Crazy day we met Ali and won Cup
The 1966 FA Cup final between Sheffield Wednesday and everton contained so many disparate elements it is hard to know where to start.
At the height of the Beatles’ global fame, Paul McCartney strolled into Wembley Stadium, apparently unguarded and presumably to cheer on everton, whose squad had spent the previous evening at the cinema watching Dr Zhivago.
McCartney and the rest saw Wednesday take a 2-0 lead only for Mike Trebilcock to come from the margins, in career terms, to score twice in five minutes and make it 2-2. That prompted an everton fanatic called eddie Cavanagh to stage a one-man pitch invasion, during which the police chased him across Wembley like the Keystone Cops.
Derek Temple then scored the everton winner to take the Cup back to Goodison Park for the first time since 1933.
This was presided over by butcher-referee Jack Taylor, later of World Cup ’74 fame.
And yet in the days after, stories and pictures began to emerge of an encounter on the morning of the final, in London’s hyde Park, that was even more intriguing and unexpected. It was between a group of everton fans and none other than the champion of the world, Muhammad Ali.
Cup final Saturday was seven days before Ali had his rematch with henry Cooper. The two had first fought in 1963 — at Wembley — when Cooper famously felled Ali but still lost.
Ali was Cassius Clay then, 21, and a contender. By the time of the second fight — held at Arsenal’s highbury — Ali was heavyweight boxing world champion, the Muhammad Ali we all came to know. having beaten the fearsome Sonny Liston in 1964 to claim the title, and again in 1965, Ali’s status grew due to his talent, personality and refusal to fight in the Vietnam war. he would defeat Cooper again.
everton, meanwhile, were managed by harry Catterick, a reserved man but a winning manager. With Bill Shankly’s Liverpool having lifted the FA Cup the previous year, everton were determined to match the achievement. In May 1966, Liverpool had also won the League title.
Merseyside was football-centric and one fan saw all this and more. Teenaged evertonian Kenny Jones thought his weekend could get no better when he boarded the train at Liverpool’s Lime Street to discover some of everton’s 1933 Cup-winners on it, including Dixie Dean. But it did.
‘I am on that famous photograph,’ Jones told the Liverpool
Echo decades later. ‘I was 19 at the time and I’m the one with the long scarf and a hat. Sadly, I lost them both at Wembley in all the excitement of Derek Temple scoring the winner.
‘It was an absolutely brilliant moment but I was a little gutted afterwards because I had loads of autographs of players from the 1933 FA Cup-winning team on the hat.’
Jones’s Saturday began with him and his friends waking up in Soho, central London, and deciding to walk along to Downing Street. At the time, harold Wilson was Prime Minister and also MP for a Merseyside constituency, huyton.
Jones said: ‘We thought we’d go and see him. There were a load of us singing, ‘‘We want harold!’’ And he came out, shook our hands and wished us all the best. Then we started chanting, ‘‘We want Mary!’’ But his wife just waved at us from a window — perhaps we’d woken them up and she wasn’t too happy.
‘As for security in those days, I just remember there being two policemen outside No 10. It wasn’t long before we were in hyde Park. We’d heard Ali might be there, and we saw some evertonians milling around him as he was skipping. I wasn’t a big boxing fan, but everyone was interested in Ali.
‘ Within about an hour, I’d shaken hands with the Prime Minister and the world heavyweight boxing champion. I remember people laughing and joking with Ali and asking, ‘‘Are you an evertonian now, then?’’ Ali was laughing and grinning and seemed to be enjoying it all.’
There are reports Ali left hyde Park and headed for Wembley. If so, he saw Trebilcock’s finest hour. From Cornwall, he played only 14 games for everton over three years. But he scored five goals, two of them in the space of five minutes of an FA Cup final.
The goals enabled Temple to score his exquisite winner, though not before pitch invader Cavanagh got involved. he lost his coat and three ‘bizzies’ — as he recalled — as he ran across the turf and stopped the game. eventually they caught him and threw him out. But Cavanagh was undaunted. he got back into the stadium to see Temple score.
Cavanagh had blue lightbulbs at home in Liverpool, apparently, another colourful detail from a psychedelic Saturday.