Footballxtreme : From a wartime truce to the legendary Boxing Day goalfest of 1963, Scott Murray recalls some famous festive fixtures.1. Fulham 10-1 Ipswich Town (December 26, 1963)It's extremely difficult not to spring to the conclusion that, back in the day, players used to stagger through the Christmas fixtures absolutely paggered on egg nog. What other explanation is there for the high scores and crazy swings synonymous with holidays past?
The most famous example of festive fluctuations came, of course, on Boxing Day 1963. It would be churlish not to run through that day's classifieds, though we should probably all know them off by heart now: Blackpool 1-5 Chelsea, Burnley 6-1 Manchester United, Fulham 10-1 Ipswich Town, Leicester City 2-0 Everton, Liverpool 6-1 Stoke City, Nottingham Forest 3-3 Sheffield United, West Bromwich Albion 4-4 Tottenham Hotspur, Sheffield Wednesday 3-0 Bolton Wanderers, Wolverhampton Wanderers 3-3 Aston Villa, West Ham United 2-8 Blackburn Rovers. (According to the Times, the 66 goals were attributable to "a mixture of icy conditions in some places" and "rain and slush in others". No mention of egg nog. We're not buying it.)
The most noteworthy result of the day had been at Craven Cottage: a club record win that stands to this day for Fulham, a club record thrashing that is still the blackest mark on Ipswich Town's book. Even so, the score wasn't the biggest surprise in the world: Jackie Milburn's piss-poor Ipswich side had already shipped 58 goals in 23 games, and were already shoo-ins for relegation, a mere 18 months after becoming league champions under Alf Ramsey. Ipswich were steadily useless: they were 5-1 down at half time, and Fulham just kept on trucking. Graham Leggatt was the main man for the Cottagers, scoring a hat-trick in four minutes. Bobby Howfield – who later became a place kicker in the NFL for the Denver Broncos and the New York Jets – wasn't far behind Leggatt, with a hat-trick of his own.
The other big score of the day – OK, the other really big score – came at Upton Park, where West Ham were skelped all over the shop, eight goals to two, by Blackburn. Again, though, it wasn't totally a surprise: Rovers were the league leaders, Fred Pickering and Andy McEvoy both helping themselves to a hat-trick. ("Everything West Ham did was tinged with misfortune," wrote Albert Barham in the Guardian, "while everything Blackburn did was coldly calculated and correct.")
Notable events were everywhere. At Burnley, Manchester United were annihilated 6-1, Andy Lochhead scoring four times. It could have been much worse for United, too: according to Eric Todd of this paper, "United's goal had several astonishing escapes". A surprise, seeing United were chasing the title? Sort of, but not really: they'd gone down 4-0 at Everton on the previous Saturday. (Down in the Second Division, incidentally, Manchester City were trouncing Scunthorpe 8-1 at Maine Road, Jimmy Murray and Matt Gray with hat-tricks, Derek Kevan with two.) At Anfield, Roger Hunt scored four times for Liverpool against Stoke. Jimmy Greaves scored two at the Hawthorns, helping Spurs to a 4-2 lead over West Brom, but the Baggies boinged back, Don Howe scoring a late equaliser (having earlier missed a penalty).
But it was the advocaat-fuelled set of return fixtures two days later that really cemented the results into legend: Aston Villa 4-2 Wolverhampton Wanderers; Blackburn Rovers 1-3 West Ham United; Bolton Wanderers 3-0 Sheffield Wednesday; Chelsea 1-0 Blackpool; Everton 0-3 Leicester City; Ipswich Town 4-2 Fulham; Manchester United 5-1 Burnley; Sheffield United 1-2 Nottingham Forest; Tottenham Hotspur 0-2 West Bromwich Albion. West Ham, Manchester United and – most impressively – Ipswich Town had all avenged their Boxing Day humiliations. Though Ipswich wouldn't receive much of a fillip from their face-saving win: they ended the season in last place, having let in 121 goals.
2. Chelsea 7-4 Portsmouth (December 25, 1957)Hard to imagine now, but English top flight games used to be played on Christmas Day. The last time this happened was in 1965, when Blackpool beat Blackburn Rovers 4-2. That was the only First Division fixture that day; the last time a full card was played on Christmas Day in the English top flight was in 1950, when all 22 teams turned out to produce this set of classifieds: Arsenal 0-3 Stoke City, Blackpool 3-0 Liverpool, Charlton Athletic 2-2 Aston Villa, Derby County 1-1 Tottenham Hotspur, Everton 1-0 Burnley, Fulham 0-1 Bolton Wanderers, Huddersfield Town 1-2 Wolverhampton Wanderers, Middlesbrough 2-1 Newcastle United, Portsmouth 1-3 Chelsea, Sunderland 2-1 Manchester United, West Bromwich Albion 1-3 Sheffield Wednesday.
