West Midlands Turf Wars

Steve Tongue

Description

In the third volume of the acclaimed Turf Wars series, journalist and broadcaster Steve Tongue looks at the history of football in the West Midlands, where the world's first Football League was dreamed up and administered more than 130 years ago. Fierce rivalries had already emerged by then, and have remained as strong as anywhere. Aston Villa and Birmingham City (as Small Heath Alliance) were founded within a year of each other, only a few miles apart, as were equally bitter neighbours West Bromwich Albion and Wolves. And just as in London and Lancashire, turf wars were fought off the pitch too. In Burton and Walsall, the biggest local clubs once amalgamated to carry the name of their town forward. But what an outcry there was in the Potteries when Stoke City and Port Vale almost did the same. This is the story of them all, large and small, and non-league too with a colourful cast of characters - Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright, Major Frank Buckley and Ron Atkinson, William McGregor, Jimmy Hill and 'Deadly' Doug Ellis among them.

Sujets

• Midlands Occidentales
• West Midlands
• Warwickshire
• Midlands de l'Ouest

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 27 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781801500241
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Steve Tongue, 2021
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978178531
eBook ISBN 9781801500241
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Beginnings: 1860-1887
2. The 12 Apostles: 1888-1900
3. Down, Down: 1901-1919
4. Up for the Cup: 1920-1939
5. War: 1939-1945
6. Champions of the World : 1946-1960
7. Slump City : 1961-1970
8. Ch-Ch-Changes: 1971-1992
9. Non-League
10. Sky High: 1993-2010
11. Endings: 2011-2021
Appendix I
Appendix II
Select Bibliography
Photos

