The World's Oldest (and Greatest) Cup Competition

[kushiro]

The FA Cup - the one everyone wants to win. That's how it used to be anyway - certainly until the 1960s, and for many people, for a long time after that. Nothing compared to that excitement - the anticipation building through the week, the whole city gripped by Cup fever.  Not just for semi-finals and finals, but every step along the way. 

 

To show how things have changed over the years, let's take a look back at five moments in time - from 1934, 1969, 1985, 1991 and 2017. 

 

Notice anything about those dates? Have another look.

 

They're the years we played Millwall in the Cup. Five truly remarkable occasions that I'll use to tell not only the history of this fixture,  but also the history of the competition itself.

 

It's been great fun digging out these stories. I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Part One: Channy's Swansong

 

 

December 17th 1932

 

Manager Peter Hodge knew that the moment had arrived. It wasn't easy to bring down the curtain on a great career, but it was his job to make these calls.

 

'I'm going to put you in the Reserves this weekend, Channy'.

 

Arthur Chandler was 37. The following day, as the first team were drawing 2-2 with Birmingham City at Filbert Street, he was playing for the 'stiffs' at Highbury. Quite a comedown for our record goalscorer. And that was before the match started. When he walked off at the end, Arsenal had won 10-1. 

 

The bitter irony of that scoreline would not have escaped him. It was a reversal of the most celebrated game of his career, when the sixth swan flew over Filbert Street, beckoning him to knock in another goal. 

 

'That's football', he thought. 'It builds you up. It knocks you down.' 

 

But he hadn't hit rock bottom yet. The following week, the Reserves were playing again. Channy's name wasn't on the teamsheet. Hodge told him he was being 'rested'. 

 

Leicester City fans saw no more of Channy that season. A series of stand in centre-forwards were tried as Hodge and his scouts searched far and wide for a man who could fill the great man's boots.

 

 

Monday January 15th  1934

 

Over a year later, and Chandler was still on City's books. Now 38, he was playing at Filbert Street in another Reserve game -  against Millwall. At the same time, at FA headquarters in London, the draw for the Fourth Round of the FA Cup was taking place. The afternoon was to unfold in a quite remarkable way.

 

The Reserves went goal crazy, Channy scoring twice as Millwall trailed 8-1 at half time. When the players came in for the break, they heard news of the Cup draw. The very first team out of the bag was - Millwall. The second - Leicester City. The clubs would be meeting in a senior fixture for the first time ever. 

 

In the second half, Channy scored again to complete his hat-trick, and it finished 10-1. Yes - double figures again.

 

This was the headline in the Evening Mail:

 

 

 

It was an omen. There would be another riot twelve days later.

 

After watching that performance, manager Peter Hodge decided to restore his veteran centre-forward to the first team. We hadn't yet found a satisfactory replacement, and the following Saturday, for the League game at White Hart Lane, Channy was back at number 9. We came away with a shock 1-0 victory. This is how the news was received in the city centre:

 

In Leicester on Saturday night there was but one topic of conversation. In the Market Place, a loud cheer was raised by the stallholders as soon as the result was known. News sellers could not conceal their appreciation of the fillip this fine win would give the sports edition sales. Tram conductors, and even inspectors, had to say their little piece about it while passengers were being carried past their destinations because of the fascinating nature of the subject.   (From the Leicester Chronicle).

 

Channy stayed in the team for the next match - the Cup tie at The Den. 

 

 

January 27th

 

Millwall were a League below Leicester - in Division Two - but boss Bill McCracken was feeling confident. He told a Leicester Evening Mail reporter that City's 'stylish' football would not stand up to the 'robust stuff' that Millwall use in the Cup. In the reporter's judgement, however, 'McCracken may find that Leicester are not so 'ladylike' as they have been described on so many occasions. The restoration of Chandler to the attack at Spurs has added the necessary punch'.

 

At Leicester Station on Saturday morning there wasn't enough space on the Football Special, and 'late arrivals joined trains from Nottingham carrying Forest fans to their tie at Stamford Bridge. When that train pulled in there was a lot of good natured banter, followed by mutual expressions of goodwill'.

