The FA Cup 1871-72

[vastar iner]

Is it because of Covid, or is it because football apparently only started when Sky invented it, that I've not seen anything commemorating the sesquicentenary of the FA Cup?  Surely something worth noting?

If nothing else, the FA Cup codified two elements that, in 1871, were still not part of the Association laws; the duration of the game (could be anything from "best of three" to "till it gets dark") and the number of players per side (11-a-side had become the commonest, but it was by no means compulsory).

And 7 of the initial 15 entrants - Queen's Park, Maidenhead, Marlow, the Royal Engineers, the Old Harrovians (under the name of Harrow Chequers), Reigate Priory, and, er, the Civil Service - are still around today.

Those first-ever ties took place on 11 November 1871.  With an odd number of entrants, one (the Hampstead Heathens) got a bye.  Reigate Priory withdrew when the draw put them against the Royal Engineers, which, in modern day relative ability terms, is Chelsea v Hampton & Richmond.  The Sappers were the strongest side in physical make-up as well as ability, so the Priory used discretion rather than valour.

Another withdrawal was the Harrow Chequers, because their best players would be playing for the team they had been drawn against - the Wanderers, which in 1871 was an elite select side, mostly made up of Old Harrovians and Old Etonians.  The secretary for both clubs was Charles Alcock, also high-up in the FA, a sports evangelist, and who had proposed the competition in the first place.

That left four ties:

Upton Park 0-3 Clapham Rovers (Jarvis Kenrick scoring the first-ever FA Cup goal for the latter)

Maidenhead 2-0 Great Marlow

Hitchin 0-0 Crystal Palace

Barnes 2-0 Civil Service

This is not the same as today's Crystal Palace, but members of the sporting club that held its fixtures in the extensive grounds at the original 1851 park.  Under rule 8 of the competition, both went through to the next round...

And the Civil Service were hampered by only having 8 turn up.  Being short was not uncommon in days of difficult travel, but the CS were known for not turning out a full side.  Barnes are notable for having played the first-ever Association match at the tail end of 1863.  Prophetically it was a 0-0 draw, against Richmond, who decided to take on the rugby code instead...

[raliverpool]

This thread starting reminds me of one of the best ever April Fools stories, that you actually wished was true:

footballmanagerstory.com/football-manager-1888-the-beginnings-of-football/

[vastar iner]

A little summary of the initial 15 entrants of the FA Cup:

Name	Foundation	Ground	Shirt colour	Club origin
Barnes	1862	Limes Field, White Hart Inn	Dark blue & white hoops	Rowing club
Civil Service	1862	The Oval/Lillie Bridge (Chelsea)	Blue & orange	Works outfit
Clapham Rovers	1868	Clapham Common	Cerise & French grey halves	Sprung out of the Clapham Common Club, because some members wanted the option of rugby as well
Crystal Palace	1861	Cricket pitch at Crystal Palace	Blue & white hoops	Cricket club
Donington Grammar School	1870	at the school	White with blue trim	From a school based near Spalding (Lincs)
Great Marlow	1869	possibly near the Compleat Angler pub	Blue & white hoops	possibly a Rifle Volunteer (Victorian version of the TA) regiment, possibly a rowing club
Hampstead Heathens	1869	Hampstead Heath	White	new club
Harrow Chequers	1865	The Oval	Blue & white quarters	Harrow School old boys
Hitchin	1865	Cricket ground	Black & magenta hoops	cricket side
Maidenhead	1870	York Road	Scarlet & black hoops	cricket side
Queen's Park	1867	"old" Hampden (later Cathkin Park)	Dark blue (the famous hoops came 2 years later)	new club
Reigate Priory	1870	Priory cricket ground	White	cricket side
Royal Engineers	1864	Chatham Lines	Scarlet & blue hoops	regimental officers
Upton Park	1866	West Ham Park	Scarlet & black hoops	new club
Wanderers	1864	The Oval	Orange, violet & black hoops	spun out of Forest FC of Snaresbrook, mostly old boys from elite public schools

[vastar iner]

The second round of the Cup was bizarrely affected by the Prince of Wales falling ill with typhoid. Some matches were postponed, which cost Hitchin as they could not recruit their first-choice XI for the re-scheduled match with Royal Engineers. Indeed they could not even recruit an XI, only an VIII, and consequently they suffered the worst Cup defeat (at the time).

Crystal Palace similarly started their tie with Maidenhead a man short, and were on the defence until their last "starter" turned up. That turned the tide and Palace took an easy win.

Queen's Park and Donington again failed to arrange a fixture, and, with many of the chaff being knocked out, the school decided to bow out gracefully. A school team WOULD eventually take part in the FA Cup - Forest School of Leytonstone, who even won a couple of ties later in the 1870s.

