60 years ago this month...

[ancientblade]

we played in all white that day and think thats the only time in our history we have done that silent or hodgy will put me right if im wrong lol

 

[Silent Blade]

we played in all white that day and think thats the only time in our history we have done that silent or hodgy will put me right if im wrong lol

Yes

 

[Bell4]

we played in all white that day and think thats the only time in our history we have done that silent or hodgy will put me right if im wrong lol

Didn’t we play in all white in the playoff final v Palace?

 

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24 February 1962
United 3-1 Leicester
Attendance: 24015

If the above link works, you will have the rare pleasure of watching the highlights of this game; if it doesn’t, it can be accessed via YouTube. It features various points of interest. The match was played in an easterly gale (from the Kop towards the Lane End, for those who don’t know geography!), with snow showers in the second half. There is lovely skill from Hartle in the opening attack; in the second half he is undone by a classic commentator’s curse. Hodgy made a bad error for their goal (I shall now think of him as League 1 Hodgy). Fortunately it was at the Lane End. I remember being puzzled by Allchurch’s 1st goal (past Gordon Banks, no less); I think he sold Banks a dummy making him think he was pulling the ball back. The commentator thought it was a miskick. There was a lovely bit of skill from Joe Shaw in the second half. Kettleborough’s goal must have been the best he ever scored for us, and Allchurch’s 2nd goal was also well struck. And we kicked the wrong way, towards the Kop in the first half. This used to happen regularly then; has there been a rule change recently on who chooses which way to kick?
So, a solid victory, 16 games unbeaten, and the programme notes began talking about Utd doing the Double, or even the Treble, because the League Cup quarter final replay was due 2 days later. A great piece of timing by the writer! It will surprise nobody that we we were knocked out of both Cups in the next matches, and the unbeaten league run was about to end. It never pays to dream… And the weather presumably got worse - the League Cup replay against Blackpool scheduled for the Monday was postponed.
One apology for the following pics. In the player ratings, we wrote Simpson by habit; it should have read ‘Hartle’, of course. It has only taken me 60 years to notice…

 

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(Utd v Leicester, continued)
To celebrate this 16-match unbeaten run, I thought it would be good to add the League table, showing United in a wonderful position in the League. And 3 defeats in a row meant that Wednesday now needed to ‘mind the gap’!

 

[Silent Blade]

I got to know Keith Kettleborough in the 1970s because his daughter was a pupil in the same school as me and my dad would speak to Keith at the school sports days or at other school events. My dad often told me about Keith's "wonder goal" from long range against Burnley and that the stunned keeper was Adam Blacklaw. When I first read Denis Clareborough's Complete Records, I couldnt find any of the Burley matches that Kettleborough scored in. When I first saw the video of our 3-1 win against Leicester in 1962 I thought "my dad will have got the opponents and keeper wrong!". Kettleborough's long range goal was against Leicester and Gordon Banks was the keeper!

 

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I got to know Keith Kettleborough in the 1970s because his daughter was a pupil in the same school as me and my dad would speak to Keith at the school sports days or at other school events. My dad often told me about Keith's "wonder goal" from long range against Burnley and that the stunned keeper was Adam Blacklaw. When I first read Denis Clareborough's Complete Records, I couldnt find any of the Burley matches that Kettleborough scored in. When I first saw the video of our 3-1 win against Leicester in 1962 I thought "my dad will have got the opponents and keeper wrong!". Kettleborough's long range goal was against Leicester and Gordon Banks was the keeper!

That sounds right. Even more impressive because of the strong wind - not the ideal conditions to receive a ball in the air and control the lofted volley over the keeper. Similar skill to that shown by Lee Evans (v Middlesbrough?), also at the Lane End, perhaps.

