How the 1883 FA Cup final was a watershed for English football, when working class Blackburn triumphed over Old Etonian toffs
WHEN Downton Abbey meets football tonight, the posh toffs in top hats draw 5-5 with the northern ruffians in flat caps.
They are destined to meet again at Kennington Oval where, just months after the birth of cricket’s Ashes legend following Australia’s first Test win on English soil, the 1883 FA Cup Final became a watershed moment for English football.
When Blackburn Olympic beat Old Etonians 2-1, it was the first time a working-class team playing an expansive game triumphed over public school ‘rushing’
– like the stampede for the last toilet rolls in Tesco.
At first, the southerners came out on top by resorting to rough tactics.
Think of Chelsea captain Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris wiping out Leeds winger Eddie Gray in the FA Cup Final 50 years ago, or Crazy Gang ringleader Vinnie Jones introducing himself to Liverpool’s Steve McMahon at Wembley in 1988, with the ball in a different postcode, and you get the picture. Without wishing to spoil the plot, the best player on the pitch eventually joins Blackburn for a £100 signing-on fee and £6 a week.
And his best mate marries their widowed landlady.
For those who are missing football like a fish would miss water, The English Game – a six-part serial released on Netflix today – might fill a void.
The series is another period drama from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes and although Branson the chauffeur doesn’t fall in love with Lady
Sybil this time, it captures an era when professional football, as we know it, was born.
With a generous helping of artistic licence, Fellowes recycles the tale of Scottish missionary Fergus Suter – the original Fergie – and his migration south of the border to become the first professional when he is signed by a Darwen cotton mill owner to play for the town’s football club.
Suter brought passing, movement and tactical flexibility to a game whose origins made Wimbledon’s Bash
Street rascals
Bolshoi Ballet.
“He really did change the game,” Fellowes told the Radio Times. “He brought the passing look like the game down into England. Before, football was much nearer rugby and they played quite violently.
“In the show, when you are watching them play at the beginning, you think, ‘My God, this wouldn’t be allowed for five seconds now’.
“I think football fans will learn an incredible amount from this series. It’s a massive education.”
When Old Etonians, from the same public school which brought us a succession of useless prime ministers more than a century later, meet the cotton mill shop-floor workers, Fellowes treats us to a loom with a view.
There is a heavy irony when the upperclass highbrows resort to brutality and it’s the working-class factory boys who unfurl the futuristic, elegant moves. As with most dramas with a football theme on the big screen, some of the defending is dreadful.
And goalkeeping has never recovered in the TV and film industry since Hollywood superstar Sylvester Stallone’s risible bobbing and weaving as the Allies’ last line of defence in wartime flick Escape To Victory.
But the cast involved in action scenes on the pitch were taught how to make their movements look authentic at Manchester United’s Carrington training ground and Mike Delaney, an England futsal international, was appointed “football choreographer”.
Suter, played by actor Kevin Guthrie, tells his attentive flock in Darwen: “The best way to bring folk together is to win the FA Cup for them.”
The good people of Wigan and Portsmouth – apart from Everton, the only clubs from outside the so-called big six to lift the old pot in the last 30 years – might agree.
And when they see how the Cup was won in the 1880s, at a cricket ground with no VAR to spoil the spontaneity, they might like it.
One last spoiler: When the Old Etonians meet their nemesis from the dark, satanic mills of Lancashire, it’s not really filmed at The Oval. It’s a park in Altrincham.
The southerners came out on top at first by by resorting to rough tactics