the game,’ Tueart recalled. ‘If we could swamp the midfield we could also cut off the supply line to Jones and Clarke.’502 Revie would be forced to admit, ‘They never allowed us to settle. We have no excuses.’
With just over half an hour played, Hughes swung in Sunderland’s first corner from the left. Watson and Halom jumped and when the ball dropped to Porterfield he cushioned it with his thigh and lashed it into the goal with his right foot from eight yards. The left-footed Porterfield never scored with his right. But this rare goal was no more than the underdogs deserved. As half-time approached, Sunderland’s fans taunted their opponents with chants of ‘easy, easy’, while Hughes used the back of his heel to find his team-mates in the manner of Leeds at their arrogant best. ‘These flicks and touches have caused trouble in the Leeds defence,’ Coleman observed of the man whose older brother John had helped Celtic beat Leeds in the European Cup three years earlier.
Leeds emerged from half-time with fresh resolve to match the clean, dry shirts several of them had put on. Curiously, though, the round-neck short-sleeved jerseys now worn by Bremner and several others didn’t match the collared long-sleeved versions in which the team had begun the match. Apparently even the best club in the land could only run to one set of first-choice kit. For a while, there was more uniformity in their play, but then three attempts on goal by Sunderland left-back Guthrie was evidence that the underdogs were some way from throwing their backs against the wall.
The second signature moment of the match came 20 minutes into the second half. Leeds left-back Trevor Cherry arrived with a late run into the box and connected with a diving header that Montgomery pushed away. The ball fell to Lorimer with the goal at his mercy from five yards.
‘And Lorimer makes it one each,’ cried Coleman.
‘And a goal,’ echoed Moore on the rival station.
‘It must be a goal – it’s a goal,’ Jones told Radio 2 listeners.
Yet their eyes deceived them. Montgomery had somehow lifted himself from the grass to fling himself back and to his left and diverted the ball against the underside of the bar.
‘No. Astonishing,’ barked Coleman as the ball bounced away from Cherry’s attempt to flick a heel at it as he lay flat on his stomach.
‘I knew I had to get off the ground as quickly as I could,’ said Montgomery, who on a dry day would have tried to hold the ball after Cherry’s header. ‘I’ve seen him hit it and I stick my hands up to make a save and fortunately the ball hits my arm. As I turn around off the floor I see the ball come down off the crossbar. I trained to make saves life that.’503
Clarke was probably correct in his assertion that ‘had we scored at that point we would have won. Sunderland were legless and they knew it.’504 Montgomery didn’t realise the significance of it at the time, ‘but later, talking to players, the people and the supporters, that was the time they felt we are going to do it.’505 After another 25 minutes of intermittent, although never overwhelming, Leeds pressure, they had indeed done it.
As the final whistle blew, ITV’s director, Bob Gardam, made the inspired decision to keep a camera focused on an ecstatic Stokoe. It meant that his camera captured the Sunderland manager, in red tracksuit, brown mac and, according to Jones, ‘a sporty trilby’, racing on to the field and going directly to hug his hero goalkeeper. ‘He was the kind of guy who was always going to do something at the end, so we had to follow him,’ Gardam explained. ‘It was a glorious moment.’506
Meanwhile, Revie went and stood among his players, their faraway stares betraying their disbelief. Kerr, Sunderland’s little captain who often joked that he was mistaken for the mascot, collected his front teeth from one of the reserve players and headed towards the Royal Box. ‘Ha’wa the lads,’ Moore intoned unconvincingly in his Home Counties voice as Kerr lifted the trophy. While the nation settled to watch The Pink Panther Show, the residents of the victorious town took to the streets or started parties in living rooms, community halls and working men’s clubs – all captured by Tyne-Tees Television for its revealing piece, Meanwhile Back in Sunderland. ‘The town’s been brought back to life since Stokoe came to Sunderland,’ one celebrating fan told the cameras. ‘Not just the football club, the town itself.’
The football club would not do badly either. In the first year of Stokoe’s arrival at Roker Park, they reckoned to have made £1 million in gate money, advance season-ticket sales, FA Cup cash and additional revenue from European football. ‘There is nothing like the Cup,’ said Stokoe. ‘It has resurrected Sunderland.’507
One season after the trauma of Sunderland, Leeds – on their way to winning the League – were beaten at home by Second Division Bristol City in a fifth-round replay. You might have thought that all these FA Cup mishaps would have dissuaded Bremner from hasty predictions. But when Leeds prepared to welcome Southern League Wimbledon to Elland Road in the fourth round in February 1975 he announced, ‘There is no question of Wimbledon beating Leeds on Saturday – none whatsoever.’508
The players of Burnley had probably felt the same in the third round a few weeks earlier. Above Leeds in the table and semi-finalists in the competition a few months earlier, they knew that no top-flight team had lost at home to non-Leaguers since before the Football League was reorganised beyond two divisions in 1920. Meanwhile, the borough of Wimbledon, chiefly synonymous with tennis, had added only the existence of furry, long-nosed rubbish collectors, The Wombles,‡ to its resumé. But beyond the view of the nation – Burnley chairman Bob Lord having again banned the TV cameras – Wimbledon’s footballers created their own identity.
