Turn back the clock
The FA Cup’s 150th anniversary
Michel Platini was in expansive, relaxed mood on a sun-splashed breakfast terrace before a Champions League draw in Monte Carlo. He was the all-powerful head of UEFA, explaining why he was transferring the Champions League final from its traditional midweek slot to a Saturday.
“It’s the real day you must have for a cup final,” he told me. “When I was a young boy I remember the excitement, every year, for the day of the FA Cup final in England. We did not have much football on television then and this was the great occasion: Wembley, 100,000 fans, the anticipation, the singing, maybe the Queen or whoever – and the most important match.”
The 1950s and early 1960s, with the new magic of television, brought the dramatic reality of the FA Cup to fans around the world. That first Saturday in May was always “Cup Final Day”. Fans in England, for all their own passion, were ignorant of the power abroad evinced by those black-andwhite and grainy-grey images.
Yet here was Platini, years later, reaching back to the example of the FA Cup – the world’s oldest competition – as the stylistic pinnacle of the presentation of elite football.
Platini went further in drawing on his childhood memory. UEFA, under predecessor Lennart Johansson, had introduced a pitch trophy presentation but Platini dismissively scrapped it to recreate the traditional long walk up the steps to the VIP box presentation. Again: “that was the way at the FA Cup final.”
A well-documented explosion in worldwide popularity of football, with its technological revolution and billion-generating eruption of other competitions, has reduced its significance, value and status. But the inspiration remains undimmed.
The shape of the game as the world sees it today has been dictated by the milestones found along the route of the FA Cup. Leagues are essential and (sometimes) exciting but nothing can compete with the drama of knockout football, as pioneered in England in the late 19th century.
Most potent memories from the World Cup, Champions League and European Championship are invested in such knockout drama.
Some eight years after the founding of The Football Association, in 1863, its seven-man committee considered a proposal “that a Challenge Cup should be established in connection with the Association, for which all clubs belonging to the Association should be invited to compete.” The historic date was July 20, 1871; Charles W. Alcock was the proposer.
Alcock was not only secretary of the FA but a noted footballer and
cricketer, a journalist and later secretary of Surrey County Cricket Club. He was typical of contemporaries for whom association football (“soccer” as he dubbed it) was not the only sport. Racing, boxing and hunting were a few of the other pastimes in which the sporting amateur engaged.
But it was in narrowing down football’s focus to a gripping national competition that Alcock – more by accident than design – threw open welcoming doors to a populace enjoying the leisure-pursuit fruits of the Factory Acts, which halted work at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon.
Alcock drew on the inter-house system from his Harrow schooldays for the simple knockout concept. Thus, October 16, 1871, saw the
FA set the regulations and accept 15 pioneering entries; nowadays the annual entry runs to around 800.
The shape of the game as the world sees it today has been dictated by the milestones found along the route of the FA Cup
Just as Alcock would barely recognise today’s football, so today’s fan would struggle to follow the game that he knew: no pitch marking save for the touchlines, a tape not a crossbar, no heading, one-handed throw-ins, two umpires but no referee or assistants. And technology? Definitely not.
The impetus drawn from that first meaningful national competition cannot be underestimated. The competitive cementation of the newly-unified Laws of the Game delivered the platform for both a first official international match between England and Scotland in 1873 and then the creation of the Football League in 1888.
Along the way, the cup’s outreach reflected the eruption of organised football beyond the pioneering universities and public schools and into the grasp of the common man.
The first final, on March 16, 1872, was contested between Royal Engineers – a team of commissioned army officers – and Wanderers, a club of former public school pupils from south London. Engineers were hampered in the tenth minute when one of their players broke a collarbone. Wanderers duly won 1-0 with a goal from Morton Peto Betts. Appropriately Betts, an Old Harrovian, had been a member of the FA committee that created the competition.
Betts played under the name of
A. H. Chequer. In the first round a
team named Harrow Chequers had withdrawn after being drawn against Wanderers. Betts, a Chequers player, duly joined Wanderers. This was not a problem. After all, Alcock – a fellow Old Harrovian – was the Wanderers captain. Incidentally, the £20 silver cup was not presented after the match at the Kennington Oval but four weeks later during Wanderers’ annual dinner.