 

The players had traveled on an earlier train, and as it passed through north London there was another omen:

 

 

 

After arriving at Marylebone, they continued 'by motor'. The man from the Leicester Chronicle described the rest of the journey: 'We sped past Marble Arch, crossed the Thames and skirted The Oval to the strains of haunting melodies, as Sandy McLaren (the Leicester keeper) acted as choir leader'.

 

At The Den, the thing that really struck that reporter was the roar of the Millwall fans. Their shouts of "Come on Lions!" were so loud 'they must have been heard some distance away'. On days like this, noise from outlying grounds would often carry as far as central London, and this was one of those unique occasions that only the early rounds of the FA Cup could provide. With bigger gates, heightened passions, and the luck of the draw giving the big London teams home ties, the skies were filled with noise from all directions - Stamford Bridge (that Chelsea v Forest game), Highbury (Arsenal v Crystal Palace), White Hart Lane (Tottenham v West Ham) and here, south of the river, where the cries of thousands of Leicester fans were added to the mix. 

 

Millwall started the game brightly, but then came the key breakthrough. There's no Pathe news footage of Sep Smith's goal, but it was described so well at the time that we can visualise exactly what happened:

 

 

 

Millwall equalised, but then we went into overdrive. At half-time we were 4-1 up, playing 'cool, methodical, on-the-floor football'.  Channy, Arthur Maw from 35 yards, then Danny Liddle were the scorers. Here's Channy's goal:

 

That kit we we're wearing was red shirts with black shorts.

 

After the break Channy and Arthur Lochhead made it 6-1, before Millwall quickly got two back. It was 6-3 after 63 minutes, which is how it ended. That word was back in the headlines:

 

 

 

As the team arrived back in Leicester, 1,000 fans were there to greet them, the biggest cheer reserved for Channy. 

 

In the next round we played Birmingham City at St. Andrews. Look at the picture below, taken at the Queen's Hotel in Coventry where the team stopped on the way home, and see if you can guess the outcome of the game:

 

The man with the beaming smile in the middle of the back row is Arthur Chandler, 38 years young, whose goals gave us a 2-1 win and took us into the quarter-finals. 

 

Here's one of his goals:

 

 

Next was another tough away tie - at Preston, who had Bill Shankly and Jimmy Milne in their half back line. We came away with another fantastic result. This was the only goal of the game:

 

 

 

'Furnival', the famous cartoonist of the Lancashire Evening Post, saw it like this:

 

 

The man who had been written off by everyone was now the talk of the nation, on a sensational scoring streak, wth key goals at The Den, St.Andrews and now Deepdale putting us in sight of our first ever trip to Wembley.

 

The semi-final draw paired us with Portsmouth, with St. Andrews again the venue.

 

It was the biggest game in the 50 year history of the club, and there were 12,000 at Leicester Station that morning.  'Not since Armistice Day in 1918 had there been such scenes of jubilaiton' said the Evening Mail, which had some wonderful pictures. This is what Leicester fans looked like back then:

 

 

 

 

And this was the players' wives on the way to the game, Channy's wife one from the right:

 

 

 

And there was one more woman heading for St. Andrews. With her advancing years, she had been unsure whether she should make the journey. But when she woke up that morning in London she knew she just had to be there. She hurried to Paddington Station and boarded a train for Birmingham. Had she told her son she was coming, she would have been given a comfortable seat alongside those wives in the Main Stand, but she didn't want her impulsive decision to disturb his preparation. She paid her money and stood on the packed terraces.

 

How much of the action Mrs. Chandler, Arthur's mother, was able to see we don't know, but we can be sure that when he ran out that day, she'd have been the proudest person in the 66,000 crowd.

 

Here he is in action, white shirt and black shorts, Pompey in red shirts and white shorts.

 

 

 

Sadly, we lost 4-1. Channy's glorious swansong would not be ending at Wembley. 

