Authors: Gordon Banks
The Cup final of 1958, thankfully, was one in which the ‘hoodoo’ did not strike. But a much more profound tragedy enveloped this final between Bolton Wanderers and Manchester United. Three months previously Manchester United had been involved in the Munich Air disaster which claimed the lives of over half the forty people on board. Those who lost their lives included the United captain Roger Byrne, reserve left back, Jeff Bent, who was making his first trip abroad (and only because Wilf McGuinness had been injured when playing for United on
the previous Saturday), right half Eddie Colman, centre half Mark Jones, left half Duncan Edwards, inside right Billy Whelan, centre forward Tommy Taylor and outside left David Pegg. The United secretary Walter Crickmer also lost his life along with first-team coach Bert Whalley and trainer Tom Curry. Several crew members and journalists also died, including that great goalkeeper of the thirties and forties, Frank Swift, who had been working for the
Sunday People
. In addition to those who died, several United players were so badly injured they never played football again. Having lost so many players, for United to reach the FA Cup final just three months on was a remarkable achievement, testament to their fortitude and courage.
I had heard about the Munich disaster in Germany when serving the final days of my National Service. Like any other compassionate human I feel deeply for those involved in any tragedy, but felt particularly sad when hearing the news of Munich. As with most professions, I suppose, there is a feeling of brotherhood among footballers and I was deeply saddened to learn of the catastrophe that had struck Manchester United. I had made acquaintance with a number of the United players when Chesterfield played them in the FA Youth Cup final, among them Bobby Charlton. Bobby was thrown from the plane still strapped to his seat and miraculously survived. Some of the other lads I knew were not so lucky.
In playing Manchester United in the FA Cup final of 1958, Bolton Wanderers were in a ‘no-win’ situation. The sympathies of the entire nation were with United that day. Their remarkable resurrection after Munich and their determination to succeed won the hearts of everyone. But Bolton had a cup to win and win it they did.
It was as if fate had spared the Bolton–United Cup final the pain of the ‘hoodoo’. It was the only final of the fifties in which no player suffered serious injury. The following year the ‘hoodoo’ was back to haunt Wembley.
Luton met Nottingham Forest in the final of 1959. Forest
were triumphant but their outside right Roy Dwight, the uncle of Reg (better known as Elton John), was stretchered off with a broken leg. Then in 1960 a similar fate struck the Blackburn Rovers full back Dave Whelan in their defeat by Wolves. Life, however, was to have good fortune in store for Dave. He opened a sports shop in the north west and became so successful that JJB Sports are now nationwide. Dave is still heavily involved with football as chairman of Wigan Athletic and their super stadium at the Robin Park complex in Wigan, which the football club shares with Wigan Warriors Rugby League team, is Dave’s legacy to the town. Not for nothing is it called the JJB Stadium.
The plethora of serious injuries to beset FA Cup finals throughout the fifties and early sixties had, of course, nothing to do with a hoodoo. It did, however, have much to do with the pitch and the occasion.
In the fifties and sixties we basically played on three types of pitches. At the beginning of the season pitches would be lush and flat but due to heavy use for the first- and reserve-team games and occasional youth and local representative matches, the inclement weather of winter soon took its toll on the grass. Come January the vast majority of pitches had only grass on the wings, the rest of the pitch resembled a mudheap. Towards the end of a season the winds of March and April dried out pitches, so much so that we often played on surfaces that were as hard as if the ground had been frozen.
Wembley was very different. The pitch was laid with Cumberland turf that was lush but also very spongy. This turf was so pliable that it felt like playing on delicate springs. Only two other football league grounds boasted Cumberland turf, Ayresome Park, the home of Middlesbrough and Doncaster Rover’s Belle Vue ground. After a long hard season playing mostly on muddied pitches or bumpy, bone-hard surfaces, the Wembley pitch, with its considerable ‘give’ and stamina-sapping softness, was not easy to adjust to. Many players when stretching for a ball were caught out by the supple turf and jarred their knee, hence the many
ligament injuries to beset FA Cup finals at this time, Len Chalmers included.
