Recently discovered footage is casting new light on Leicester City history. Like the release of sensitive government files under the 30 year rule, online videos are revealing the truth about what really happened. Let's look at the semi-final and final of the FA Cup in 1961:

1) FA Cup Semi-Final, March 18th 1961. Leicester 0 Sheffield United 0 at Elland Road.  

Gordon Wills, our outside left, played most of the game as a hobbling invalid. Why? In Of Fossils and Foxes, it refers only to him 'receiving a severe knock'. What does this mean? Well now we know. Uploaded this week is footage of the match that tells us. In the first half, Sheffield United's Gerry Summers committed an atrocious foul  - one that not only left Wills hobbling for the rest of the game,  but ruled him out for the rest of the season, including the Cup Final v Spurs.

Look at the incident at 3.24 (it's set to play just before the key moment). Then pause it and look at it again, as if it were Monday Night Football analyzing a horror tackle, so you can see how bad it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44XSNdZ1icc&t=3m20s

Summers, as many will recall, later joined the Leicester coaching staff, an assistant to Gordon Milne in the early 80s. Did anyone ask him about the tackle then? In Of Fossils and Foxes, there is a brief summary of Summers' career, but the tackle is not mentioned. I wonder how it was reported in the press back in 1961.  In the programme for the semi-final it describes Summers as 'sharp in the tackle'. Hmmm.

Well, Sheff Utd missed their chance - they couldn't beat our 10 men, and we won in a second replay. Matt Gillies reorganized the forward line without Wills, giving Albert Cheesebrough Wills' number 11 shirt and bringing in Ken Keyworth.  

2) FA Cup Final, May 6th  1961. Spurs 2 Leicester 0.

It's commonly known that Len Chalmers' injury in the first half after a tackle by Les Allen once again left Leicester with only 10 fit players. I'm not sure if the detail has been well documented, but if you look at the full match, (which is available online but, judging from the number of views, rarely seen)  you get a good idea of the build up to the incident:

The key passage of action is from 17.45 to 23.35 in the video.

These are the moments that stand out:

a) Jimmy Walsh's tackle on  Cliff Jones (17.45 on the video). 

Leicester's captain makes a pretty awful high challenge on Spurs' Cliff Jones (there is a very good slow motion replay at 18.28). The first thing that struck me was how similar this was to a famous challenge from another Spurs Cup Final - Paul Gascoigne's outrageous lunge into Garry Parker's chest in the opening minutes of the game.

Walsh's challenge doesn't have the same venom as Gazza's, but it does leave Jones winded, and the Spurs' players wound up.

b)  Albert Cheesebrough's challenge on Peter Baker. This is just after play restarts, at 19.40 in the video, and once again the Spurs trainer comes on. You can't see what happened so clearly in the video but if you look at different footage of the final (taken from the other side), you can see it doesn't look like a dangerous challenge at all, or even a foul.

Still, that's the trainer on twice in two minutes, and maybe Spurs were starting to think of dishing out a bit of rough stuff themselves. 

c) Les Allen's frustration.

At 21.03 on the original video, just seconds after the referee has restarted play with a drop ball again, Frank McLintock seems to brush the leg of Spurs' Bobby Smith, and Smith goes down. Look at the Spurs player on the edge of the centre circle - it's Les Allen. He wheels round towards the ref in apparent frustration, perhaps appealing for him to start protecting his teammates (it was a totally innocuous challenge, and McLintock may not even have made contact with Smith, but maybe Allen thinks 'this is the third incident in quick succession'). If you were making a case for the prosecution, you'd be citing Allen's body language here as key evidence proving intent in the incident that followed seconds later...

d) Allen's challenge on Len Chalmers

Seconds later, Allen makes the challenge that puts Len Chalmers out of the Final with more than three quarters of the game still to play. It's difficult to see how much he takes the ball - it comes out behind Chalmers as though Allen did make pretty good contact with it, but that doesn't excuse the follow through - maybe it's best described as a classic over the top tackle. 

So they are the two X-rated tackles, without which history may have been very different.  We win the final and deprive Spurs of the double.  McLintock, who would leave for Arsenal frustrated with Leicester's 'lack of ambition', is content with a major trophy and stays at Filbert Street, erasing Arsenal's double from history...

