Posted in Famous news stories, Historical articles, History, London, Sport, Sporting Heroes on Monday, 23 April 2012

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This edited article about the F A Cup originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 694 published on 3 May 1975.

On Saturday the eyes of Britain’s soccer fans will be turned to Wembley for the Final of the F.A. Cup. Here we look back at some of its most dramatic moments

I if Wembley Stadium were twice as big, there would still probably be more than 200,000 people who would want tickets for the FA Cup Final and touts would still do a roaring trade on the day selling tickets at two or three times their proper price.

Football fans have paid as much as ¬£30 for a ¬£1 terrace ticket to watch a Final of the greatest – and oldest – knock-out soccer competition in the world.

Yet the first Final of them all, in 1872, was attended by fewer than 2,000 spectators, and the leading sporting newspaper of the day, Bell’s Life, claimed that the poor attendance was because of the ‘exorbitant’ admittance charge of one shilling (5p).

Football was not given much space in the newspapers in those days. If the modern swarm of soccer writers, all looking for sensational stories, had been reporting in those times, they would have had a field day.

The big story would have been: Who was the Mystery Man who scored the only goal which enabled the Wanderers to beat Royal Engineers and become the first team to have its name on the Cup?

On the team-sheet, he was listed as A. H. Chequer. But that wasn’t his proper name at all. He was, in fact, M. P. Betts, whose own team, Harrow Chequers, had scratched from the Cup in the first round.

The Luck of the Cup is a favourite phrase for teams who do better than expected today. But none of the hundreds of teams who have enjoyed the Cup’s luck has thrown it away like Queen’s Park, Glasgow, the only team twice to reach the semi-finals without playing a match.

Queen’s Park, the first Scottish team to enter the FA Cup, were among the 15 original entries in 1872 – and were given a bye into the last four.

They had to travel to London for a semi-final against the Wanderers at the Oval Cricket cricket ground. It was a draw, and although Queen’s Park were offered a replay on the following day, the club could not afford an overnight stay and scratched from the competition.

The following year, they were again given a bye into the semi-finals, but again withdrew rather than face the cost of going south again to meet Oxford University.

Nobody knows what happened to the original FA Cup. In 1895 it was won by Aston Villa, who loaned it to a Birmingham football-boot manufacturer to display in his shop window.

One morning, Mr. William Shillcock arrived to open his shop and found to his horror that the Cup had been stolen during the night. At last the Cup made headlines in the newspapers, but despite an intensive police search it was never recovered.

The thief was also never apprehended, although 63 years later a man, then aged 83, told a newspaper that he had stolen it and melted it down to make counterfeit silver coins. As there was less than ¬£20 of silver in the original cup, he and his associates must have been disappointed with the results of their work.

Recently another man thought he had found pieces of the original cup among some silverware in a junk shop, but his claim, too, has been officially discounted.

The second trophy lasted for only 15 years. When the FA found that the design was being copied and used for other competitions, it ordered a third new trophy of exclusive design, 19 inches (482 millimetres) high and weighing just over 10 lb (4.5 kilograms) – and that is the one still proudly carried round Wembley Stadium before thousands of cheering fans.

It was made in Bradford in 1911 and won that year by a Bradford club – the first, and so far only time that Yorkshire city has been ‘Oop for t’Coop.’

The biggest attendance at a Cup Final was never counted. When it was staged at Wembley for the first time in 1923, crowds stormed the gates and an estimated 160,000 people were around and on the pitch when kick-off time arrived.

Watched by King George V, one policeman on a white horse was mainly responsible for urging the spectators back over the touchlines so that the game, between West Ham United and Bolton Wanderers could begin.

Since then, Wembley finals have always been all-ticket matches – and from then on the precious little pieces of paper which get you into the Final have fetched higher and higher prices. Every year there used to be stories of vast forgeries of these tickets, but nowadays they are of such intricate design and printing that they are almost impossible to copy accurately.

There has been plenty of drama on, as well as off, the field. One player, a Lt. Cresswell of the Royal Engineers, broke his collar bone in the first Final, but the most dramatic injury of all occurred to Manchester City’s German-born goalkeeper Bert Trautmann in 1956.

Fifteen minutes from the end of a game Manchester won 3-1, Trautmann had to make a daring dive at the feet of a Birmingham forward to stop him from scoring. He was knocked out, but played on to the end after treatment.

At the victory banquet afterwards, Trautmann was still complaining of pains in his neck. Not until he was examined in hospital was it discovered that he had played for 15 minutes with a broken neck.

But there have been triumphs as well as tragedies. In 1939, Portsmouth came to Wembley as the biggest underdogs of all time to meet Wolverhampton Wanderers, then a ‘team of all talents’.

There were rumours that Wolves had been given monkey-gland treatment, to which the Portsmouth manager Jack Tinn replied by insisting his team would win because he would be wearing his lucky spats.

The spats – and Portsmouth – did win, by an astonishing 4-1 margin.

But the match still remembered by most people as the most dramatic was Blackpool’s 4-3 victory over Bolton Wanderers in 1953.

It was the third time in six finals that the veteran Blackpool winger Stanley Matthews had tried to win a Cup Winners’ medal. They were a goal down in 90 seconds and 3-1 behind with only 22 minutes left to play.

Then Matthews turned on his dribbling magic on the right wing in an incredible display of individual skill, shattering the Bolton defence and enabling his colleagues to score three times.

The Cup was won – and that’s what it’s all about.