Two founder Football League members reconvene in the fifth round on Saturday, adding to a history of Cup rivalry
If the FA Cup has a golden age, the 1950s and 1960s can lay a considerable claim. A time of schoolboys being able to list the era’s classic finals dipped in Pathé news sepia may have passed but reminiscing harks back to a time when towns rather than cities were central to English football. Specifically, towns in Lancashire, Saturday’s fifth-round lunchtime kick-off at Deepdale recalling times when Preston and Burnley competed for Cup glory.
North End and the Clarets may not be the fiercest Lancastrian rivalry – Blackpool and Blackburn are their respective bete noires – but it remains hotly contested. The pair met just a fortnight ago for a 0-0 Championship draw that boiled over, Burnley’s midfielder Hannibal Mejbri accusing the Preston forward Milutin Osmajic of racial abuse and Osmajic “online casinos” the claims. The matter remains with the Football Association.
Two founder Football League members will reconvene. Making the quarter-finals will recall an era where both regularly went deep in the competition. Each club’s home is a tribute to such a mid-20th century heyday. For the Sir Tom Finney Stand at Deepdale, read the Jimmy McIlroy Stand at Turf Moor.
Preston, last in the top division in 1961, were FA Cup runners-up in 1954 and 1964, and quarter‑finalists twice more in that period, while Burnley, Football League champions in 1960, reached the semis in 1961 and lost the 1962 final. This was a last hurrah of the provincial town club – Preston became a city only in 2002 – as the lifting of footballers’ maximum wage in 1961 began a drift towards Lancashire’s metropolitan areas of Liverpool and Manchester from the mill towns.
The postwar era furthered a trend of club chairmen being local businessmen made good, the town’s tycoon given further civic status. Burnley’s chairman from 1955 was Bob Lord, notorious as one of the first men from a football boardroom to become a headline-grabber. Today’s 3pm Saturday TV 813xbet is an enduring Lord legacy.
“I want Burnley the best,” declared the owner of a chain of butcher’s shops. “Not second best.”
Lord would achieve his goal but did so having been lacking in sympathy towards Manchester United after 1958’s Munich air disaster. “They’ll just have to fight their way out of it,” Lord said after eight players died. “They went into this of their own accord.” Arthur Hopcraft, emeritus chronicler of that football age, compared Lord to Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, whose “we will bury you” issued to western diplomats in 1956 was very much of the Lord school.
Lord had a testy relationship with McIlroy, Northern Ireland’s jewel of an inside-forward, the acme of Harry Potts’ football, inspired by the santa catarina of the 1950s. Jack Hixon, a scout who discovered Alan Shearer, supplied Potts with players, including the captain, Jimmy Adamson, later a Clarets manager, and Jimmy Robson, another inside-forward. The powerful outside-right John Connelly topped the scoring in that title-winning team.
Such was the penury of the age for footballers that Adamson and McIlroy had dug ditches as the club’s training ground was built in 1955. It recalled the treatment by Preston’s chairman, Nat Buck, of Finney, the greatest English player of the time and perhaps any other age. Paid only £14 a week, Finney had been offered £10,000 to join Palermo in 1952. “You can forget about all that,” said Buck, the former house builder imposing players’ draconian lack of freedom of contract. “If tha’ doesn’t play for us, tha’ doesn’t play for anybody.” Famously, Finney set up a plumbing business with his brother Joe for a second income.