‘We really did not fear anybody,’ said goalkeeper Dickie Guy of a team constructed by Allen Batsford, who had won the FA Amateur Cup in 1973 as manager of Walton and Hersham and taken several of his players with him to Plough Lane. Early in the second half, skipper Ian Cooke forced a save and the ball was put into the net by Mick Mahon, who had been a member of Colchester’s giant-killers four years earlier. Guy made several saves to keep Burnley out and by the time Wimbledon were on their way back to London the fourth-round draw had paired them with Leeds. Paul Wilcox reported in The Guardian, ‘The expected Wombling taunts from the crowd faded with Burnley’s reputation … the only rubbish Wimbledon picked up on Saturday were the First Division team’s errors.’
‘We applied our skills to the best effect – Burnley didn’t,’ was the simple verdict of Batsford, who had prepared a 15-page dossier on the opposition. ‘They were complacent in the first 20 minutes and when they got behind they panicked.’ The same day had seen Everton come within a last-minute penalty of losing at home to Northern Premier League Altrincham; while Isthmian League duo Wycombe Wanderers and Leatherhead held First Division Middlesbrough and beat Third Division Brighton and Hove Albion respectively. It was enough to prompt The Times to print its round-up of events under the headline, ‘The Cup that revives a nation’s gaiety’.
Leatherhead’s goal-scorer that day was centre-forward Chris Kelly, who was to make a national name for himself later in the evening. Having been out to celebrate and become ‘a bit inebriated’ he was tracked down to appear on Match of the Day. Responding to his team-mates’ urging to ‘wind them all up’, he confidently predicted victory against Leicester City in the next round. ‘I almost needed a prop up my back to stop me falling over,’ he recalled. ‘I just said some ridiculously stupid things.’509 The tabloids quickly dubbed him ‘The Leatherhead Lip’. Even after the non-Leaguers conceded home advantage for a bigger pay-day, Kelly almost lived up to his boast when scoring a goal to help his team to a 2-0 lead at Filbert Street, before the Division One side came back to win by the odd goal.
It was further support for Batsford’s argument that ‘the League sides think that skill alone is enough to beat a non-League side, but this season they have been taught a lesson’.510 The most shocking reinforcement of that was very nearly delivered at the expense of Leeds, who were frustrated to find themselves held goalless at half-time by Wimbledon. Clad in all green, the bearded Guy made a series of saves, but seemed destined to have his clean sheet spoiled when future Dons manager Dave Bassett brought down Gray to concede a penalty. Guy kicked the post in frustration as he waited for Lorimer to place the ball; then dived to his right to push away a tame spot-kick from the man with the hardest shot in the game. ‘Dicky Guy can have the freedom of Wimbledon this weekend,’ called Yorkshire Television commentator Keith Macklin. Every headline in the Sunday newspapers belonged to the man who worked as a tally clerk in London’s docks and who had the final touch of the game in making another remarkable save from Terry Yorath’s header.
Bremner managed to compliment his own team on not falling into the trap that befell Burnley, that of chasing the game – which seemed a strange piece of self-congratulation from the League champions at home to non-League opposition. And he complained, ‘A little too much credit was given to [Guy] for saving Peter Lorimer’s penalty. The ball almost gave itself up to him.’511 Even Guy was forced to admit, ‘He scuffed it, and I just had to get my hand under my body to knock it away.’512
Guy was no less outstanding in the replay two weeks later, staged in front of 45,701 at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park. But with 50 minutes played, a hopeful long shot by Giles took an enormous deflection off Bassett, leaving the keeper stranded and the underdogs out of the Cup.
Leeds went on to lose a third replay against Ipswich Town in the quarter-final, before falling victims to lower-division opponents for the fourth time in six years the following season. This time it was Third Division Crystal Palace, led by a fedora-wearing Malcolm Allison. Palace’s successive relegations under Allison’s leadership had done nothing to repress his ego. In fact, when his girlfriend Serena Williams presented him with some new headwear and he unveiled it for the third-round game at Scarborough, Allison was back in the spotlight he craved. ‘We’re going to win the Cup with this hat,’ he told his players. Palace’s Northern Premier League opponents were less than enamoured. ‘The one chance we get of some publicity,’ one Scarborough player was heard to observe as the photographers focused on Allison, ‘and he wears that fucking hat.’
According to winger Peter Taylor, ‘Leeds were such a good team that we said to Mal, “Let’s not give it the big ’un. We believe we can beat them, but let’s keep it low key.” We woke up in Leeds on the morning of the game, picked up the paper and there’s Malcolm saying we will win 3-0!’513 Allison was wrong. It was only 1-0, a goal scored in the first half by the head of striker David Swindlehurst. But Leeds were so outplayed that Palace defender Stewart Jump was miming smoking a cigar as the final minutes elapsed. ‘That is a special memory,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to portray to the bench how very, very easy it was for us. They didn’t even come close to scoring.’514
That Ronnie Radford goal gets brought out on the old video every time the FA Cup comes around. So there was I, a young and inexperienced commentator with an opportunity to cover a goal I never expected to be doing so.