 

But before leaving this story, there's another song we need to mention. Remember those 'haunting melodies' of the players' choir as they passed through London on the way to The Den? On the day of the semi-final, captain Roger Heywood told us more:

 

There had been too much seriousness in the team. We decided to form a kind of choral society, with Sandy McLaren as leader, and Channy and Hughie Adcock, with his child impersonations, contributing the harmony. 

 

There was one number that they sang at every stage of that Cup run. Not 'Sweet Caroline', but 'Sweet Adeline' - a massive hit in the early decades of the century. 

 

Here are the lyrics:

 

Sweet Adeline

My Adeline

At night, dear heart

For you I pine

In all my dreams

Your fair face beams

You're the flower of my heart

Sweet Adeline

 

Here's a comic version from a 1930 cartoon:

 

 

It's also been in The Simpsons:

 

 

 

In an alternative history, we went all the way in 1934, and City fans sang the song at Wembley as we lifted the trophy. It was the same when the Cup was paraded through the streets of Leicester, helping to establish it firmly in everyone's minds as the club's very own theme tune, a tradition that has continued to this day.

 

If only. 

 

Oh well, perhaps the @Union FS lads, who've always had a keen sense of history, could polish their barber-shop harmonies and resurrect it on Saturday.

 

That's the first part of the story. Part Two coming right up.

 

Edited 2 January 2024 by kushiro

[kushiro]

 

Part Two - Keith Weller v Lenny Glover

 

 

January 25th 1969

 

If we're trying to discover the lost songs of Leicester City's FA Cup history, the next time we faced Millwall in the competition provides some intriguing possibilities.

 

It was thirty five years later, but it was almost an exact repeat of 1934.  Fourth Round day in the capital with the roars of the crowds once again coming from the North (Arsenal v Charlton and Spurs v Wolves),  the West (Fulham v West Brom) and south of the river (Millwall v Leicester City).

 

Anyone standng on top of a tall building in central London that day might have picked up traces of that noise coming from all directions.

 

Well, believe it or not, we know that someone was doing exactly that. 

 

In that wonderful eight-hour documentary Get Back, we see The Beatles rehearsing new tracks and arguing endlessly about where they might perform them for the climax of the film. It was on that Saturday, January 25th, that the producers suddenly came up with a solution, and suggested it to Paul McCartney:

 

 

 

That's the moment - Paul pointing upwards to the location that Glyn Johns has just suggested - the roof of the Savile Row studios.

 

A few minutes later, Paul, Ringo and several members of the film crew head upstairs and out into the cold January air for a reccy:

 

 

 

From other clues in the documentary we know that they went up on the roof between 3pm and 4pm, shortly before it got dark.

 

And this is where we call up the ghost of 'Magic Alex' - the 'scientist' who claimed he could manufacture ingenious devices such as 'electric paint', 'hovering houses', 'voice-activated phones' and an 'artificial sun'. Every time he put forward an idea, John Lennon said 'Yeah - that's great!', and thanks to John's gullibility, he was on the Beatles' payroll for several years.

 

There's a scene in the documentary where the band finally realise that the 'recording studio' he'd been constructing was nothing but a pile a junk, and that 'Magic' Alex was in fact a complete conman (something George Martin had known all along), 

 

What we really needed was for Alex to set to work on a machine that could capture those crowd sounds floating across the London skies.

 

Actually, fifty years on, some of his ideas have become reality. We do have voice-activated phones. And we also have incredibly sophisticated audio capture devices.

 

The Get Back documentary was only possible because advances in technology finally allowed Peter Jackson to overcome a long-standing problem - how to separate the conversation in the studio from the sounds of the instruments and other background noise. Jackson's new box of tricks could not only do that, it could also distinguish between the different voices, providing a separate audio track for each member of the group. It was the same technology that allowed John Lennon's vocals to be extracted so cleanly from his 1978 demo tape, and used so effectively in the single they released in November, Now and Then. 

 

Perhaps we really could feed the machine the footage from the roof on that Saturday afternoon and have it pick up distant crowd noise from Highbury, White Hart Lane, Craven Cottage and The Den, separating the accents into cockney, black country (Wolves, West Brom) and broad Leicester, giving us a playlist we could call 'Footy Chants, 1969'.