 

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Wednesday February 28, 1962
Fairs Cup, Quarter Final
Wednesday 3-2 Barcelona
Attendance: 28956

United’s League Cup replay v Blackpool due to be played on the Monday was called off because of the weather. As a consolation, I braved the freezing conditions (hence the lower than expected crowd) and went to S6 in the hopes of seeing Wednesday’s rubbish league form continue. Disappointingly, an evening risking frostbite on the Kop did not have that happy outcome, but I got to see the famous Barcelona team, and they won 2-0 in the return leg to knock Wednesday out of the competition.
I was studying for O-levels at the time, but for once I could justify spending an evening watching football because I was studying Spanish. Of course, I had no idea at the time that Catalan was the language of FC Barcelona and that Real Madrid were an instrument of a right-wing Fascist dictator (Barcelona had an agreement to sign a certain Di Stefano to play alongside the wonderful Kubala (manager by 1962), but the regime managed to hijack the deal and got him to partner Puskas in years of domination of European football). But I was a pedant from an early age, and would tell anyone prepared to listen (nobody was) that there was a mistake in the programme: the Spanish Cup was the Copa del Generalisimo, with one ‘s’ in Spanish. And don’t try to get one over on me by saying it should have an accent on the ‘i’; I do know, but have no idea how to do it on a phone
And whisper it quietly: United were the club I loved, and there was much about Wednesday to dislike. But they were ambitious and outward-looking, though for once we were above them in the League. We just needed to keep that unbeaten run going at Ipswich on Saturday…

 

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March 3rd, 1962
Ipswich 4-0 United
Attendance: 20158

The team of 2021-22 ended its unbeaten run on the last Saturday of February 2022 with defeat at Millwall; the 16-match unbeaten run of their 1961-62 predecessors came crashing to a halt on the first Saturday of March 1962, with a heavy defeat at Ipswich. There must have been some tired legs and minds in the 1962 side, as there were no substitutes, few team changes, and 6 midweek matches in that sequence. And there was a 6th Round Cup tie to follow a week later.
I did not get to this match, though my brother did, so the marks for how the players performed are purely his. Nothing like the meltdown when we lose in 2022 - the marks are a bit lower than usual, but there are no ‘wage-thiefs’ or ‘players not putting a shift in’. I think the fact that the team changed so little in our teenage years was a factor in this: Utd were not a team of expensive stars, they were more like an extended family. They may not have been worldbeaters, but they were the club, and it was difficult to imagine a future without them. They made mistakes as family members do, but you wouldn’t want to swap them. It made for a good few years following them, even if they never won a trophy, except for the County Cup.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the possibility of winning trophies was there for clubs like United. Ipswich v United was a match between the 2 newly promoted clubs, at kick-off 5th and 3rd in the League. And Ipswich went on to be champions!
I will end with a grumble. The Ipswich programme was rubbish. They barely managed to fill 2 small format pages with text, and what was written was not very interesting. Not a patch on United’s programme!

 

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A further report from East Anglia:

 

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March 3, 1962
United Reserves 4-1 Newcastle Reserves
Attendance: no idea

Just to complete a few days of football bingeing, I went from watching Barcelona on the Wednesday to playing football on the mud of Whiteley Woods on Saturday morning and watching United Reserves in the afternoon, or rather watching the goals going in at Ipswich being updated every 15 minutes, and half-watching the Reserves. It is interesting to look back and see the combination of an older generation (Thomson, Mason and Hodgson) and the next generation, especially Len Badger. I would love to say I immediately recognised a star of the future, but you wouldn’t believe me (quite rightly)!

McGrath and Heslop had good careers.

 

[Silent Blade]

March 3, 1962
United Reserves 4-1 Newcastle Reserves
Attendance: no idea

Just to complete a few days of football bingeing, I went from watching Barcelona on the Wednesday to playing football on the mud of Whiteley Woods on Saturday morning and watching United Reserves in the afternoon, or rather watching the goals going in at Ipswich being updated every 15 minutes, and half-watching the Reserves. It is interesting to look back and see the combination of an older generation (Thomson, Mason and Hodgson) and the next generation, especially Len Badger. I would love to say I immediately recognised a star of the future, but you wouldn’t believe me (quite rightly)!
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McGrath and Heslop had good careers.

And Alan Suddick had a long career at Blackpool

 

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And Alan Suddick had a long career at Blackpool

That is a very good spot! I have to confess that I can’t actually remember seeing him play.

 

[SUFC Handsworth]

I have a reserve team sheet from the mid-80s against Newcastle with a certain Paul Gascoigne in the opposition team, I can't recall him in the game but he must have played. A bit of rarity because I reckon Gazza didn't play that often at the Lane, once for Spurs in the League Cup in 90, for the Boro in 98 and then Burnley in about 2002. I reckon he'd have played more if we'd have gone up in '97, I'm pretty sure Kendall had got him lined up to sign for us if we'd have been promoted to the Prem.