The tie at Barnes (against the Hampstead Heathens) was abandoned because of bad light with the score at 1-1. It had been scheduled for 23 December, a week after most other ties, so they kind of miscalculated that. As it was not a drawn match, rule 8 did not apply, so the game started afresh at Barnes. And this time the visitors won.

The tie of the round saw two of the top sides meet at Clapham Common, the Wanderers squeezing through 1-0.

Crystal Palace 3-0 Maidenhead

Clapham Rovers 0-1 Wanderers

Royal Engineers 5-0 Hitchin

Barnes A-A Hampstead Heathens

Barnes 0-1 Hampstead Heathens

Queen's Park w/o Donington School

[vastar iner]

Feb 16, 2022 18:51:41 GMT 1 raliverpool said:

This thread starting reminds me of one of the best ever April Fools stories, that you actually wished was true:

footballmanagerstory.com/football-manager-1888-the-beginnings-of-football/

Slight error in there as there was an offside law in 1888 - it required 3 opponents between the attacker and the goal-line though.  The offside law in association was the same as rugby (i.e. every attacker ahead of the ball) from 1863 to 1866.  It was the influence of the Sheffield rules that changed it to something a bit more liberal, and changed the game forever; although all the way until 1877 Sheffield rules only required 1 opponent to play someone onside.  (In part because the Sheffield goals were half the width and the goalkeeper was not a designated position in Sheffield rules until 1873.)

[o]

Maybe it's a stupid question, but why was the FA Cup mainly southern based, yet when the Football League started it was northern and midlands based?

[Panda]

Feb 17, 2022 17:17:38 GMT 1 o said:

Maybe it's a stupid question, but why was the FA Cup mainly southern based, yet when the Football League started it was northern and midlands based?

Because the northern/Midlands clubs were much quicker to (officially) embrace professionalism once it was permitted by the FA in the mid 1880s.

[vastar iner]

Feb 17, 2022 17:17:38 GMT 1 o said:

Maybe it's a stupid question, but why was the FA Cup mainly southern based, yet when the Football League started it was northern and midlands based?

It's definitely not a stupid question.  The FA Cup started as southern-based because the southern clubs tended to play under Association or rugby rules, but northern clubs tended to play under Sheffield rules.

Plus, from a societal perspective, it was still difficult for the working man to get time off for recreation.  The southern club members were all from the elite classes.  Even those clubs without outright aristocratic patronage, like Clapham Rovers or Barnes, had upper-middle-class members.  Solicitors (back then a much more exclusive profession), architects, stockbrokers and so on.  They could afford to take time off to undertake a pastime.  It took until 1880 for working-class teams to get going in the Cups.

The first real professionals were probably at Blackburn Rovers in the mid-1870s, where businessmen suddenly realized there was money to be made by enclosing grounds, charging for admission, and recruiting the best players.  Rovers poached almost the entire Blackburn Olympic Cup-winning team in the early 1880s.  Other clubs who basically blasted all local competitors out of the water by paying players included Bolton, Preston, and Villa - who paid a chap called Ramsey £200 to move from Scotland in 1879; as a transfer fee that would not be beaten for 20 years.

And of course all this professionalism was illegal.  Against FA rules.  It came to a head when Preston beat Upton Park in the FA Cup in 1884 and Upton Park put in a protest.  Preston did not even try to deny they paid their players, and were expelled from the competition.  But the genie was out of the bottle and, faced with all of the northern clubs threatening to break away to form a new association, the FA allowed professionalism in 1885.  Note that the Rugby Union took a different approach - which is why we have Rugby League...

The south though remained amateur, and dilettante.  So when the League started, as an outright money-making cartel, none of the southern clubs was competitive, let alone worthy of inclusion (although Blackburn did suggest inviting the Old Carthusians).   

And yet...the strongest team in England until about 1900 was an amateur side.  Whenever the Corinthian Football Club deigned to play a professional team, they tended to kick their ass.  8-1 against Cup winners Blackburn in 1884, 10-3 against the Bury side that had won the Cup 6-0 in 1904.  England v Wales in 1894 and 1895 was Corinthian v Wales.  Then again Corinth was deliberately created to be an elite side, only playing the very best amateurs.  And competition was anathema to playing the game for the sake of it.

[vastar iner]

(and the Sheffield rules merged with the FA rules in 1877 - the last holdout in Sheffield was using kick-ins rather than throw-ins. But in 1866 it was Sheffield rules that were much more akin to football today than Association was; Association still allowed quite a bit of handling, included the try as a legitimate way of getting a shot at goal, and would overall have looked like rugby without anyone carrying the ball.

But once the Sheffield and FA rules were identical, the Sheffield-playing teams - which included teams from Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, as well as other clubs who swapped between Association and Sheffield rules according to the fixture list - could enter the Cup without being at a disadvantage.)