 

Some time in the future there will be an interactive version of the documentary, with viewers able to manipulate each audio track on a separate fader, creating thier own personalized, FA Cup-themed backing track. (John Lennon is nodding his head enthusiastically, saying 'Yeah -- let's do it!')

 

 Back on the football field, we were being tormented that day by a 22 year-old Millwall winger called Keith Weller. He was the main threat to our defence, but he couldn't get past our 19 year-old keeper - Peter Shilton. 

 

We won the game 1-0, the goal coming from Lenny Glover, twenty minutes into the game. You can see it here from two different angles:

 

 

 

Somewhere in that sea of heads we might find 11 year-old Danny Baker and his dad, Spud (and maybe the odd Leicester fan, too. Impossible? It was a different era. See below.)

 

The goal no doubt triggered a hearty chorus of 'Lenny, Lenny Glover, Lenny Glover on the wi-ing'. 

 

That victory led to a Fifth Round saga that lasted through the whole of February. We were drawn at home to Liverpool -  a tie which was postponed six times due to the icy weather. With Bill Shankly insisting on being present for every pitch inspection, he and Leicester boss Frank O'Farrell became great friends.

 

When the game finally took place on March 1st, it finished 0-0, and everyone thought we had no chance in the replay. 

 

This is where we introduce another musical legend (well, in Leicester he is anyway) - future Showaddywaddy lead singer Dave Bartram. Still a schoolboy, he traveled up to the replay and stood on the Kop, surrounded of course by scousers. I wonder what his reaction was when:

 

1) Lenny Glover raced down the wing, beat Chris Lawler and crossed perfecly for Andy Lochhead to head home.

2) Peter Shilton saved Tommy Smith's penalty.

3) The final whistle blew and we'd held on for a famous victory. 

 

After the game, Leicester fans' coaches were smashed up as they stopped at traffic lights near the ground.

 

We then won 1-0 win at Mansfield Town in Round Six, so once again a win at Millwall was a staging post on the way to the semi-finals - this time at Hillsborough against Cup-holders West Brom.

 

Times had changed. The demographic of our traveling support had narrowed, with fewer women, fewer rosettes and rattles, and no accordions.

 

This was a favourite from the Leicester City songbook of the time:

 

We are the boys in the blue and white

We love to sing and we love to fight

So let's dance (duh-duh-duh-duh    du   duh-duh-duh-duh)      (It's the Chris Montez hit from 1962 - no doubt 'Let's Dance' being switched to 'Let's Fight')

 

That semi-final was also postponed for a week, as the pitch was in such awful condition. When it finally took place we knew that if we made it to our fourth final our opponents would be Manchester City. That's how it turned out, with Allan Clarke's late winner.

 

We made it four Wembley defeats out of four, of course, but that young Millwall winger we encountered in Round Four would soon be heading to Filbert Street and providng us with memorable FA Cup moments throughout the following decade.

 

Part Three is on its way soon.

 

Edited 2 January 2024 by kushiro

[kushiro]

Just before Part Three, here's what happened after that Liverpool replay in 1969:

 

 

 

The guy in the picture is 'Mr. R.Wyatt,  engineering superintendent at the Midland Red garage in Wigston'.

[onekeithweller]

2 hours ago, kushiro said:

Just before Part Three, here's what happened after that Liverpool replay in 1969:

 

 

 

The guy in the picture is 'Mr. R.Wyatt,  engineering superintendent at the Midland Red garage in Wigston'.

Misread that at first 🤣

What a front page! MEAT & NYLON NIGHTIES!

[FoxFossil]

Sorry to be a kill joy.

FA Cup is longest running cup competition, but not the oldest  which was the Youdan Cup. Won by Hallam FC four years before FA Cup started. Hallam still playing at Sandygate  stadium, Sheffield, which is the oldest football ground in the world.

[kushiro]

6 hours ago, FoxFossil said:

Sorry to be a kill joy.