BBC commentator John Motson515
It was perhaps the greatest FA Cup goal of the decade. The iconic crowd scenes marked one of the most unlikely upsets in the competition’s history. And it kick-started one of the nation’s most celebrated broadcasting careers. Saturday, 5 February 1972 holds a significant place in the history of English football. So much so that in 2007 readers of The Observer voted the third-round replay between Southern League Hereford United and First Division Newcastle United as the greatest Cup tie ever played.
It should have been the day on which all the fourth-round matches were staged, but a series of postponements meant that Edgar Street was still waiting to host the replay Hereford had earned with a 2-2 result at St James’ Park. They had drawn level with a goal by Colin Addison, who had become the player-manager a couple of months earlier following the dismissal of Welsh football legend John Charles.
Unable to gain a place in the Sheffield United side that had surprisingly been challenging at the top of the First Division table, former Arsenal midfielder Addison had accepted a drop of four levels in order to take his first steps in management. ‘Hereford had good facilities and a nice little ground,’ he remembered. ‘I could see the League potential.’516
Even through his inexperience, Addison could sense the agitation of opposite number Joe Harvey when bad weather forced repeated postponements and a series of wasted 500-mile round trips. ‘When the match was called off again – this was the second occasion – Joe was absolutely distraught. I took [him] to my house. Joe had a whisky and I thought, “They’re having to go home again, this will help us.” They absolutely did not fancy it at Edgar Street.’517 Newcastle waited so long to get the game played that Malcolm Macdonald recalled them stuck in their hotel for days in dirty clothes before the Cecil Gee menswear store in Worcester enjoyed a windfall of custom.
Addison had told his men to keep their heads up, look confident and prove that they belonged in a sport that some might have felt had dealt them a bad hand. With eight minutes remaining on Hereford’s muddy field, they were still matching a club with a rich FA Cup heritage. Then Macdonald headed Newcastle into the lead. ‘That’s it,’ said BBC’s John Motson in a fatalistic tone.
But urged on by a crowd that was officially recorded at 14,313, but was thought to be underestimated and certainly didn’t include those on vantage points outside the ground, Hereford weren’t done. Three minutes later, Ronnie Radford, a signing from Newport County, won the ball in midfield, just as Motson was praising the ‘tremendous spirit’ in the home team. Radford pushed the ball forward – a miracle it reached its target in the cloying mud – found the ball laid back into his path and let fly from more than 30 yards. His shot sailed beyond goalkeeper Iam McFaul’s right arm and into the top corner. ‘I was four yards behind him,’ said Macdonald. ‘The ball sat up on a divot. He didn’t know that was going to happen. Without that, it would’ve been a mishit and a throw-in.’ Even Radford admitted, ‘It could have finished in the car park, but as soon as it left my foot I knew it was going for the top corner.’518
What has enabled that game, that goal, to stamp such an indelible hallmark on the FA Cup is not just the strike, or its significance, but the scenes of spontaneous, unbridled, innocent joy as fans of all ages raced to the field to pursue the scorer as he ran off with arms aloft. One of the duty policemen on the day, Hereford fan PC Grenville Smith, was at the head of the charge until catching himself and shouting, ‘Off the pitch!’ at his fellow celebrants. And Motson’s commentary has accompanied the goal into history. ‘I often shudder when thinking about if I’d got the scorer wrong,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t spot it, but when I say, “What a goal!” there’s a pause between the “a” and “goal” so that I could say “shot”.’519
Ironically, when another hero emerged in extra-time, it was one of Motson’s best friends from his hometown of Barnet, Ricky George. A regular substitute because of ankle problems, George had been sent on after Macdonald’s goal to replace right-back Roger Griffiths, who would discover that he’d been playing since the early minutes with a broken leg. George had been up in the hotel bar later than some on the eve of the game, bumping into Newcastle legend Jackie Milburn in the hotel lift. Milburn, who was there to report on the game, told George off for not being in bed and telling him it was such indiscipline among players that had made him give up football management. Milburn departed by telling George he’d probably go on to score the winning goal.520
With 13 minutes of extra-time played, George gathered Dudley Tyler’s low ball into the penalty area, turned towards goal and shot low beyond McFaul. ‘I tried to cushion it, but it popped up in the air to my left. I followed it, turning all the time towards goal,’ George explained. ‘My brain said “shoot” and I struck the ball right-footed.’ The delighted goal-scorer was not on screen for long. Within moments he had disappeared within a swarm of Hereford fans. ‘The elation is immediate. Your reaction is spontaneous,’ he continued. ‘For a moment, this was my moment. But the glory for all time will be the team’s.’521
There was more of that glory to come four days later when Hereford drew 0-0 against West Ham United in the fourth round, causing Jeff Powell to tell Daily Mail readers, ‘Hereford blew a rich, ripe, agricultural raspberry at West Ham and all the football aristocracy they represent.’ West Ham manager Ron Greenwood, who visited Hereford’s dressing-room and admitted his team was lucky to still be in the competition, was impressed enough to sign midfielder Tyler for £25,000. A Geoff Hurst hat-trick in the replay meant the end of a Cup run that was said to have earned them £27,000, but Hereford’s real ambition – a place in the Football League – was now within their reach.