Chapter 3

Lord Kinnaird passed away on January 30th, 1923. His funeral took place on Friday February 1st, and the following day. black armbands were worn by players at all football games. Leicester City lost 1-0 at home to Cardiff City. That it was an FA Cup tie is very appropriate for this story, but to provide a more satisfactory climax to this sequence of remarkable coincidences, we need something a bit more spectacular - and that's exactly what historical events provided us with.

February 16th  1997. Exactly 150 years on from Arthur Kinnaird's birth and the last Leicester Shrove Tuesday game. Leicester are playing in the 5th Round of the FA Cup at home to Chelsea. It ends 2-2 so there has to be a replay at Stamford Bridge, and there has to be one more contribution from our Lord...

When Arthur died in 1923, the title 'Lord Kinnaird' passed on to his son, and then later to his grandson. But that was the end of the line. Graham Kinnaird was the father of four daughters, but his only son died aged just 4, so when Graham died on February 27th 1997, the title 'Lord Kinnaird' was no more. There was very little mention in the media of the event. The papers that day were full of another story. On every back page, and several inside pages too, was the fury of Martin O'Neill, whose dream of bringing a first ever major trophy to Leicester had been taken away in scandalous circumstances by referee Mike Reed's penalty decision at Chelsea the previous night.

Mike Reed himself was giving his side of the story that day, and telling the press about his ordeal after the match:

Here's the detail:

Mike Reed got off lightly. There's a powerful echo of 1847 in the events he describes, but had the spirit of 150 years earlier truly reawakened that night, Leicester fans would have gathered en masse and headed for his house (Danny Baker was actually fired by the BBC the next day for suggesting something similar on Radio 5). 

Just in case you need a reminder:

Chapter 2

So, Mill Lane got to stage just one FA Cup game. But there must have been some people there that day in 1890 who remembered another footballing occasion at the same site, 43 years earlier, long before Leicester Fosse, or the Association game, came into being.

Towards the end of The English Game, Major Marindin is talking to Arthur Kinnaird about a picture on the wall at the FA. It was an image of the Ashbourne Football game, the traditional occasion held on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday every year in which two teams wade through rivers, scramble across fields to try and get a ball into a goal - one at either end of the town. In the TV series, Marindin tells Kinnaird that a person actually died recently playing the game, and says that's what you can expect if you let the working class take over the game. (The scene is based on a real incident - 19 year old James Barker, drowned in the river at Ashbourne during the 1878 game).

Leicester people had their own Shrove Tuesday tradition called the 'Whipping Toms', in which people had to run a gauntlet of stick wielders, being belted around the shins as they made their way from one end to the other. The origins are uncertain - one theory is that it was originally a celebration of the Danes being forced out of the town. In the 1840s, the Leicester authorities wanted to stamp out this tradition, and they were helped by The Highways Act of 1835, which, as well as specifying that vehicles were to drive on the left, contained a clause banning 'football and other games' from taking place on the roads. People found guilty of such an offence could be fined up to 40 shillings, which was quite a deterrent, as the average worker at the time would need to slave away for over a month to earn that much. The act was used in many place to clamp down on football.

In Leicester, things came to a head in 1847. In the days leading up to Shrove Tuesday, notices were posted around the town aimed at prohibiting The Whipping Toms or any football game taking place. But the locals weren't having it. No-one was going to take away their traditional pastime.  

This is how the Leicester Chronicle reported events:

In the Newarke, a football was thrown up into the air, and on the police going to the place they found a number of people kicking at it, the most active of whom were taken into custody but immediately rescued by the mob.

A second football was thrown up at the green, and the people ran in that direction. The police followed and were immediately assaulted with stones, and on their retiring due to the weakness of their force, were followed up and pelted.

Additonal forces arrived and the people were forced out of the Newarke and into the Mill Lane.

The pavement and causeway were pulled up in several places to furnish stones for throwing.

PC J Chapman stated that he saw Burley drop a football from under his smock frock and kick it, and also saw Ratcliffe kick the ball. A witness apprehended Burley immediately. PC T Smith saw Burley and Ratcliffe kick the ball, and apprehended Ratcliffe.

By the end of the day, Burley, Ratcliffe and 15 others had been arrested and charged with rioting - and that was the end of it. No longer would the Whipping Toms, or football, or any other game be played in Leicester on Shrove Tuesday. A year later, the Leicester Journal simply reported that On Monday, placards were issued forbidding the assemblage of the "Whipping Toms", and no attempt was made (on Shrove Tuesday) to revive the ancient custom. (The precise relation between the Whipping Toms tradition and the football tradition is unclear - were they two entirely separate events on Shrove Tuesday, or somehow connected?) 