FA Cup is longest running cup competition, but not the oldest  which was the Youdan Cup. Won by Hallam FC four years before FA Cup started. Hallam still playing at Sandygate  stadium, Sheffield, which is the oldest football ground in the world.

 

Let me pretend I really meant 'Oldest Cup competition still going' . 

 

Thomas Youdan, the guy who sponsored the competition,  sounds like a fascinating figure.

Youdan Cup - Wikipedia

 

[kushiro]

Right, on with Part Three.

 

February 19th 1985

 

After beating Burton Albion and Carlisle United, we were drawn away to Millwall in Round Five, the game taking place on a Tuesday night. When the players walked into the away dressing room at The Den, there was a collective groan. 'Oh no - the dreaded green kit!'

 

Sponsors Ind Coope had wanted us to wear green so it matched their brand colour, but we seemed to lose every game we played in it. Things didn't get any better at Millwall - we lost 2-0. 

 

 

That's Lions boss George Graham with goalscorers John Fashanu and Alan McLeary. Graham, looking forward to the quarter-final after the game, said: 'This means there will be more talk of the team, rather than the hooligans'. 

 

It was a sad night for Gary Lineker, who missed several chances, with Everton boss Howard Kendall watching from the stand. And it was also, in retrospect, a very sad night for football. 

 

If we had won, the notorious Luton v Millwall game in the next round would never have taken place:

 

 

(Who knows - if we had managed a draw and Millwall had come to Filbert Street for a replay, maybe these infamous scenes would have been played out in Leicester, with the seats being ripped out of the East Stand).

 

Danny Baker was there that night, and this is what he said about in the book Behind Closed Doors that he and Lineker wrote: 

 

 

 

 

It's difficult to say just how different things might have been if we'd won at The Den and those scenes had not been shown on the TV news for several days in succession after the game. within everyone saying 'something has to be done!'. The timing was interesting. The year-long miners' strike had just finished, and Margaret Thatcher now had the scalp of Arthur Scargill to add to that of General Galtieri. Now, after the scenes at Luton, she summoned the football authorities to Downing Street and told them her govenment was going to introduce ID cards. Football fans were her new enemy (and that's exactly the word used by political commentators at the time).

 

Had it not been for the Luton game, who knows - Heysel, or some other instance of crowd violence may have been the trigger for the ID cards policy. Of course, it took the Hillsborough tragedy (1989) and the Taylor Report (1990) for the idea to finally bite the dust, just as it was about to be signed into law.

That meant that the following year, when we next drew Millwall in the Cup, supporters could pass through the turnstiles in the traditional fashion (33 years on, there's still a lively debate around these issues, as recent threads on this forum demonstrate).

 

That 1991 tie is coming up next, in Part Four.

[Foxmeister]

13 hours ago, kushiro said:

 

Let me pretend I really meant 'Oldest Cup competition still going' . 

 

Thomas Youdan, the guy who sponsored the competition,  sounds like a fascinating figure.

Youdan Cup - Wikipedia

 

Fantastic link, it seems like Sheffield rules were as near to Rugby as football. Right angle throw-ins being like lineouts, rouges like tries and the tackling would keep VAR busy by the sounds of things.

[FoxFossil]

Reintroduce the 'Rouge' for goal near misses between special flags. Sounds a right laugh. Spice up the League Cup?

[kushiro]

Part Four

 

January 5th 1991

 

David Pleat's job was on the line when we headed for The Den for a Third Round tie in 1991. He was supposed to be taking us back to the top flight, but here we were midway through the season fighting to stay out of Division Three.

 

Part of the 'magic' of the FA Cup is that it can transform a team's season and a manager's fortunes. A year earlier, Alex Ferguson was about to be sacked when Man U won at Forest in Round Three then went all the way to Wembley and lifted the Cup.

 

Now, with ten minutes left at The Den, Pleat must have hoped he was about to be thrown a similar lifeline. We had taken the lead with an early Tony James goal and Millwall didn't look like getting an equaliser.