These were the days when the League operated as a closed shop, with an ambitious non-League club having to win a vote of the membership if they were to be admitted at the expense of one of the 92. It happened so rarely that Cambridge United’s election to the League in 1970 was the first for a full decade. ‘No one has a right to be in the League and we don’t say we should be in,’ said Addison. ‘We have proved our playing abilities against League clubs; we have good support; our spectator and ground facilities are extremely good; the nearest League club, Newport, is 42 miles away; and we have a forward-looking chairman and board of directors.’522
Hereford, runners-up in the Southern League, won enough votes to replace Barrow, even though chairman Frank Miles admitted, ‘We had to convince them that Hereford deserved a place in the League on overall merit and we did that by travelling thousands of miles spreading the word.’523
As if to prove a point, Hereford immediately won promotion from the Fourth Division and then beat West Ham 2-1 in another memorable FA Cup replay at Edgar Street the following season. It is the Newcastle game that endures, though. ‘For me to regard the experience as less than the greatest moment of my life would be insulting to the dreams of millions of school kids,’ said George, who would add joint-ownership of 1998 Grand National winner Earth Summit to his sporting achievements. ‘It changed my life.’524
During a bleak 1977-78 season that ended in Newcastle United’s relegation, one occasion at St James’ Park was bathed in light. It was the night when the longest FA Cup run of any non-League team during the 1970s ended when Blyth Spartans of the Northern League lost to Wrexham. Victory would have made them the first non-Leaguers since 1914 to reach the quarter-finals. The game ended up being a final hurrah for the stadium’s giant Leazes End, demolished at the end of the season. While Blyth attracted 42,617 to their temporary home on the penultimate night of February – their own fans standing shoulder to shoulder with Newcastle and Sunderland supporters – their tenants never once achieved that level of attendance in their own dismal season.
Based in a Northumberland port town, the very name of Blyth Spartans sounded romantic, the kind of moniker – like Bishop Auckland or Corinthian-Casuals – synonymous with football outside the professional ranks. Starting out in the first qualifying round, Blyth won seven ties to reach the fourth round proper, only one of which had been against League opposition. After beating Third Division Chesterfield at home in the second round, they had the disappointment of being drawn against another part-time side, Isthmian League Enfield, in the third. A header by Alan Shoulder earned them a visit to Stoke City, by now relegated to the Second Division in the wake of a financial crisis created by storm damage to an uninsured Butler Street Stand roof. In place of names such as Peter Shilton, Alan Hudson, Jimmy Greenhoff and Mike Pejic, the club were recycling the likes of Howard Kendall and Alec Lindsay, alongside a young striker called Garth Crooks.
After taking a tenth-minute lead via the prolific Terry Johnson, Blyth were 2-1 down with ten minutes to play when a free-kick by Sunderland’s Cup-winning left-back, Ron Guthrie, deflected against a post. In the melee, Shoulder headed against the other post before Steve Carney netted the equaliser. Their winner came in the final minute when Johnson fired home. True to non-League trope, coach Jack Marks recalled, ‘Even after we beat Stoke we were all back at work at seven o’clock the next morning.’525
Blyth, whose players used to take the field with a shot of whisky still stinging their tongues, were denied a dream date with Newcastle by the First Division team’s surprise defeat to Wrexham. Instead, they found themselves at the Racecourse Ground, where they conceded a last-minute equaliser by Dixie McNeil after the home team were twice allowed to retake a corner because the flag had fallen over. Consolation for missing out on a home quarter-final against Arsenal was their night at St James’ Park. Despite Johnson pulling a goal back after they conceded two inside 20 minutes, Spartans’ run came to a glorious end after 11 matches.
For defender Carney and forward Shoulder there were contract offers from Newcastle, the latter teaming up in attack with Peter Withe, who had been winning the League with Nottingham Forest during Blyth’s Cup run. The rest of their team-mates, who earned around £7 a week to play for the team, had to content themselves with £350 worth of bedroom furniture from a local store and a lifetime of memories. ‘I still remember going out and being amazed at the uproar and support that we got from a full stadium [at Newcastle],’ said skipper John Waterson more than three decades later. ‘It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up just thinking about it.’526
While Blyth went on to finish as runners-up in the Northern League, it was the second-placed team in the Northern Premier League, Wigan Athletic, who became the fourth team in the decade to break into the Football League, following Cambridge United’s replacement of Bradford Park Avenue in 1970, Hereford in 1972 and Wimbledon’s elevation in place of Workington in 1977. Wigan, who took the place of Southport, had been hopeful of election seven years earlier, having seen Cambridge campaign hard for their place the previous year. But after spending heavily on a promotional campaign, Wigan secretary Frank Postlethwaite said on that occasion, ‘Public relations cannot help sell a football club.’ When Wigan had rounded off their campaign by giving an expensive pen set to each club chairman at the Football League’s decisive meeting, one of the recipients called it ‘nothing short of bribery’ and claimed, ‘That little stunt cost them a stack of votes.’527
After Wigan eventually succeeded, it would be another nine seasons before the League welcomed another new entrant, when Scarborough became the first Football Conference champions to win automatic promotion.
