Home of football statistics and historyDuring the early 1880s interest in the game was beginning to show; attendances were rising; the number of clubs entering various local cup competitions was growing; and – thank goodness – coverage in the newspapers was better with reporters taking more trouble to find out who was playing and who scored. No doubt if they had realised that in 2017 we would be researching into those matches their reports would have been better but no doubt they thought “it’s only football – not cricket.”
Many important games were taking place, various local cities and counties were arranging annual challenge matches which retained their importance until the coming of the Football League overshadowed such events and they eventually became the domain of the local club amateur. Once again we have attempted to provide some details of the first season of each county FA Cup competition.
With the great growth of such lesser competitions we have had to be more selective in the material we have chosen to publish. Details of all the major county cup finals, such as Lancashire, Birmingham and Sheffield are given but lesser cups are restricted to their first season. However at the end of the book is a year-by-year list of all county cup winners 1879 – 83 including Scotland. Some of the lesser inter-county games have also had to be omitted, for example Norfolk v Suffolk, but once again all the available ones involving the major centre, London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Lancashire and Glasgow are included as well as many others.
We would like to acknowledgement the assistance of Robert Folliard for the essays prefixed to each season, based on contemporary reminiscences and reports, and also Ian Laschke, Andy Mitchell, Paul Lunney, Keith Warsop and Alex Wilson for their help in making this series possible. Thanks also got to those other members of the Association who have helped to clear up specific queries or went to their local newspaper library to get otherwise unobtainable line-ups for us. As usual many newspapers have been consulted, particularly The Sportsman, Bell’s Life in London, the Athletic News, the Midland Athlete, the Nottingham Daily Guardian, the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, the Glasgow Herald and various local papers covering places from Rochester to Darwen, and from Maidenhead to Newcastle. The Football Annual edited by Charles W Alcock 1879 – 83 has also been most valuable.
So we travel back to the winter of 1878 and the eighth-year of the FA Cup – just handed back to the FA by The Wanderers who had won the right to keep the trophy permanently after three successive Cup Final victories….
1878/79
Was there ever such a season as 1878/79 for foul weather – heavy rains, high winds, snow, ice, frost in great measure. Football everywhere was disrupted; in Ireland some clubs never got a game between November and March. On one Saturday the Kilbirnie club in Ayrshire, deprived of its ground by the severe weather, played a game on the ice of Kilbirnie Loch. On another day Edinburgh University, after making great efforts to raise a team to travel to Nottingham for a game, arrived at Trent Bridge to find the turf buried under a foot of snow (in order not to disappoint the visitors after their long journey, the host club agreed to play a match of half-an-half-hour’s duration).
The phenomenon of the newly perfected electrical illumination caught the fancy of football match promoters in many parts of the country. Almost every week there were games played with the aid of artificial light. The results of these endeavours to be independent of Mother Nature were mixed. After the Heckmodwike v Dewsbury contest delight was expressed even though the venture was not a success at the gate. At Kennington Oval the game between the Wanderers and Clapham Rovers was made tedious for players and spectators by the inadequacy of the lamps, by the disturbing shadows and, most of all, by the attempts made by operators to follow the flight of the ball with their monstrous lamps. The apparatus used in this game was later taken to Richmond where, the lessons of the Oval having been learned, the lights gave every satisfaction at the Old Deer Park. The lamps used at Chester road Sunderland gave good illumination but subject to variations in strength. Those set up at Barnsley were considered unsuitable for serious football. At Manchester, Broughton FC had two sets of lamps working off one machine, producing an effect “very much as one sees at twilight”. They used twelve lamps mounted on 30 feet poles at Aston Lower Grounds for the Birmingham v Nottingham Forest match and the field was quite brightly lit except for a small area in the centre of the pitch. After this game someone suggested, “Why don’t they use a white ball?” In early October the Sheffield Association made experiments with artificial lighting at Bramall Lane with such success that the Glasgow Charity Cup committee decided to borrow the apparatus. Alas, the same results were not forthcoming in Glasgow. The lights behaved so capriciously that spectators derived more entertainment watching the lights than by the football match, and cheered the lamps more than the players. There were football matches played by artificial electric light all through the season and all over the country, – Burton on Trent, Newport, Hawick, etc.
The relative appeals of the two main codes, Rugby and Association, affords some intriguing conjecture. In the years immediately after the foundation of The Football Association the dribbling game seemed to attract the interest of most footballers, but with the formation of The Rugby Football Union in 1871 the handling code entered a phase of immense popularity. The fascination of the Rugby game which gave it a greater appeal than Association rules, is hard to define. Rugby was more complicated and a less fluent game then Association; it was rougher, more dangerous to life and limb, harder to play and harder to watch. Yet Rugby football’s domain was growing wider and faster than that of the other code, attracting the allegiance of the school master, the gentleman, and the factory-hand all alike. At a casual glance it would appear that Association was a game for aristocrats, and Rugby a pastime for the lower ranks, but Rugby had its full share of men of the leisure classes and the dribbling game was by no means confined to men of rank and position.
With exceptions, the strongholds of Association football were few, and scattered. There was the Metropolitan area (including Berkshire and Buckinghamshire), Birmingham and district, Staffordshire, Nottingham, Sheffield, East Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire, and North Wales, but elsewhere its popularity was uncertain. Whereas Rugby football had its adherents everywhere in strength.
In Ireland the dribbling game was almost unheard of, but the situation in Scotland was quite the reverse. Here a few Rugby clubs maintained a lonely existence backed up by some teams from the educational institutions, but the round ball was all the rage.
Outside the British Isles, wherever the Union Jack flew, Rugby Football flourished and the Association game struggled for recognition.
1879/80
By the 1879/80 season a new class of footballer had become established – the spectator. The game had always attracted a few onlookers, of course; some curious about the game, some too young, too old, or otherwise unable to take part; some doing so. Until the advent of the ‘eighties they were few in number, Certainly not enough to be considered as a separate development of the sport. In the year under review it became obvious to anybody who thought about it that there was a section of society willing to be entertained by the proceedings of a football match. To this type of person it was the Association game rather than Rugby football that most appealed; perhaps because the rules were fewer and appeared simpler, or the action was more continuous, or because it looked the more skilful game.