The other reason for the injuries was the occasion itself. The FA Cup final was the showpiece of the domestic season, the most important game not only of the year but, in many cases, in the career of a player. Many was the player who made his name in a Wembley final and enjoyed lasting fame through his efforts and accomplishments in this one game alone. Who remembers Mike Trebilcock? Those who do, will remember him for the two goals he scored for Everton when they beat Sheffield Wednesday in the Cup final of 1966. But if I were to ask you to recall anything else about Mike’s career, the vast majority of people would struggle. Five years after being Everton’s Wembley hero, Mike was playing for Torquay United reserves in the Western League against the likes of Barnstaple Town and St Luke’s College. His fame, on the blue half of Merseyside, however, lives on to this day.
Roy Dwight of Nottingham Forest (1959), Norman Deeley of Wolves (1960), Sunderland’s Ian Porterfield (1973), Southampton’s Bobby Stokes (1976) and Roger Osborne of Ipswich Town (1978) are other examples of players who readily come to mind only for what they achieved in a cup final. The rest of their respective careers has, for the vast majority, been lost to the memory.
In addition to wanting to give everything for their team and club in an attempt to win the FA Cup, players are acutely aware that they may well have just the one opportunity to play in an FA Cup final. Where they might think twice about making a certain tackle in a league game, they have no such reservations at Wembley. They throw caution to the wind and go in where the boots are flying, committing themselves totally. This is especially so where goalkeepers are concerned and may well explain the injuries sustained by Bert Trautmann and Ray Wood. The FA Cup final is do or die for ninety minutes, in which players take risks that they wouldn’t normally take in a league match.
This is the other contributing factor to the tally of serious injuries that was dubbed the ‘Wembley Hoodoo’ in the fifties and early sixties.
That the so-called hoodoo was laid to rest in the sixties came about because players had become increasingly aware of the dangers of playing on the Cumberland turf that had been laid at Wembley in 1949, and compensated for its spring and sponginess underfoot. Also, teams were allowed to practise on Wembley on the day before the final, which helped them get a feel for the pitch. This was not the case when I first played at Wembley. The first time I set foot on Wembley’s hallowed turf was when I joined my Leicester team mates when we walked out on to the pitch in our suits to soak up the atmosphere ninety minutes before kick-off.
Although it did not occur to me at the time, looking back now it appears that events had conspired against our winning the Cup in 1961. We were without the spearhead of our attack, Ken Leek, and within fifteen minutes were carrying a passenger in Len Chalmers. With all due respect to Hugh McIlmoyle, who acquitted himself well in this game, had we had Ken to worry the hell out of Maurice Norman and been at our full complement of eleven fit players, I reckon we could have beaten Spurs, though it would still have been difficult. After a quarter of an hour, however, our task had become even harder, though we stuck to it with more than our normal zeal and application, and Spurs found us as hard to break down as we did them.
At half time it was goalless but as the second half progressed the contest of ten men against eleven began to take its toll. We tired a little on the sapping pitch and Bobby Smith put Spurs ahead after sixty-nine minutes. Latching on to a great throughball from Spurs winger Terry Dyson, Smith controlled the ball, for once beat Ian King and hit a hard drive that was too far to my left for me to get a hand to.
Eight minutes later the game was as good as over when Smith
returned the compliment. Terry Dyson met his cross from the right at the far post to plant a firm header into my net. There was nothing I could have done about either goal, and at 2–0 I knew Spurs had their hands on the Cup and achieved the elusive double.
Spurs had not outplayed us by any stretch of the imagination. For long periods of the game we had been their equal and even, at times, had held the upper hand. Jimmy Walsh and Ken Keyworth did a fine job of containment on Blanchflower and Mackay, neither of whom exerted their normal command on the field. Richie Norman kept their speedy left winger, Cliff Jones, quiet while neither Les Allen nor Bobby Smith got much change out of Colin Appleton and Ian King. We had our moments of promise – Hugh McIlmoyle flashed a shot inches past Bill Brown’s left-hand post with the Spurs keeper well beaten, while both Jimmy Walsh and Ken Keyworth had good efforts well saved. But in the cold light of day we were never going to win once Len Chalmers had been injured, though none of us cited that as an excuse for our defeat.