Hey Mister Dream Seller, where have you been? Tell me, have you dreams I can see?
Meet Me on The Corner, Lindisfarne (Rod Clements; Warner
Chappell Music Inc., Universal Publishing Group, 1971)
Nothing speaks more eloquently of the egalitarianism of 1970s English football than the FA Cups of the decade’s middle years. As if to prove that Second Division Sunderland’s triumph in 1973 was no anomaly, West Ham United won in 1975 from a position of 13th in the First Division; Southampton did so from the Second Division; and Ipswich Town won in 1978 after finishing only three points from relegation in 18th place in the top flight.
Fulham provided further Second Division representation at Wembley in 1975 after upsetting First Division Everton, Carlisle United and Birmingham City. And what made their story fit even more perfectly into the mystique and magic of the FA Cup was the fact that in their ranks was none other than Bobby Moore, returning to Wembley at the age of 34 and finding himself facing his former West Ham team-mates.
Upton Park’s favourite son had moved across London in the spring of 1974, his final game for the Hammers having been an FA Cup game against Hereford in which he was injured. ‘There I was,’ he said. ‘One moment on top of the world, captain of club and country, the next leading out West Ham’s reserves.’528 As the last of the club’s trio of World Cup winners to depart, it also meant the termination of any connection to the team that had won domestic and European trophies in the 1960s. Ron Greenwood was no longer in charge as the Hammers began their 1974-75 FA Cup campaign, replaced as team manager by John Lyall, a prematurely retired player who had risen through the club’s coaching staff.
Things had changed so much that after West Ham beat Leeds in mid-season, Bremner had the audacity to complain, ‘They seem to have sacrificed all their traditional skill for aggression. I didn’t like their provocative tactics one bit. West Ham were always respected in football in the past for their attractive style and sportsmanship.’529 Easy to love a team who were always pushovers, of course.
Fulham’s path to the final was personified by Moore and the emergence of an unlikely goal-scoring hero in John Mitchell, who netted the winner in the last minute of extra-time in the semi-final replay against Birmingham. Meanwhile, it was a previously unknown forward called Alan Taylor who emerged as the principal character in the West Ham story. Signed from Fourth Division Rochdale for £40,000 late in 1974, Taylor shot to national fame in one of his earliest games for his new club, a quarter-final played on a Highbury mud heap. Selected by Lyall in order to exploit what he perceived as a lack of speed on the left of the Arsenal defence, Taylor, who was awake with excitement in the early hours, scored both West Ham goals in a 2-0 win. The second, built down the Hammers’ right flank with Brooking, was exactly the kind of execution Lyall had envisioned.
Brooking was a man who could make light of even the heaviest surface, with ball-winning colleague Billy Bonds saying, ‘I always thought Trevor was better at playing in the mud. He was physically strong … he would stick his backside into people and hold them off.’530
Having taken a little time to establish a regular place in the first team of the club he supported as a boy – he had even asked for a transfer in March 1971 – there was now nobody in the English game who had better perfected the art of allowing the ball to run at his feet and do his work for him. Former team-mate Bryan Robson called him ‘the most creative player I ever played with’ and recalled, ‘He did the same thing every time from our throw-ins, but no one could stop him from letting the ball run across his body before turning to build up the play.’531 It was a sign of the times, though, that in identifying his main ambition of delivering ‘killer balls’, Brooking noted that packed defences meant that ‘if I can pull off two or three of these passes in a match I am doing pretty well’.532
In front of Brooking, Taylor, pale and frail, appeared no match for the bruisers who patrolled First Division defences. Yet he seemed to have been sprinkled with the Cup’s stardust, scoring West Ham’s goals in their 2-1 semi-final replay win against Ipswich at Stamford Bridge. And it was the same in the final. Denying Moore and Fulham captain Alan Mullery their end-of-career bonus, Taylor twice pounced on shots that had been parried by goalkeeper Peter Mellor to give his team the trophy 2-0.
The human storylines were a counterpoint to one of the decade’s blandest finals. In the Daily Mirror, Frank McGhee even complained that the low total of 17 fouls indicated a lack of passion in the game – a sign that a few lumps being taken out of opposing players had become accepted as part of the beautiful game in England.
Crystal Palace’s hopes of representing the Third Division in the following season’s final ended at Stamford Bridge, where winger Peter Taylor had inspired them to a memorable 3-2 win against Chelsea in the fifth round. Back there for a semi-final against Southampton, the prospect of a Wembley visit offered redemption to Allison after six years in which his career had been in steady freefall. Yet with Taylor, newly capped by England, unable to fire, Southampton were comfortable 2-0 winners. ‘Everyone expected Peter to do more,’ said Palace forward Alan Whittle. ‘But he was tied up by Peter Rodrigues and it didn’t happen. Malcolm probably put too much on the boy.’533
Rodrigues was a story in himself. A former Wales right-back, he’d played in the 1969 final for Leicester before five years at Sheffield Wednesday had ended with a free transfer in the summer of 1975. Even though only 31, his reaction had been to go on a pub crawl for several weeks – not to drown his sorrows, but to make notes in preparation for a career as a landlord. Yet before he got his name above the door, Southampton manager Lawrie McMenemy gave him the chance to continue his playing career. By the time the Saints began their FA Cup campaign early in 1976, he’d become club captain.