In Ashbourne, similar attempts were made to clamp down on Shrove Tuesday football, but the resistance was so strong that eventually the authorities gave up, and the event became so famous that in 1928 the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) was a spectator, after which it was known as the Royal Shrovetide Football Match.

So, to summarize the story so far, Mill Lane was the site of two historic moments in Leicester's football history:

a) Our first FA Cup game - the tie being drawn at the same meeting at which Lord Kinnaird became FA President.

b) The riot on the occasion of the town's last ever Shrove Tuesday football game. This too was an important date in the Kinnaird life story, for it was on that very same Shrove Tuesday in 1847 that Arthur Kinnaird was born.  Quite a coincidence, and quite an irony, for just as one tradition was being killed off, into the world came the man who would later do so much to help the working man's version of the game to flourish.

If you watched the TV series 'The English Game' you'll know all about the central role of Arthur Kinnaird in the development of the game. One story that hasn't been told before is the remarkable way Kinnaird's story ties in with the history of Leicester City and the FA Cup. It's a story in three chapters, and I hope I can post the three parts here in time for our Cup tie at the weekend.

Chapter 1

It's July 31st 1890, and as the FA Council meet at their new HQ in Chancery Lane, there are several items on the agenda. First they have to approve applications from several teams that wish to join the Association, one from a team called 'Leicester Fosse'. Their application is accepted, along with 12 others. In the following day's newspapers, people across the country would have read about our club for the first time, although depending on where they lived, the impression would have been very different. In the Nottingham Evening Post the club was referred to as 'Fosse (Leicester), in the Birmingham Daily Post we were called 'Lester Fosse', while readers of the Sheffield Evening Telegraph were told there were two different teams, 'Leicester' and 'Fosse'. 

These 12 new teams were also entered into the FA Cup for the first time. The draw for the qualifying round was due to take place six weeks later, by which time the FA Council would have a very different character, for another item on the agenda that day was the resignation of the president, Major Marindin (the bad guy in the TV series who plots to get Blackburn Rovers thrown out of the Cup). Who would replace Marindin? There was one obvious candidate - the current treasurer, Lord Kinnaird, the man who played in nine Cup Finals and whose progressive outlook helped prevent a ruinous split between amateurs and professionals.  The vote, like the FA Cup draw, would have to wait for the next meeting.

September 1st.  Back at Chancery Lane, the draw for the qualifying round of the FA Cup takes place. In 'Number Four Division' of qualifying (the East Midlands section), Leicester Fosse are drawn at home to Burton Wanderers. So there will be an FA Cup tie in the town for the first time, at the Mill Lane ground to which the Fosse had moved just a year earlier.  When the draw is over, the meeting moves on to the election of the new president, and as expected, Lord Kinnaird is the man chosen. He would hold the post until the day he died, 33 years later.

An historic day, then, for the Lord and the Fosse. 

October 4th.    FA Cup Qualifying First Round. The current holders are Blackburn Rovers, who'd beaten The Wednesday 6-0 in April to take the trophy for the fourth time. If they win it again this season, Jimmy Forrest will equal Lord Kinnaird's record of five winners' medals.  Rovers have just moved to Ewood Park, a ground that a few weeks later would be smashed to pieces in a riot far worse than the minor scuffle at their previous ground that was depicted in The English Game (the one used as a pretext for Marindin to throw them out of the Cup).

At Mill Lane, Leicester's hopes of progress are dashed. Burton Wanderers win 2-0, and Leicester supporters feel that crushing sense of disappointment that would be repeated more than 100 times before we finally won the trophy. Three weeks later, Leicester fans would have been wondering how on earth this lot managed to win at Mill Lane. Burton Wanderers' game in the next round was at Loughborough, where they lost 8-0. Reporters in those days didn't mince words - the Burton keeper 'was not to be relied upon in the least' , while 'a palpable weakness in the Burton team was their inability to shoot correctly'.

But you want to know about the Ewood Park riot, right?

On Christmas Day, Rovers were due to play a friendly against local rivals Darwen (yes, the same fixture that led to the scuffles a decade earlier). There was an icy pitch, and Rovers decided not to risk their first team players with crucial games coming up (they'd been drawn away to Middlesbrough Ironopolis in the First Round Proper of the FA Cup). Darwen walked out and saw they'd be facing a second XI. They decided to walk straight back to the dressing room and send out their own reserves too. The crowd didn't like it one bit, and asked for their money back. When this was refused, a full scale riot ensued. As the players and officials cowered inside the club offices:

Stones from the partly finished cycling track were used to break windows, any moveable articles in the grandstand were taken and smashed, the goalposts broken and the club flag torn up.

