FIRST RUSSIAN TAKEOVER AT THE BRIDGE
POST-WAR GOODWILL FRIENDLY, NOV 13, 1945: CHELSEA 3 DYNAMO MOSCOW 3 STAMFORD BRIDGE. ATT: 74,496 (PAID)
They said there were 100,000 there. But it was just a guess, and 100,000 was a remarkably neat figure for such a chaotic, exuberant occasion which was anything but neat in its organisation. This was a football match which provoked a court case in which the game was decreed to have fulfilled the legal definition of a riot.
It was November 1945, 10 happy weeks after the relief brought by the end of the Second World War and so many people of all ages wanted to get into Stamford Bridge that even the vast terraces which shoe-horned the pitch then could not hold them.
The reason for the riotous excitement was the visit of Dynamo Moscow for a post-war goodwill friendly. Russia was Britain’s ally and Dynamo were on a tour to promote friendship. This was postwar colour and excitement and, at least to some, it was pioneering european football.
Brian Mears, whose grandfather founded Chelsea and who would later become chairman of the club, was there. Aged 14, it was his first football match. Mears skipped school to go and recalled that a prime motivation was a general desire of Londoners to witness the people whose Red Army had just defeated hitler to win the war.
‘They’d never seen Russians before and they were curious to see these people that had come from near extinction to push the Germans right back to Berlin.
‘The Russians were a power to be reckoned with, and our allies, so they were heroes — before we knew what was going to happen afterwards, the Cold War . . . they were heroes and they were bloody good footballers. It was a huge thing, it was fantastic.’
Thousands of other schoolchildren agreed with Mears. houses adjoining the stadium were clambered over — the court case was brought by a landlord on Fulham Road — and while 74,496 paid to get in, estimates put the actual attendance in six figures. Once inside Stamford Bridge, fans were prepared to climb up walls and on to the stand’s roof. Thousands more crowded on to the perimeter greyhound track.
Days before the game Chelsea signed the great Tommy Lawton from everton. Lawton said of his introduction: ‘I felt like a film star at a premiere.’
Lawton’s analogy came from Dynamo handing over bouquets of flowers to the Chelsea team before kick-off, a gesture which puzzled the home players. That feeling continued as the Russians bamboozled their hosts on the pitch.
‘Dynamo were one of the fastest teams I have ever seen in my life,’ said Lawton. ‘The Russians do not dribble. They flash the ball from man to man in bewildering fashion, often while standing still.’
Chelsea went 2-0 up through Len Goulden and Reg Williams. Dynamo missed a penalty but got the score back to 2-2 before Lawton made it 3-2. At which point, he recalled, the crowd were audibly supporting the visitors. There was satisfaction therefore when Dynamo’s late offside equaliser from their captain Vsevolod Bobrov was allowed to stand.
As the official biography of Chelsea notes: ‘Some gates buckled under the pressure . . . People (looked) like starlings massed on telephone lines atop every climbable structure — hoardings and nearby buildings.’
Dynamo’s goodwill tour was off to a great start. From Stamford Bridge, the Russians went on to Cardiff City and won 10-1 — in front of 60,000. Back in London, they beat Arsenal 4-3 — a game played at White hart Lane, as highbury was under the control of the Ministry of Defence. They then went to Glasgow, where they drew 2-2 with Rangers.
As Lawton said, their short-passing style stunned Britain. In Russia it was known as passovotchka, or ‘organised disorder’, which possibly summed up the Chelsea occasion. In the Daily Mail, Geoffrey Simpson wrote of Dynamo playing ‘a brand of football which, in class, style and effectiveness is way ahead of our own’.
This was eight years before hungary shocked england at Wembley, yet lessons appear to have gone unheeded, possibly because amid the ‘goodwill’, there was suspicion from both British and Russian officials. There were complaints from Dynamo about accommodation and referees, while the British were bemused by the silence of the visitors. George Orwell wrote that rather than promoting goodwill, such international sport was ‘the cause of ill-will’.
Dynamo Moscow returned home unbeaten and heroic. The Football League resumed in england and when, in 1955, Chelsea won it for the first time, they were invited to enter a new competition just starting across the continent, the european Cup.
Chelsea were interested but the Football League said No. had the League any vision, they could have seen from the fans scrambling on to the roof at Stamford Bridge how popular european football could become. Manchester United showed them the way a year later.