At Wembley, Rodrigues was up against Gordon Hill, whose signing from Millwall had allowed Tommy Docherty to complete the attacking 4-4-2 formation that characterised Manchester United’s exciting return to the First Division. It might have sounded crass, but Docherty spoke for the majority when he looked forward to United’s semi-final meeting with Derby County by saying, ‘This is the first time the FA Cup Final will have been played at Hillsborough.’ Both teams were chasing Liverpool for the League title and it was two long-range goals by Hill that won the day. The first, a brilliant curling finish after a swift build-up showcased the best of Docherty’s side. ‘This match summed up Manchester United under the Doc for me,’ said Lou Macari. ‘Great football played on the deck at good pace with a pair of wingers causing havoc. Gordon Hill never played a better game in a red shirt.’534
At Wembley, United were almost as heavy favourites as Leeds had been three years earlier, although – unlike Sunderland – McMenemy’s Southampton could boast a handful of players with experience at the highest level. England forward Mick Channon was partnered by Peter Osgood, scorer in every FA Cup round in 1970, and their midfield support came from Scotland international Jim McCalliog, who had scored in a final for Sheffield Wednesday and twice been sold by Docherty. McMenemy, the former guardsman, would make a feature of signing established England players – the likes of Alan Ball, Mick Mills, Peter Shilton and Dave Watson would follow – and was unafraid of the challenges it presented. According to David Peach, ‘Lawrie had to prove that signing these players wasn’t just for fun. But he was a great man manager and he got respect from those players. Players like Osgood and Ball came, a bit of devilment in them, and they just needed a little bit of slack that they probably didn’t get in other places. He gave them that and they would cross rivers for him.’535
McMenemy recalled that ‘Ossie was irritating me’ and suggested, ‘He did not feel he fitted into second-tier football and in that I agreed with him … there was more than a touch of the diva about him.’ But unlike some managers confronted with the mavericks of the period, he added with acceptance, ‘You get that with players who are different because they possess outstanding talent and know it.’536
United knew it, too. ‘When you looked at the Southampton team you saw a lot of good players,’ said defender Brian Greenhoff. ‘As a defender, you know you’re going to have a hard game against Osgood and Channon. We did think that if we got into them for 15 minutes and scored we would win, but the longer the game goes on you get nervous about it. It only takes one deflected shot.’537 Or even one controversial decision.
In a game that was a colourful triumph for the emerging Admiral sportswear firm – who kitted out both teams – referee Clive Thomas ruled that the yellow shirt of Bobby Stokes was in an onside position when, seven minutes from time, he latched on to a bouncing ball and beat Alex Stepney from the edge of the penalty area. United could complain all they liked but they’d hardly deserved to win the game. Hill had been so subdued by Rodrigues that he’d been taken off midway through the second half. ‘I was having an absolute nightmare,’ he admitted. ‘They held the card up with my number and I looked at the boss and said, “Me?” and he said, “No, all fucking 11 of you!” Even then he was able to have a joke.’538
A joke that went too far provided a fatal footnote to the 1976 FA Cup campaign for Allison. At the end of one day’s training, a Rolls-Royce pulled up and out stepped Fiona Richmond, star of Britain’s mid-1970s soft-porn film industry. As the Palace players sunk into their communal bath they were shocked to find Allison and Richmond stripping off to join them, with a photographer on hand to capture the moment. Allison would explain that Richmond had said, ‘Do you mind if I get in?’ and he’d replied ‘Yeah, why not?’ – an inexplicable response for a manager with an eye on his reputation and career, but totally in keeping with the character of Big Mal. The Palace board had seen enough. After a series of clashes over Allison’s reluctance to sell Taylor, there was now an FA disrepute charge to face. Having failed to make himself unsackable by winning the Cup, Allison was gone.
Docherty, meanwhile, created a happier next chapter. Having gone around the Wembley dressing-room telling his players they would win the trophy the next year, he repeated his promise to 20,000 fans in Albert Square the following day. ‘It was tongue in cheek,’ Docherty admitted. ‘That was hope rather than expectation. But I felt I had to say it. Some people probably thought, “Big mouth twat.”’539 Steve Coppell remembered thinking, ‘Blimey, fancy putting that expectation on us, but Doc made a commitment and the crowd loved it.’540 Sure enough, a year later Manchester United beat Liverpool 2-1 at Wembley and Docherty was about to hit the front pages (see next chapter).
The smallest town to boast an FA Cup winner in the 1970s was Ipswich, whose team were champions in the early 1960s and spent the next decade mounting a steady climb back towards the top of the table. Ironically, that expedition stalled in 1977-78. Starting with 1972-73, they had finished fourth, fourth, third, sixth and third in consecutive seasons. Manager Bobby Robson admitted that ‘it may be strange to see Ipswich sitting up there with Leeds and Liverpool’ but, without repeating Alf Ramsey’s out-of-the-blue title success of 1961-62, they achieved a consistency that made it a surprise when they suddenly plummeted down the table again.