I also suspect I have another team sheet from the same era against Man U with Peter Beardsley in the starting XI.

 

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March 10, 1962
FA Cup 6th Round
United 0-1 Burnley
Attendance: 57000.


Again, we have the luxury of News video of this huge home game, assuming that this link works. Another year, another 6th Round Cup-tie with a sell-out crowd. But this time, against the league-leaders, our luck really ran out. Summers pulled a muscle in the 3rd minute, and after a few minutes off the pitch, he came back on to play on the left-wing; the reality was, we played 87 minutes with 10 men. Even then, we were unlucky to lose.
The film shows:
Lots of kids with rattles, but I couldn’t find me! Amazing where all those rattles came from for a big match.
Two awful crosses by United kicking towards the Lane End.
Scary scenes at the front of the Kop, when the swaying crowd broke the front railings, and several kids were injured. It was about 20 yards to my left, and was seriously frightening. Play continued despite the carnage, and the commentary said that 3 people were taken to hospital. I assume they all recovered? A floodlight pylon was blown down the day before the 5th Round, barriers collapsed in the 6th Round. Not the best of safety records for Bramall Lane over 3 weeks.
We see a couple of good saves by Hodgy in the second half, and then Pointer’s goal. Genius or fluke? At the time I felt it was a fluke, and still do, though the film doesn’t make it clear. Not as good as MGW’s goal the other evening at the same end, in my opinion… And that was that. We were back to concentrating on the league (and League Cup), but we had given Burnley a serious test. I found this report from The Times, which sums it up well:

There was clearly a danger that the season would peter out, particularly with some of our players picking up injuries towards the end of a long, hard season. But with 10 men, we had given the league-leaders a serious fright. Burnley had an inexpensive squad, but they had some excellent players, and also gelled as a team. For the size of the club, their success has been remarkable. But we had little time to think about that - the re-arranged match against moneybags Everton was on Wednesday. Another big game.

 

[Monks' double]

This was the first game I ever saw. As a 10 year old, I ‘saw’ very little of the game, being surrounded by my dad and his mates, meant that I got only fleeting glimpses of the match. All of the men on the supporter’s bus home were clear that Pointer’s goal was a fluke, which had hit the back of his head, without him knowing anything about it. Although we were stood at the kop end (just above and to the left of the collapsed railing), and I’m not sure any of them had a clear enough view of the goal.

My abiding memory was of being surrounded by my dad and his mates, all of them miners, who formed a circle around me in the crush of the crowd leaving through one of the gates into Shoreham Street. From then on, a Blade.

 

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Wednesday, March 14th, 1962
United 1-1 Everton
Attendance: 21072

It would have been easy for the season to have petered out at this point. We had lost our long unbeaten record at Ipswich, and then been knocked out of the Cup v Burnley. Tiredness was setting in, and injuries were a problem (sounds familiar?). Very unusually for this era, this led to 3 changes, with Joe Shaw, Summers and Simpson all out injured, and replaced by the inexperienced trio of Finnigan, Orr and Hartle, and this against 4th in the league Everton, known at the time as big-spenders. And United’s makeshift side put up one hell of a fight, and in a bruising encounter fully deserved the point which took them above West Ham and back into 5th place. I don’t remember much about the game, but take this opportunity to highlight an extract from Hodgy’s autobiography, which in tongue-in-cheek fashion tells us a lot about the attitude then to players’ well-being. It is full of exaggeration for effect, but also riddled with factual errors which are a problem throughout the book. But the following is well worth a read (I hope it is legible):



Though I don’t remember specific details of that evening, Gordon West in the Everton goal was one I always enjoyed watching, and that will have been the first time I saw him. He was very agile, very spectacular, but you always felt there was a chance of an error; I suspect the United goal was partly his mistake.
And one detail from the programme- United had just sold Cliff Mason to Leeds. He was at the Lane for 7 years, was never 1st choice, as reserve left-back he had an improbably successful spell as a right-winger, played almost 100 league games for us and over 250 league games in his career, and I don’t think anyone ever had a bad word to say about him.