Front cover
Top: Stanley Matthews (Stoke City), Jack Grealish (Aston Villa), Dave Bennett (Coventry City). Bottom: Billy Wright (Wolves), Jeff Astle (West Bromwich Albion), Trevor Francis (Birmingham City).
By the same author
Turf Wars: A History of London Football (Pitch Publishing, 2016) Lancashire Turf Wars: A Football History (Pitch Publishing, 2018)
Acknowledgements
Whatever the collective noun is for journalists (a hackful?), many thanks to Rob Bishop, Colin Burgess, David Harrison, John Homer, David Instone, Paul Joannou, Jeff Kent, Chris Lepkowski, Phil Shaw and Martin Swain.
Also David Bauckham, Steve Carr, Dr Graham Curry, Will Hoyle and John Lerwill.
To Duncan Olner for the cover and all at Pitch Publishing for their continued support.
Introduction
WHEN G RARD Houllier took over as manager of Aston Villa in 2010, he was surprised to be told by the police officer in charge of crowd safety, You re welcome here, but I can t support you - I m a Bluenose. Houllier, Anglophile veteran of a dozen or more Merseyside derbies while with Liverpool, might have been expected to know all about local rivalries; but he was not the first or last to underestimate the strength of tribal loyalty either in Birmingham or the wider area of 5,000 square miles and almost six million people that make up the West Midlands region, where those partisan feelings are as powerful as anywhere in the country.
Most of the rivalries had begun even before Aston Villa, West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Stoke (our definition of the area takes in Staffordshire) were made founder members of England s Football League, the world s first, in 1888.
The first of more than 130 meetings between Villa and Birmingham City, for instance, took place in 1879, at a time when the latter were known as Small Heath Alliance, a name reflecting their own locality - barely three miles from Aston but proudly different. That opening skirmish in the turf wars was suitably controversial - Villa complained about the state of a pot-holed pitch. By 1894 the Heathens had joined their neighbours in the First Division, which one of the many local newspapers felt could help both. Birmingham is large enough to support two clubs and the interests of Aston Villa and Small Heath need not clash in the slightest degree. A healthy rivalry, on the contrary, may be beneficial to both clubs, said the Birmingham Daily Post .
So it remains more than 125 years later. Healthy it has mostly been, although the hooligan excesses of the 1970s and 80s often spilled over into something else. Not that crowd trouble was a 20th-century phenomenon. If snowballs being thrown at West Brom players by Small Heath followers in the mid-1880s now seems quite quaint, it was the sort of behaviour that for a time deterred the mighty Preston North End from travelling as far south as Birmingham.
By 1888 they were having to, after Villa s William McGregor proposed that ten or 12 of the most prominent clubs in England combine to arrange home and away fixtures each season - a groundbreaking concept originating in the second city, run in its early years from a small office in Stoke-on-Trent and soon copied all over the globe.
It is a source of pride for the area to have had at least one of its clubs in football s top tier every year since the Football League began and to have supplied the English champions 11 times.
Whether Villa were genuinely the best club in the world at the start of the 20th century, as has been claimed, was unfortunately never tested, but they challenged for the official title in 1982 having famously become champions of Europe. Birmingham City were the first English club to compete in European football, entering the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1955, after Wolves and Albion had paved the way with glamorous televised friendly matches against foreign opposition in the years immediately beforehand; indeed, the European Cup and hence the Champions League could be said to date from the moment in December 1954 when Wolves manager Stan Cullis proclaimed his team champions of the world after victory over the revered Hungarian side Honv d.
Disappointingly, there has been no league title since Villa s in 1981, 40 years being the longest break in history without one; and a book about the region s football in 2018 by Professor John Samuels of the Business School at Birmingham University was titled Where Did It All Go Wrong? His conclusions were poor leadership, poor governance and a poor image, problems that have troubled many aspects of life in the West Midlands region, not just football .
It is true that all the area s biggest clubs have experienced hard times and financial crises. Villa, Birmingham, Stoke and Albion dropped as far as the Third Division, Wolves and Coventry City played in the Fourth. Yet changes of fortune are common from week to week, let alone season to season, and provide part of the sport s charm. Within a year of Where Did It All Go Wrong? appearing, Wolves had finished seventh in the Premier League for a second successive season, qualifying for the Europa League, in which they reached the quarter-final; Albion had boing-boinged their way back into the top tier; and Villa were being spoken of as contenders for a Champions League place.
It was hardly coincidence, of course, that the success of those three clubs had been built on foreign money. In the Birmingham Post s West Midlands Rich List for 2020, no fewer than four of the top six wealthiest men were owners of local football clubs - two at Villa (Egyptian and American), one at Wolves and one at West Brom (both Chinese).
A theme of previous volumes in this series, on London and Lancashire, is that in the long term big clubs tend to stay big and small ones stay small. But the democracy of football also allows those of more slender means to rise above their station, however fleetingly. Burton Albion, Hereford United, Port Vale, Shrewsbury Town and Walsall, all featured here, have spent time in the second tier, as well as enjoying famous FA Cup days.
They have also had to be imaginative in employing the sort of manoeuvres necessary to fight turf wars down the years. A town as small as Burton once had two separate Football League clubs (1894-97) before they joined forces and then had to disband; but once established in a town, football is reluctant to die and Burton Albion, founded as late as 1950, eventually emulated them. Similarly, when Hereford United dropped out and suffered severe financial problems, a new phoenix club immediately emerged. In 1926 Port Vale supporters had to fight off a proposed merger with their great rivals Stoke City; and in the financially problematic 1980s Walsall (themselves the product of a merger between the town s two biggest clubs) might have moved to either Molineux or St Andrew s, before deciding to build a new ground. Later Coventry - victims rather than beneficiaries of foreign owners - also moved to a new stadium but later found themselves groundsharing at Birmingham and out of the region altogether at Northampton.
All have fought the good fight and contributed to the life of their communities, as have the many clubs mentioned in the Non-League chapter here; from Worcester City, who once knocked Liverpool out of the FA Cup, to Kidderminster Harriers, taking 114 years to become Worcestershire s first Football League team and staying for only five.
Famous clubs, players, managers and administrators - and, yes, a few charlatans too. The characters and tall tales from more than 150 years of West Midlands football can be found within these pages.
1
Beginnings 1860-1887
Association clubs have sprung into existence rapidly all over the town, and this year I can name more than a dozen clubs playing Association rules in Birmingham alone; while wherever a field can be obtained in the Black Country an Association club will be found enjoying the healthy exercise.
Birmingham Daily Post, March 1876
There can be no possible objection to the recognised payment of men who cannot afford to play for amusement.
Sporting Life, September 1884
The time has now arrived when some radical reform is necessary to save the club [Aston Villa] from utter collapse.
Athletic News, December 1885
The Birmingham rough seemed compelled to demonstrate his presence and snowballs were hurled about. It looked as if they were intended for the West Bromwich Albion players.
Sporting Life, March 1886
I understand that Preston North End positively refuse to