Robson cited a 3-3 draw at Leeds in August 1972 as one of the matches that persuaded his players that they belonged in elevated circles and proved a point to the football world. ‘It does annoy me to keep hearing that Ipswich are in the backwaters,’ he said. ‘That sort of publicity has been very unfair to the club.’541 It meant, he believed, that he had to rely even more on developing young players in order to make up for the stars’ reluctance to move to Portman Road, despite the support of an ambitious board under chairman John Cobbold. In the summer of 1971, even Arsenal’s out-of-favour midfielder Jon Sammels had declined a move to his hometown team and chosen Leicester instead. ‘We have our £100-a-week players, our ground and our facilities,’ Robson had said after succeeding Bill McGarry in 1969. ‘Certainly, no player need be afraid of coming to Ipswich and getting less in any way than he might elsewhere.’542
Yet Robson’s time at Ipswich was, by necessity, characterised by bargain purchases and bringing through players from a development system that earned them the FA Youth Cup in 1973 and 1975. Men such as Scots John Wark, converted from full-back to midfield, and George Burley, a stylish right-back; energetic England midfielder Brian Talbot; and Kevin Beattie, the powerful and skilful defender who put Robson in mind of Duncan Edwards. ‘It was distressing to me when Beattie had to retire because of his knee injury,’ Robson said. ‘I ranked him as the finest player ever produced by Ipswich, one of the best British players in post-war British football. He had so much pace and power, and in the air there was no one in the world to match him.’543 Leading them was defender Mick Mills, who had moved east when Portsmouth scrapped their youth system.
And while Ramsey’s Ipswich, for all their strategic pragmatism, were never that easy on the eye, the rise of Robson’s team was welcomed by those who longed for the return of greater ascetics. An attacking midfielder capped 20 times by England, Robson saw his team evolve from the scrappy style that ensured First Division survival in his early years to an eye-pleasing team who moved forward with pace and intent. At the end of the 1973-74 season, Foul magazine predicted, ‘Ipswich look two years away from being the most dominating side in the game. And if they make it, and establish this domination, it will represent a complete turn of the tide back to skilful football rather than the negativity which has been prevalent since the mid-Sixties.’544
Along with the consistency of performance and elevation of players into international football, a sign of Ipswich’s progress was when, in November 1976, they won a battle for one of the game’s hottest properties, Plymouth Argyle centre-forward Paul Mariner, who was signed in an exchange deal worth £220,000. Mariner took the No.9 shirt that had previously belonged to David Johnson, an intelligent player considered by Robson to have been one of his best acquisitions when he arrived from Everton. Johnson had now gone back to Merseyside to join champions Liverpool, but Robson described his replacement as another ‘young, brave, smart’ player.545
Such was Mariner’s impact that by the spring of 1977, his strike partner, Trevor Whymark – who had scored four goals against West Bromwich Albion in Mariner’s second game – was talking credibly about the club’s title challenge and had the confidence to suggest, ‘I don’t rate Liverpool as the biggest danger to us. I still have a sneaky feeling that Manchester City will be the team who run us closest.’546 Four defeats in their final six matches put paid to that, but it was a surprise when Ipswich stumbled through the next League campaign, winning only one match away from Portman Road. Yet it was a season that would go down in club history, thanks to an FA Cup run that reached the semi-final stage before they encountered another top-flight team in West Bromwich Albion. Mariner scored seven goals, including a hat-trick at Millwall, in helping his team to the last four.
Talbot’s brave diving header gave his team the lead at Highbury after eight minutes, an act that left both the scorer and Albion skipper John Wile bloodied with head wounds. While Talbot was stitched and substituted, Wile played on with a red-stained bandage, but was unable to prevent Mills adding a second goal in a goalmouth scramble. Ipswich were on their way to a 3-1 victory and their first Cup final appearance.
Facing them would be an Arsenal team in its second season under Terry Neill’s management and featuring some of the most significant names of the footballing decade. Most notably, Pat Jennings had followed his manager’s path across north London after Tottenham’s relegation, an unthinkable development that Jennings’s reputation at White Hart Lane would survive, making him a rare beloved figure on both sides of that divide. ‘I would have been willing to stay on,’ he said after leaving Spurs for a four-year contract at Arsenal. ‘The prospect of the Second Division didn’t frighten me.’ Yet at 32 and with Spurs believing Barry Daines to be a worthy successor, Jennings was sold for £45,000. Ironically, it could have been Ipswich that he joined, preferring a move that allowed him to stay in his home in the Hertfordshire town of Hoddesdon. Declaring himself ‘fit and healthy’ and ‘sure I can last the pace’,547 Jennings would end up playing for Arsenal for eight years and appearing in two World Cups for Northern Ireland.
His new team-mates included Alan Hudson, hitting a rich vein of form in the second half of the season after struggling to settle following his transfer from Stoke, and Malcolm Macdonald, whose £333,333 transfer from Newcastle had marked Neill’s arrival at Highbury after Bertie Mee’s retirement in the summer of 1976. With the languid left feet of Liam Brady and Graham Rix helping Macdonald to 26 goals during the season, Arsenal advanced to the final during a period of attacking football that was barely recognisable to those who identified them with the functional methods of the Double winners and expected more of the same after Don Howe’s return as first-team coach. Once again, Wembley featured a heavy favourite.