 

[Silent Blade]

Ernest Jackson left the backroom staff in 1955 so Hodgy would have meant Harry Latham. Summers didnt play in the Everton match

 

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Ernest Jackson left the backroom staff in 1955 so Hodgy would have meant Harry Latham. Summers didnt play in the Everton match

He got the referee right, the crowd wrong.

 

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March 17, 1962
Fulham 5-2 United
Attendance: 22,711

United were back to the inconsistency of the early part of the season, with the creditable draw against Everton followed by a 5-2 thrashing away at bottom club Fulham. Indeed, we were 4-0 down after 75 minutes, but staged a minor revival in the last 15 minutes. In addition to tiredness, injuries were a problem, and for this match, 3 of the famous back 6 were missing - Hodgy, Joe Shaw, and Summers, as well as Summers’ replacement in the previous match, Harry Orr. I didn’t go to this game, but was at the Reserve match, watching the evolving disaster on the Pavilion scoreboard. From the programme jottings , my brother appears to have been at the game, but his player ratings are either lost, or he couldn’t bring himself to do them.
I will again begin with 3 pages from Hodgy’s autobiography, which contain a wonderful anecdote about his fitness test before the match, and great comments about the importance of crowds at football matches. Well worth a read, but again don’t look for historical accuracy. In fact, Des Thompson played in goal at Fulham, and Hodgy returned for the next match.
The rest of the material about the game is a painful read.

 

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March 17, 1962
United Reserves 2-1 WBA Reserves
Attendance: no idea!

Confirmation of the match I attended instead of going to Fulham. It looks like the Plan B for cover at left-back was to move Roy Ridge to left-back, and play a very young Len Badger at right-back, now that Mason had been sold to Leeds. The team is a mix of experience (including Simpson returning from injury) and youth. That was not a bad second eleven. Bobby Hope went on to have a good career for WBA, and Foggo and Potter made plenty of league appearances (mainly for Norwich in the case of Foggo). I haven’t identified any hidden gems.

 

[Silent Blade]

March 17, 1962
United Reserves 2-1 WBA Reserves
Attendance: no idea!

Confirmation of the match I attended instead of going to Fulham. It looks like the Plan B for cover at left-back was to move Roy Ridge to left-back, and play a very young Len Badger at right-back, now that Mason had been sold to Leeds. The team is a mix of experience (including Simpson returning from injury) and youth. That was not a bad second eleven. Bobby Hope went on to have a good career for WBA, and Foggo and Potter made plenty of league appearances (mainly for Norwich in the case of Foggo). I haven’t identified any hidden gems.
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And Steve Cram's uncle who was in the Colchester team that knocked Leeds out of the FA Cup in 1971

 

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And Steve Cram's uncle who was in the Colchester team that knocked Leeds out of the FA Cup in 1971

That will teach me not to stop searching half-way through a group. I even had a momentary thought that there might be a connection with Steve Cram, but decided against following it up. You never cease to amaze me.

 

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24 March, 1962
United 3-1 Bolton
Attendance: 18234

The United team plus reserves in the 1961-62 were nothing if not resilient. They had been knocked out of the Cup, and with several players out injured had been thumped 5-2 by bottom club Fulham, dropping to 6th position in the League. Still without the injured Summers and Simpson, they again bounced back with a 3-1 victory over Bolton, which combined with West Ham’s 4-1 home defeat to Man City took United back up to 5th position in the League. It is not a match I remember, and the match report suggests that it was a poor game. But a win is a win, even if the disappointing attendance suggests that there was an end-of-season feeling around.
The programme has plenty of interest, including a detail that I had forgotten - Bolton had signed the teenage centre-forward Wyn Davies from Wrexham. I remember him well from his Newcastle days - ‘the mighty Wyn’.
It also mentions the intention to build a guard rail inside the front railings around the ground, to prevent a repetition of the serious problem at the Burnley match. Was this ever built? I have no memory of it.
Resilience would be needed for the next few weeks, with lots of games to come. In particular we had Blackpool at home (League Cup replay, held over from February 3rd), and Blackpool away (League; the original game postponed just after Xmas). Between these 2 midweek matches, we had a trip to Man City, who had just won 4-1 at West Ham. Anything could happen.