Merry Christmas!

There were no real repercussions for Rovers, and after winning at Middlesbrough, they went all the way to the Final where they beat Notts County 4-1 to give Jimmy Forrest that fifth medal. The man whose record he equaled, Lord Kinnaird, presented it to him.

Leicester Fosse invited beaten finalists Notts County to Mill Lane for a friendly a month later, when 'far and away the largest crowd seen on the ground' saw a 2-2 draw. Fosse's days at Mill Lane were numbered, however. The ground would never host another FA Cup game. The radical Leicester Corporation, in its drive to provide sanitary conditions for all its residents, had the land earmaked for new housing. The following season, after a few games at Grace Road, Fosse themselves found a new home, close to Walnut Street. Unlike Ewood Park, the first season at this new ground would not be witness to mass rioting. But don't think for a moment that in 19th century Leicester there there was no reason for the authorities to worry about mass urban unrest related to football. Far from it - as we will see in Chapter 2 of Leicester, the Lord and the Mob.

I never realized how good he was. To me, he was always 'the boss of that stylish Leicester team in the 70s'. So it came as a bit of a surprise to discover that as a player he was just as stylish as that team. 

He made his name at Arsenal in the mid-50s. He played over 200 games for them as an inside forward, with a pretty good goal scoring record - 54 goals in total. Here's one of them - cutting inside the defender and curling it into the top corner. Kenny Dalglish would regularly get Goal of the Month for this kind of thing 25 years later.

18 months later he stars in a 2-2 draw at Everton - a historic occasion: the first League game under Goodison's new floodlights. No footage of this one - we'll just have to imagine it. Here's the match report:

In enjoying our floodlit honeymoon we must not rule out the possibility of future bleak cold nights that might tempt the greater part of the 54,000 crowd to stay home in front of the telly. But if I could be sure every time of seeing Bloomfield, sending out a stream of passes, I would endure Spitzbergen. The display from Bloomfield was nothing short of superb.

(By the way, Spitzbergen was the place in Norway where Italian polar explorers were famously stranded in 1928.)

He left Arsenal in 1960 and joined Birmingham City. Here he is in action against Blackpool a few months later. If the goal above is like Kenny Dalglish, here he does what Johan Cruyff did in the first minute of the 1974 World Cup Final - picking up the ball, striding gracefully past four opponents before being brought down in the box. Except the referee doesn't agree and waves play on. Jimmy's body language as he rises from the mud tells you what he thinks of the decision. (You'll have to do some work and click on this one as it's a video that can't be embedded):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvdkRXdxIbo&t=0m5s

(Speaking of Cruyff, it was after the 1974 World Cup that Bloomfield, so impressed with Holland's total football, tried to get Leicester to play the same way the following season. He very nearly became England manager that year after Ramsey's sacking).

He moved on to West Ham in 1965. On his home debut he scored with a diving header. No footage, but a great picture from the wonderful West Ham site 'theyflysohigh' (with Geoff Hurst looking on approvingly):

So there you are - scoring worldies, spraying passes all over the park, waltzing through opposition defences, diving headers - it seems he was the complete player. And it seems a mystery why he was never selected for England. He did win two Under-23 caps (playing alongside Brian Clough in 1956/57), and played once for the Football League XI, but never for the full team. 

Well, I hope you have enough evidence there to show that the Leicester side of the 70s was very much built in his own image - attacking, skillful, stylish, entertaining - rather like the teams Dalglish and Cruyff built when they became managers. 

So - did anyone actually see Jimmy in action? 

So - we need to beat Spurs and hope for a favour from somewhere else. We've been in a similar situation a total of seven times in the past. On three of those occasions we ended the day smiling - not a bad ratio really when you consider that two games have to go the right way. Here's those seven occasions:

Let's look at promotion battles first:

1894/95  Division Two

We've spent much of our existence as a yo-yo club, but 26 out of our first 27 seasons in the Football League were all spent in the same Division - the second. There was very little last day excitement in those years, however there was a dramatic climax to our first year in the league, the top four playing each other on the final day, with places in the play-offs (then called 'Test matches') at stake. This was the table before the game:

We needed to beat Bury and hope Newton Heath (later Man U) lost at home to Notts County. We won 1-0 but Newton Heath drew 3-3 to deny us on goal average. They lost in the Test match anyway, to Stoke (who thus stayed in Division One). Just missing out meant that Walnut Street (as the ground was then called) was free to stage the test match between Notts County and Derby County, Derby won 2-1. 