[Shireblogger]

Feb 18, 2022 0:11:25 GMT 1 vastar iner said:

Feb 17, 2022 17:17:38 GMT 1 o said:

Maybe it's a stupid question, but why was the FA Cup mainly southern based, yet when the Football League started it was northern and midlands based?

Plus, from a societal perspective, it was still difficult for the working man to get time off for recreation.  The southern club members were all from the elite classes.  Even those clubs without outright aristocratic patronage, like Clapham Rovers or Barnes, had upper-middle-class members.  Solicitors (back then a much more exclusive profession), architects, stockbrokers and so on.  They could afford to take time off to undertake a pastime.  It took until 1880 for working-class teams to get going in the Cups.

It goes back even further than this. In the early days of regularised football, the only youngsters who played organised sport were the boys at private boarding schools, who had lots of time on their hands once lessons and religious obligations were completed. A revolution in education in the 1830s and 1840s had introduced competitive sport onto the daily schedule. These same boys then continued playing their sport at Oxford and Cambridge, and later when they went to work in London or abroad in the Colonies.

Although education was also a feature of the lives of working class boys in the 1830s and 1840s, the schools had no facilities; and the children had no time for games outside school hours, as they would be expected to work, run errands for their parents, provide child care for younger siblings, and generally do their bit to help keep their household above water.

Thus, as a sweeping generalisation, the north lagged behind the south in terms of talent and appetite for football in the 1860s and 1870s. As vastar iner says, by the 1880s further social advancements started to offer opportunities for the non-wealthy to participate more regularly in games and sports at all ages, and the financial implications turned it into a viable enterprise.

[vastar iner]

The working class versions of the sport in the early 19th century were basically either the ceremonial "mob football" that still exists today - but something else which is now gone, and that's wager games. Pub landlords, if they had grounds near their premises, would pay known players to turn up as an ad hoc team, and have them play against locals. The real cherry for the landlord was running a book on the outcome. It's a phenomenon that did not last for long and is almost forgotten today.

It was the mix of public school games that generated the football laws. The Football Association was founded to make it easier to set up matches between the earliest clubs, which were almost all ex-public schoolboys looking to continue the activity. It was easy enough if everyone had gone e.g. to Harrow, but if you threw an Etonian in there, then what? Hence at Cambridge in 1848 there was a set of laws drawn up taking bits and dabs from the games. Which differed mostly in whether you could carry or pass the ball - which was in those schools in the country, where there was land, such as Rugby or Shrewsbury - or had to dribble it (city schools like Winchester).

The FA Cup was a great regularizer in setting the laws. When Maidenhead played Great Marlow at the start of 1871, it was 15 per side. When Barnes played Richmond in 1862, the duration of the game was "first to two". The rules under which any game was played was often a matter for negotiation. The goalkeeper was abolished in Association rules (perhaps accidentally) for a year but nobody seems to have paid any attention to that.

And when I mentioned above enclosing grounds, the pitches used at this time were rudimentary. The No Names club of Kilburn, founder members of the FA but already moribund by 1870, were known as the Mudlarks because of the lack of quality in their pitch. Either grounds were near pubs (where there were changing facilities), adapted cricket pitches, or public parks. It was easy enough to delineate a pitch as there were no pitch markings. Just corner flags and the goals. Not even a bar back then - just tape between the top of the posts.

[vastar iner]

Third round:

Crystal Palace 0-0 Wanderers

Royal Engineers 3-0 Hampstead Heathens

Queen's Park: bye

So only one team knocked out as Rule 8 applied and both Palace and Wanderers went through to the next drawing. Queen's Park had nobody to play as there were no provincial teams left in the competition.

Hampstead Heathens were a curiously evanescent team, they morphed into existence in 1869 and were gone by 1872. Players finding berths with Old Boy teams or other organizations. Perhaps in part due to the difficulty in parcelling out bits of the Heath to play on. Also at the end of the year the No Names club re-constituted itself as Brondesbury FC, and some of the Heathens seem to have taken up their mantle.

And any chance they had at the powerful Engineers was pretty much gone when they turned up in Chatham with only 9 men. One turned up half-way through the first half but 11 army officers v 10 middle-class lawyers (many of them worked in Lincoln's Inn) was only ever going to go one way.

[vastar iner]

Semi-finals:

Crystal Palace 0-0 Royal Engineers

Wanderers 0-0 Queen's Park

Good luck getting a Match of the Day out of that lot.

Under rule 8, the FA could have allowed all four teams into the next round. You can see why that rule was slung out for the next competition.

What the FA could have done was re-draw the competition, and have the "missing" ties; Royal Engineers v Wanderers and Crystal Palace v Queen's Park. But there was a problem. The rules of the competition - and perhaps a reason why the Sheffield clubs did not enter - mandated the last two rounds to take place in London, and Queen's Park had used up all their spends getting to the Oval for the semi. So they withdrew.