 

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League Cup, 5th Round Replay
Tuesday, 27th March, 1962
United 0-2 Blackpool
Attendance: 12895

I realise now that I should have called this season ‘the quadruple assault season’. The Cup had seen us knocked out in the 6th Round; the League Championship had realistically been out of reach for some weeks now; and with this home defeat to Blackpool, the possibility of the League Cup had disappeared. We now only had the County Cup as a piece of silverware to aspire to.
The attendance shows that the League Cup had still not been widely accepted as a major competition. In the last 8 match in the Cup v Burnley, the attendance was a 57000 sell-out; the last 8 League Cup match v Blackpool had an attendance of under 13000. And I have to assume that I went to the match, but I have no memory whatsoever of the game. From the report, it seems that the 2 teams provided committed performances, and it could have gone either way. The League Cup over the years has not provided us with many memorable moments, with a couple of notable exceptions.
And so on to 2 tricky away matches to keep our season alive rather than allow it to drift into a mid-table finish. First, Man City, and then another game against Blackpool. Plenty still to play for.

 

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March 31st, 1962
Man City 1-1 United
Attendance: 19157

This was another resilient performance by United. Man City were unbeaten in 6, having won 4 and drawn 2, including a 6-2 thrashing of Spurs and a 4-0 win at West Ham, a result which kept United in 5th position, 2 points clear of WHU. Joe Shaw, Summers and Russell were all out injured (3 out injured in the 1950s/60s was an injury crisis), but United were good value for this point.
I always enjoyed going to Maine Road. I liked the ‘feel’ of the Maine Road stadium, and always found Man City fans to be a good bunch. If you look at the programme (pics below), you will see that it was very generous with the space given to the visitors, the descriptions of the players always seemed to have been individually written, and there was a challenging quiz about the citing club. And the cover page looked good. In addition, to go to a match with Hodgy and Bert Trautmann as the 2 goalies was always an added bonus. I assume the wild weather had led to school football being called off that Saturday - anyone who ever played at Whitely Woods will remember the depth of mud and water that was only suitable for a re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme. The awful weather helped produce a good match at Maine Road, though, with conditions perfect for the returning Hodgson, and the draw kept the season alive for another week.
The report below (thanks again to Silent Blade ) gives a sense of the performance, and one thing that has come across to me from re-living the matches of 60 years ago is that Cec Coldwell was a better player than I recall. He frequently gets mentioned in the reports, and again, our player ratings score him highly. He didn’t have the glamour of Hodgy or Graham Shaw, or the obvious skills of Joe Shaw, but he was a key player I didn’t fully appreciate as a kid. And for over 20 years after I started watching United, the only right-backs I knew were Coldwell and Badger; very different players, but both terrific club servants.
I end with one of my favourite anecdotes, prompted by seeing the name of Man City captain Bobby Kennedy in the programme. It comes from the book Colin Schindler, ‘Manchester United Ruined My Life’, and I have to do it from memory, because I lent it out so often it has gone AWOL. The author had a tricky childhood, being a Jew and a Man City fan growing up as the ManU legendary status was taking hold. To his credit, he has followed this up with a book about the current ownership/wealth of Man City with ‘Manchester City Ruined My Life’. His first book is about how whenever Man City achieved something, it immediately went wrong in unforeseen ways (sounds familiar?). In 1968 they won the League, only for ManU to win the European Cup a few days later. In 1969 they won the Cup for the first time in the author’s football supporting career. He was at University, and spent days celebrating the event, culminating in the last of many late nights. Early the next morning, a fellow student came banging on his door, shouting ‘Wake up, wake up, they’ve just shot Bobby Kennedy!’ With a hangover and little sleep, he went into deep depression, thinking ‘We just win the Cup, and someone’s gone and shot our bloody captain!’ He had mixed feelings of guilt and stupidity when relieved to learn that it was the American presidential candidate…
(As it happened, Bobby Kennedy at the time missed out on medals for both the League and the Cup; he was recently awarded a League Championship medal as under current rules he would have played enough games to have qualified.)

 

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Man City v United
I forgot to add this photo:

 

[Silent Blade]

The day I was born!

Looks like that day had 4 seasons weather just like today!

 

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Remarkably similar!
Happy birthday. Good job you avoided April 1st!

 

[Silent Blade]

Remarkably similar!
Happy birthday. Good job you avoided April 1st!

Thank you