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Search: 'Richard Wright'

Stories

How You’ll Never Walk Alone became football’s most famous song

Embed from Getty Images

A German documentary charts the rise of the anthem, from its roots in 1909 play by Jewish-Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar to Carousel and then the terraces

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Underdogs

306 Underdogs The unlikely story of football’s first FA Cup heroes
by Keith Dewhurst
Yellow Jersey Press, £16.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 306 August 2012

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Keith Dewhurst has already quarried personal memories as a young journalist catapulted into the Manchester Evening News‘s United beat by the death of his predecessor at Munich to produce a memoir acclaimed in WSC 302 as “one of the best football books of its type ever written”.

Now he digs further, into family heritage in the Lancashire mill town of Darwen, to tell the story of the team that, in 1879, shook the still-nascent football world by twice holding the heavily favoured Old Etonians in an FA Cup quarter-final, before succumbing in the second replay.

All three games, thanks to FA rules and the refusal of the Etonians to either play extra-time or travel to Lancashire, were played at The Oval – then English sport’s national stadium – forcing Darwen into a succession of long, expensive and ultimately exhausting journeys.

A different outcome might have changed the title. Darwen, mostly millhands, gave away inches and stones per man to better-fed opponents. “Giantkiller” would have had a literal element.

The story, often bracketed with nearby Blackburn Olympic’s defeat of the Old Etonians in the 1883 final as a key marker in the game’s democratisation, is well known. Dewhurst, though, aims to put flesh on bare bones, to give life to the silent figures in team photographs and explain why this corner of Lancashire adopted football so passionately.

He puts both teams – he also looks closely at the Etonians – into the context of the early development of football and of wider social currents. This is a multifaceted story with regional and tactical dimensions – the Etonians played a very different game to the fluid, Scottish-inflected style of Darwen – as well as the obvious class aspects.

Dewhurst has dug widely and clearly enjoyed the archives. The outcome has a certain picaresque charm. A large cast of characters includes William Gladstone, an escaped gorilla and mad mill magnates. How can you not love a book that contrives to use “Antidisestablishmentarianism” as a chapter title?

As befits a well-established playwright, Dewhurst handles his large cast with skill. Individuals such as team captain James Knowles, who emigrated to the US before the end of the season, and the remarkable Dr James Gledhill, a tantalising link to the great Preston team of a decade later, emerge from the fog of history.

Along with this are subtle, thoughtful examinations of issues such as why Darwen went to such lengths to deny that their Scottish imports, Fergus Suter and Jimmy Love, were professionals – they almost certainly were – even though payments were not illegal until 1882.

It is, Dewhurst points out, part of the arbitrariness of history that Suter is memorialised in the Dictionary of National Biography as the first professional while Love disappeared so completely that nobody is sure even when he died. Dewhurst, typically, has found a credible answer. Now, though, this entire team has the memorial that it richly deserves.

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Everton 2 Wolverhampton Wanderers 1

wsc299 Goodison Park was once a place ahead of its time but, as Simon Hart reports, the rebranded “Old Lady” is now a meeting place for disgruntled supporters frustrated by their club’s decline

Step into the parish hall of St Luke the Evangelist church on the corner of Goodison Road and Gwladys Street, and you enter a world that could not be any further removed from the ad-man’s fantasy of the face-painted, replica-shirted modern “footy” fan and their agony-and-ecstasy matchday experience.

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Letters, WSC 297

Dear WSC
In answer to Jamie Sellers’ enquiry (Letters, WSC 296), no, David Needham and I are not related, although I pretended he was for a while at junior school. Also, when I went to Forest games and the Trent End chanted “Needham! Needham! Needham!” during corners (he was renowned for nodding them in), I would step forward, raise a hand, shout “Thank you, fans!” and then do that breathing-on-the-fingernails-and-buffing-them-on-the-lumber-jacket thing that boastful kids were wont to do in the late 1970s.
Al Needham, Nottingham

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Letters, WSC 292

Dear WSC
I recently heard Alan Green and Robbie Savage give the customary abuse to Howard Webb during the Man City v Sunderland game. While Green’s job is to commentate on football, Savage, as a current player, is in an awkward position when he criticises officials from the safety of a studio in terms that would get him booked on the field.
Maybe the threat of a disrepute charge would concentrate his mind. As Savage himself commented during the broadcast: “The officials bring problems on themselves. First sign of dissent, bang, yellow card.” Well you said it, Robbie.
Paul Caulfield, Bradford

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