1991/92  Division Two

After blowing it the previous week with a 2-0 defeat v Charlton (at Upton Park) we now needed to better Middlesbrough's result.

Boro won 2-1 at Wolves and we couldn't beat Newcastle anyway - losing 2-1 at home to Keegan's men. We lost in the play-off final to Blackburn.

2012/13   Championship

Could we win at Forest? Would Bolton fail to beat Blackpool?

Yes and yes. But then came the play-offs.

Now here's the relegation battles:

1934/35   Division One 

The end of the first great Leicester team. To stay up, we need to win at Portsmouth and hope Middlesbrough lose at home to Chelsea.

Both games were draws so we were relegated to Division Two after 10 years in the top flight - our first ever experience of the R word.

1985/86   Division One

We had to beat Newcastle at Filbert Street and hope either Ipswich, Coventry or Oxford slipped up.

Peter Beardsley so nearly ruined it for us in the first half but his shot hit the post, and we went on to win 2-0. Ipswich lost at Sheffield Wednesday, so in our first post-Lineker season we managed to stay up. 

1986/87   Division One

The following year we couldn't pull off the same trick. We needed to better Charlton's result.

 We could only draw 0-0 at Oxford while Charlton beat QPR 2-1. That didn't actually keep Charlton up - yet. This was the first year of the modern play-offs, which were then between three sides from Division Two and the 19th place team in Division One. Charlton managed to get past Ipswich in the semis and beat Leeds in the final to retain their top flight status.

1990/91  Division Two

We were lucky that only two were relegated from Division Two that season. If we bettered West Brom's result we'd stay up.

We beat Oxford with Tony James' goal, and Albion could only draw 3-3 with ten man Bristol Rovers at Twerton Park.

I was only at one of those seven games - the second Newcastle game. 1895 and 1935 might be stretching it a bit, but was anyone at all the other five?

Feb 22nd 1983     League Division Two v Shrewsbury (h)

It looked impossible. We'd just lost 1-0 at Grimsby - a third defeat in four games, and promotion seemed a million miles away. We were fully 12 points behind Fulham, who were 3rd. No play-offs then, of course. Just the top three went up automatically.

But that night, Tuesday February 22nd, we beat Shrewsbury 3-2, with two from Lineker and one from Ian Wilson. Then four days later, leaders Wolves came to Filbert Street for one of the great occasions of Gordon Milne's reign. We won 5-0, with the Lineker-Smith-Lynex attack irresistible and recent signing Gerry Daly crowning a great display with the 5th. Could we...??

Gradually we reeled Fulham in, the key result being that famous 1-0 win at Craven Cottage in April.

That fantastic promotion race had a distant echo from early in the century, and in that season too, February 22nd was a key turning point.

February 22nd 1908    Derby County (a)

Here too, it looked hopeless. Just two clubs went up at that time, and Leicester Fosse were down in 8th,  and our next four games were against teams above us in the table, Also, our top scorer had just asked for a transfer. Imagine the impact on the 1982./83 promotion race if Lineker had suddenly demanded a move. Back in 1907/08, it was Percy Humphreys, who'd got 19 in 26 games.

This was the table:

We went to second placed Derby that day and got a crucial 2-1 win. It was Humphrey's last game, and he left for Chelsea the following week. Three days after that West Brom came to Filbert Street and were hammered 3-0. A week later we went to leaders Bradford City - and won 5-1!!  5,000 fans greeted the team as they arrived back at Leicester station that night, and the city was suddenly alive with promotion fever, with people no doubt asking 'Percy Who??'. Then yet another promotion rival came to Filbert Street - Hull City. They were beaten 3-2, and we were now up to 4th. 

In the end, we could afford a couple of slip ups, as Derby, then 2nd, contrived to lose seven of their last nine games. A 1-0 win at Stoke clinched promotion, Fosse finishing second behind Bradford City,  leaving Leicester fans to sing 'Ee Aye, Ee Aye, Ee Aye Oh, Up the Football League we go' for the first time ever,