 

Then Paul Ramsey was sent off after a clash with Keith Stevens - his second red card in two weeks. In the remaining ten minutes, Teddy Sheringham equalised and Stevens got the winner. Steve Walsh was then sent off in injury time - his second red card of the season.

 

Pleat was furious. In the dressing room, he blamed Ramsey for the defeat. Walsh spoke up, defending Ramsey, and 'harsh words were exchanged between the three of them', as Walsh later recalled. On the coach back to Leicester, no-one spoke to him or Ramsey.

 

Three days later, the behaviour of the two players was placed into sharper focus when Gary Lineker, now at Spurs, received the FIFA Fairplay Award for going through his whole career without getting booked.

 

Pleat was wondering how to deal with them - 'both players may find themselves out the door' wrote Bill Anderson in the Mercury.

 

But instead it was Pleat whose days were numbered. At the end of the month he was sacked. It was the end of an era at Filbert Street. Chairman Terry Shipman stood down too, replaced by Martin George, and so what you might call the 'Shipman era' - with Terry and his father Len - came to an end after 50 years. We looked no more like potential Cup winners now than we had back then. The defeat at Millwall was our SIXTH Third Round exit in succession.

 

Here's the action from The Den, with the red cards judiciously omitted on the season review video:

 

 

[kushiro]

So the last part. 

 

February 18th 2017

 

After winning the League, lots of us thought we might have a good chance of the other one the following season. When we got past Everton and Derby, then drew Millwall away in the last 16, expectations grew still further. They were in the third tier at the time.

 

Only problem was, the FA Cup as our third priority. We had a fight on our hands to prevent that title glory being tainted by instant relegation, and there was also the small matter of the Champions League knockout stages. The away leg v Sevilla was four days after the Millwall game.

 

So we played a second string XI, and were beaten by a goal ten seconds from the end of normal time, despite them being down to ten men. 

 

 

Things were looking desperate for Ranieri and that game in Spain on the Wednesday was his last.

 

 

So here's a summary:

 

 

 

 

[davieG]

No excuses this year as it's a week before we play Cov.

[fuchsntf]

10 hours ago, kushiro said:

Part Four

 

January 5th 1991

 

David Pleat's job was on the line when we headed for The Den for a Third Round tie in 1991. He was supposed to be taking us back to the top flight, but here we were midway through the season fighting to stay out of Division Three.

 

Part of the 'magic' of the FA Cup is that it can transform a team's season and a manager's fortunes. A year earlier, Alex Ferguson was about to be sacked when Man U won at Forest in Round Three then went all the way to Wembley and lifted the Cup.

 

Now, with ten minutes left at The Den, Pleat must have hoped he was about to be thrown a similar lifeline. We had taken the lead with an early Tony James goal and Millwall didn't look like getting an equaliser.

 

Then Paul Ramsey was sent off after a clash with Keith Stevens - his second red card in two weeks. In the remaining ten minutes, Teddy Sheringham equalised and Stevens got the winner. Steve Walsh was then sent off in injury time - his second red card of the season.

 

Pleat was furious. In the dressing room, he blamed Ramsey for the defeat. Walsh spoke up, defending Ramsey, and 'harsh words were exchanged between the three of them', as Walsh later recalled. On the coach back to Leicester, no-one spoke to him or Ramsey.

 

Three days later, the behaviour of the two players was placed into sharper focus when Gary Lineker, now at Spurs, received the FIFA Fairplay Award for going through his whole career without getting booked.

 

Pleat was wondering how to deal with them - 'both players may find themselves out the door' wrote Bill Anderson in the Mercury.

 

But instead it was Pleat whose days were numbered. At the end of the month he was sacked. It was the end of an era at Filbert Street. Chairman Terry Shipman stood down too, replaced by Martin George, and so what you might call the 'Shipman era' - with Terry and his father Len - came to an end after 50 years. We looked no more like potential Cup winners now than we had back then. The defeat at Millwall was our SIXTH Third Round exit in succession.

 

Here's the action from The Den, with the red cards judiciously omitted on the season review video:

 

 

Bad times, but my following was from afar...