After receiving our medals, in recognition of Spurs’ remarkable achievement we stayed at the mouth of the players’ tunnel until they had completed their lap of honour (in those days only the victorious side lapped the pitch to receive the acclaim of their travelling support). As the ecstatic Tottenham players made their way back, we lined up either side of the entrance and applauded them on their way to the dressing room. It seemed the sporting thing to do.
To lose a cup final is awful. When Leicester lost a league match I couldn’t wait for the next game and the opportunity to rid myself of the general feeling of disappointment. You can’t do that after a cup final. The depression lives inside you for weeks. Desire for collective and individual glory aside, we had wanted to win the FA Cup for our supporters who had given us tremendous backing throughout the season. More than once during the traditional post-match banquet at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, Ispared a thought for the crestfallen City supporters
travelling home. The banquet is a chance for directors, management, players, club staff and their partners to celebrate, as the menu of the night said, ‘The occasion of the appearance of the club in the final of the Football Association Cup’. There being no cup, we didn’t do much celebrating.
On returning home I turned to the special Cup final edition of the
Leicester Evening Mail
’s sports section, commonly referred to as ‘The Green ’Un’. In a piece by Billy King on the front page, Matt Gillies gave his reason for omitting Ken Leek from the team. People should be in no doubt: Gillies made the change for no other reason than the interest of the side, he said, and ‘purely and simply because I consider McIlmoyle to be the player in form and that is all’. Well, that was news to me. Never at any time was Ken told that he had been dropped because of a dip in form. In our final league game of the season we had beaten Birmingham City 3–2, Ken scored one of our goals and had played so well that two Sunday newspapers gave him the top mark in their performance assessment of each player. No, it was all to do with that Wednesday evening drink.
Matt Gillies would have given the true reason for dropping Ken Leek to the Leicester board. I’m sure that the meticulous Charles Maley’s minutebook would back up my opinion, too, were it not for the fact that, strangely enough, the pages recording the minutes of that particular meeting have been ripped out of the book. Ken was an honest professional who would have accepted his omission on form grounds. And why would the manager persist with a below-par player in league games? It just didn’t add up.
Following the Cup final Ken asked for a move. In June he was transferred to Newcastle United but only spent five months on Tyneside before moving to Birmingham City. From there he went to Northampton Town, then Bradford City before dropping into non-league football, first with Merthyr Tydfil, then Ton Pentre. He was probably never the same player after his crushing disappointment in 1961.
As for Hugh McIlmoyle, the unwilling and unwitting participant in this controversy, the responsibility of leading our line was too heavy a burden on his young shoulders. Unable to hold down a regular first-team place, within a year Hugh moved on to Rotherham United and was to become a football journeyman in every sense of the word. His subsequent career included three spells at Carlisle United interspersed with appearances for Wolverhampton Wanderers, Bristol City, Middlesbrough, Preston North End and Morton. Hugh developed into a fine player and a prolific goalscorer, particularly in his first spell with Carlisle when he notched 39 goals in 1963–64, just three short of Carlisle’s all-time goalscoring record set by Jimmy McConnell in 1929. All in all Hugh scored 200 league and cup goals on his travels.
The 1960–61 season marked a watershed for professional footballers. The Football League agreed to the demands of our union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, that the £20 maximum wage and the so-called ‘slavery contract’ (binding players to their clubs for life) be abolished. The PFA had been engaged in a long hard battle with the Football League and our victory, which simply gave us the rights enjoyed by all other workers, was due largely to the efforts of PFA chairman Jimmy Hill and union secretary Cliff Lloyd, a former solicitor.
The maximum wage had long been a bone of contention among footballers. There was no way clubs could pay more for quality players: the top stars in the First Division, with considerable experience at international level, could not earn any more than a journeyman Fourth Division player. That, to my mind, was never right.
According to the Football League, the maximum wage was designed to save smaller clubs from bankruptcy and give everyone an equal chance of holding on to their best players. That is why relatively small clubs often managed to keep a world-class player for the duration of his career: for example, Preston and Tom Finney, Blackpool and Stanley Matthews, Bolton Wanderers and
Nat Lofthouse, Middlesbrough and Wilf Mannion. The system may have benefited the clubs, but at the expense of the players.