The first 12 years of the competition were dominated by four clubs: Wanderers (five wins), Old Etonians (two), Royal Engineers and Oxford University (one each). They totalled 19 final appearances between them.
Lord Kinnaird was the cup’s first superstar. He was a cup winner five times with Wanderers and Old Etonians, became president of the FA in 1890 and remained powerfully in office until his death shortly before the final in 1923. Kinnaird and Alcock, against their traditionalist instincts, were also two of the instigators of the acceptance of professionalism.
The idea of being paid had been anathema to early cup heroes. They played for love of the game. But it was the very success of the cup they created which sparked the demand for more regular competition: hence the creation of the Football League and the consequent introduction of professionalism.
A public schools game had become the people’s game.
Simultaneously British businessmen, industrialists, empire-builders and adventurers were spreading the game around the world, but in no other country has the cup ever garnered the fervour generated by the original. Or, coincidentally, the very particular English veneration for giant-killers.
Football’s burgeoning popularity was evidenced at the 1923 FA Cup final when the game’s first 100,000-plus crowd swarmed all over the new Empire Stadium at Wembley. Bolton Wanderers beat West Ham United 2-0 only after the overflowing crowd was edged back to the pitch fringe by mounted police including, most famously, PC George Scorey on his white horse Billie.
No authored history of the game can be considered complete without a picture of those moments: one of those iconic images that sealed the status of the FA Cup in the narrative of the nation.
By now the FA Cup and Football League had learned to live side by side. For all the progress of the game and its great players, no club managed to win the league and cup “double” during the inter-war years, not even Herbert Chapman’s great Arsenal. But it continued to set a trend: community singing in 1927 and shirt numbers worn for the first time in the 1933 final between Everton and Manchester City. Squad numbers way before their time.
Fascination with the unattainable “double” grew in the 1950s which saw the peak of the FA Cup’s popularity, fired by television coverage which gripped the attention of not only fans in England but around the world – even if they had to wait for newsreels at their local cinemas.
A string of finals were spoiled by serious injury: Arsenal full-back Walley Barnes in 1952, Bolton’s Eric Bell in the so-called “Matthews Final” of 1953, Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann with a broken neck in 1956, Manchester United’s Ray Wood in 1957, Nottingham Forest winger Roy Dwight in 1959, Blackburn Rovers’ Dave Whelan in 1960 and Leicester City’s Len Chalmers in 1961.
That latter final saw captain Danny Blanchflower lift the trophy as Tottenham Hotspur made history as the first double winners in the 20th century.
The patently unfair disruption to all of those finals led directly to the introduction by English football of the first substitutes in 1965. Football was becoming a squad game not a team game. The FA Cup had again been a vector for revolutionary change.
By now its greatest days were over. The arrival of the aero jet engine put wings on the new European cups and, ultimately, directors’ and managers’ self-protective priority for Premier League over FA Cup. TV demands killed the unified Saturday kick-off and the Monday radio broadcast of the next round’s draw, while even replays have now fallen victim to fixture congestion.
The mystique of the FA Cup faded further with the demolition of its grand old stage in 2001. Six years later a smart, sanitised Wembley arose from the rubble of the Empire Stadium. Construction costs forced the cashstrapped FA to import just about every major match going, including the FA Cup’s own semi-finals.
That old exclusivity of the FA Cup final was gone, never to return. Further indignities saw the match evicted from its traditional first Saturday in May with even the kick-off time shunted back into the evening.
“Why?” asked Platini rhetorically while drifting, wistfully, down Memory Lane over breakfast in Monte Carlo. His presidential alter ego knew the answers: the same answers which helped persuade him to move the Champions League into its own Saturday slot – TV ratings, commercial revenue and sponsor preference.
But no more room for sentiment? Wrong.
The continued existence of the FA Cup tells not only its own tale but the evolving story of association football itself.