Macdonald had scored five goals in a single Wembley game for England after his disappointing performance for Newcastle in the 1974 final, yet those hoping for him to repeat such feats on this occasion might have found warning signs in his retrospective comments about that previous FA Cup Final experience. Sounding like a man daunted rather than excited by the occasion, he’d spoken a year earlier about the pressure that followed victory in the semi-final and the ‘agony’ of the bus ride to Wembley. ‘No other word can sum up the feeling,’ he said. ‘Bad jokes, badly played card hands, loud and unreal laughter. To the ultra-sensitive person, the whole scene is almost nightmarish.’ He went on to describe ‘the dreaded knock’ on the dressing-room door, the ‘long and draining wait’ for kick-off and ‘iron butterflies’.548 Doubtless that was an experience shared by many players over many years, but his honesty hardly inspired confidence that he would continue his record of scoring in every round of the competition.
Neill had his own worries – about the fitness of forward Alan Sunderland, Brady and Macdonald, whose knees were close to bringing his career to a premature end – and made the mistake of sharing his nerves with his players. The Gunners camp, meanwhile, felt that Robson was making too much of his own injury concerns, specifically around his beloved Beattie and defensive partner Allan Hunter. Neill concluded that ‘Bobby can be a moaner at times’.549
Robson was reluctantly forced to admit that there was no place for his South African-born England midfielder Colin Viljoen, who had been injured for three months. Hoping to play him at Wembley, Robson brought him back for the last game before the final, at Aston Villa, moving Talbot to the right as part of a reshuffle. ‘I knew the players didn’t like Viljoen, but I failed to sense how deep their resentment had become about his attitude,’ Robson would write, recalling a 6-1 defeat and his belief that Talbot was unhappy about being displaced. Angry and powerless, Robson felt he had to leave Viljoen out of his Wembley line-up, with Talbot back on the left, Wark in the centre and Roger Osborne recalled on the right of the midfield three. Robson at least felt that the episode had ‘cleared the air’.550
After all that, it was Arsenal who looked disjointed and afraid of their status as favourites. Ipswich were dominant enough for Macdonald to admit they could have won by five goals. ‘Their team outplayed, outran and outwitted mighty Arsenal in a triumph for the good things that football these days tends to forget,’ said The Times. Blond forward David Geddis, playing instead of the injured Whymark, stretched the Arsenal defence by following instructions to drift out to the right. So impressive was he that even guest of honour Margaret Thatcher singled him out in a radio interview, although – taking her cue from the match programme – she identified him as Whymark. Meanwhile, Mariner tormented Wille Young, the giant accident-prone cult hero of the North Bank. The surprise was that it was only when Young failed to clear the ball 13 minutes from time that Ipswich eventually scored through Osborne. Such were the exertions of his celebration and his efforts in subduing Brady that Osborne – a Suffolk boy who had 11 close family members in the stands – was immediately substituted after almost fainting under a pile of happy team-mates.
In the manner of Docherty, Neill attempted to lift his men by assuring them they would return next year. And once they had survived an epic five-match third-round tie against Sheffield Wednesday,§ they did indeed fight their way back. Opposing them at Wembley were Manchester United, led by Dave Sexton, winner of the decade’s first final and successor to Docherty. Arsenal now had Talbot in their team and Frank Stapleton as undisputed leader of the attack with Macdonald crocked. They each scored a first-half goal to give their team a lead they still held with 85 minutes played. To most observers it appeared that Neill had sent on substitute Steve Walford in place of midfield worker David Price in order to give him the experience of playing in the final, although Neill would insist, ‘That was untrue. David was fading fast.’551
And then ‘The Five-Minute Final’ began. It started with Gordon McQueen swinging a lazy left boot at the ball after Arsenal failed to deal with a free-kick into the box. And then, a minute later, Coppell knocked a hopeful pass forward to Sammy McIlroy on the right edge of the penalty area. ‘And McIlroy’s through,’ Motson told BBC viewers, his voice rising in excitement as yellow-shirted David O’Leary hit the floor. ‘McIlroy’s through,’ he repeated as United’s long-serving Irishman cut inside Walford. ‘And McIlroy,’ he continued, pausing as a left-foot shot slid under Jennings, ‘has done it!’
With United getting substitute Brian Greenhoff ready to play a role in extra-time, PFA Player of the Year Brady, as influential in this game as he had been disappointing a year earlier, put his head down and ran at the United defence. He nudged the ball to his left; Rix connected with a clipped cross just before two United defenders could get to him; and the ball dipped into the six-yard box just beyond the far post, where Sunderland stuck out a leg to score. United’s players dropped to their knees, Sunderland sprinted away with eyes closed and team-mates in pursuit, and Talbot was caught by the cameras offering thanks to the heavens.
The FA Cup had signed off for the decade in the way it had begun: a good old north versus south ding-dong at Wembley, with high drama, heroes and heartbreak. And, this time, not a horse’s hoofmark to be seen.