The Wanderers had suggested extra-time in the tie; the Glaswegians refused, perhaps because they had been under pressure for the last part of the match, and they wanted to leave on a draw rather than a defeat. But it was known pretty quickly, before the teams dined together that evening, that Queen's Park were not going to be able to undertake a replay.

Therefore, the FA decided to order a replay of the other semi, which rule 8 also permitted. And this time there was a decisive result.

Crystal Palace 0-3 Royal Engineers

Wanderers w/o Queen's Park

[vastar iner]

You could get odds of 4-7 on the Engineers winning the Cup, they were definite favourites, with their combination of strength and well-drilled passing. But they underperformed in the final. Which was at the Oval, the home of Surrey Cricket Club, whose secretary was C. W. Alcock, who happened also to be the secretary of the Wanderers, as well as their motive force, centre-forward, and journalist/publisher whose idea the Cup was.

The Wanderers were actually not meant to have a home ground and for the first few years only played "away". But if they needed to host one of their matches they tended to use the Oval. If that was not available, Battersea Park.

The advantage the Wanderers has was that they were a bit like the Barbarians in rugby, or the Corinthian club in later years; they were a gentlemen's club, like many of the other early clubs, but somewhat elite and it was considered an honour to play for them.

To give an idea of the prodigality of club membership in those early days, Edgar Lubbock, one of the Wanderers in the final, in the 1869-70 season alone, played for:

-West Kent
-"Mr Alcock's XI" (basically a Wanderers outfit)
-Gitanos (a poor man's Wanderers)
-the Old Etonians
-the Crusaders (basically Old Etonians and Old Carthusians),

as well as the Wanderers. And one of his Crusaders matches was against the Wanderers.

Indeed, in 1872, when the Wanderers had two matches on the same day, two Wanderers - Alfred (later Lord) Kinnaird and A. J. Baker - played in the first match, turned up at the second match (which was against the Hampstead Heathens) to watch the second half, and both decided to join in. Kinnaird for Wanderers and Baker for the Heathens.

And, as the match shook out, Wanderers basically dominated.  The only goal came after about a quarter of an hour, Morton Peto Betts, known in some reports as "A H Chequer" (A Harrow Chequer, as he had played for the Chequers as well), got on the end of a low cross from R. W. S. Vidal (Walpole Vidal, the Prince of Dribblers, who was still at school - his "other" club was Westminster School) and drove home.  Alcock thought he had added a second in the second half but a goal-kick was given because of an earlier handball; Betts was called offside when he thought he had done so.  Wanderers also hit the post.

Wanderers did have the slight advantage that Lt Cresswell (the only Gibraltarian to play in the Cup final) broke his collarbone in a scrimmage after 10 minutes.  Back then, in what must have been a slower-moving game with fewer shots, injured players tended to be shoved in goal to get them out of the way.  Not an option for the Engineers as their goalie Captain Merriman was the first player to be acknowledged as a dedicated, specialist goalkeeper.  So Cresswell had to stick it out regardless.

But overall the 1-0 score was flattering to the Engineers.  It was their only defeat of the season.  For the next few years, the Engineers would remain the top side in the country, with very few defeats; but alas for them they tended to come in crucial matches at the latter stages of the Cup.  They did get to lift the trophy once, in 1875, beating the Old Etonians after a replay. 

But the Sappers' failures meant that the Wanderers racked up a remarkable record in the FA Cup; 5 finals, 5 wins.  The only other 100%er team with more than 1 appearance is Bury.  The Wanderers' decline was remarkable though.  Their defence of their fifth championship was the worst of any Cup holder; a 7-2 defeat by the Old Etonians. 

And the reason for that decline was right there on the pitch.  Lord Kinnaird had played in the 1878 final for the Wanderers, but, for the 1878-79 campaign, plighted his troth to the Old Etonians.  The old boy schools had reached the point where it was a choice; the Wanderers or the old school.  And 1878 was the last time most players plumped for the Wanderers.  Almost overnight their best players decamped to the Old Etonians, or Old Carthusians (from Charterhouse), or the Old Harrovians.  And, after winning five FA Cups on the bounce, the Wanderers only ever won two more Cup ties.  In a sic transit moment, in 1880, they got past the Old Carthusians...then went down to the Old Etonians.

And that was it for the Wanderers.  In 1880-81 they played a handful of friendly matches, but withdrew from the Cup after being paired with Rangers (not Glasgow, or even QPR, but a club from west Clapham of next to no repute at all), because they could not find players who were not already committed to other clubs.  And in 1882 and 1883, they player one match per year, a traditional Christmas fixture against Harrow School.  The Wanderers started with Alcock, an old Harrovian; they finished with Harrow.