The last sizable Xmas Day card came in 1957, with a set of results that can be viewed as a harbinger of the aforementioned festive events of 1963. The classifieds: Blackpool 5-1 Leicester City, Burnley 2-1 Manchester City, Chelsea 7-4 Portsmouth, Everton 1-1 Bolton Wanderers, Manchester United 3-0 Luton Town, Newcastle United 1-4 Nottingham Forest, Sheffield Wednesday 4-4 Preston North End.
Some notable action there all right. At Hillsborough, there was a battle of the Finneys: Alan scoring twice for Wednesday, the more storied Tom matching his namesake for Preston, the spoils shared in an eight-goal thriller. Stuart Imlach – the subject of his son Gary's stupendously good My Father And Other Working Class Heroes – scored twice in a 4-1 win for Forest at Newcastle. Blackpool striker Bill Perry, scorer of the injury-time winner in the Matthews Final, helped himself to a couple in a 5-1 win over Leicester. And with the tragedy of Munich less than two months away, it's nice to note that the Busby Babes spent their last Christmas at home, and enjoyed themselves too, beating Luton Town 3-0, Duncan Edwards, Bobby Charlton and Tommy Taylor the scorers.
The result of the day, though, came at Stamford Bridge, where Jimmy Greaves – fresh from a six-week lay-off – sauntered back into everyone's lives and scored four goals, with Chelsea hammering Portsmouth by the surreal score of 7-4. And here's where the shades of 1963 come in: the next day – the very next day! – Pompey avenged themselves at Fratton Park with a comprehensive 3-0 win. There were two other big turnarounds: Leicester's 2-1 win over Blackpool, and Newcastle's 3-2 win at Forest. Throw in a couple of other big scores – a 5-1 win for Everton at Bolton, and a 5-3 win for West Brom at Birmingham, Bobby Robson scoring twice – and the question once again must be asked: WAS EVERYONE HALF CUT ON BOOZE?
3. Sunderland 2-3 Newcastle United (December 24, 1898)Christmas is, needless to say, the season of ill will. We've all seen EastEnders. And it's a feeling that runs the length and breadth of the country. Apt in some ways, then, that the bitter north-eastern rivals Sunderland and Newcastle United first engaged in league hostilities on a Christmas Eve.
The year was 1898. The Football League was 10 years old. Sunderland had been the first new team to win admission to the league in 1890, replacing Stoke City, and quickly set about winning three championships. But despite all the success, something was missing: a rivalry which would allow everyone to dispatch reason out of the window. Sunderland needn't have worried, because Newcastle United were on their way up.
The two had met competitively in the FA Cup in 1887-88, sort of: Sunderland beat Newcastle West End, one of the two clubs that would eventually become United, 3-1 in the second round. But it would be over 11 years before league hostilities would commence. And with the newly formed Newcastle United joining the box-fresh Second Division in 1983, finally winning promotion five seasons later, it was on.
A crowd of 30,000 gathered at Roker Park, 20 extra trains having been laid on to shuttle Newcastle fans south. The newly promoted side were struggling at the bottom of the table, but they quickly took the lead against their mid-table rivals and refused to relinquish it. According to the Guardian, Toon employed "defensive tactics in the closing stages" to secure a hard-fought win which kickstarted their season; they ended five points clear of the drop.
The following Christmas Eve would be payback time for Sunderland, Newcastle leading 2-1 at half-time only to end up on the wrong end of a 4-2 tonking. With the derby warmed up nicely early doors, it wasn't long before things started getting out of hand. On Good Friday 1901, Sunderland were after the title, and travelled to St James Park (capacity 25,000). A crowd of over 35,000 were already in the ground when supporters stormed the turnstiles. "The scene was an unprecedented one," reported the Manchester Guardian. "The footballers got mixed up in the crowd, the rougher element of which commenced horseplay." Flags and goals were ripped down. Bobbies made baton charges. The game was called off. Sunderland won the rearranged match three weeks later, though much good the two points did them, as they still came behind Liverpool in the title race.
One more early Tyne-Wear derby worthy of a mention, seeing we're on the subject, came in December 1908. Newcastle were hammered, skelped and whipped on their own turf, 9-1, Sunderland scoring eight in the second half! It's still a record in the derby, and a record top-flight home defeat. But – and it's typical of Newcastle, this – United went on to win the league title that season.
4. Germany 2-3 Great Britain (December 25, 1914)An unofficial truce took place in the trenches on the first Christmas Day of the Great War. Soldiers of both sides. According to letters sent home by British soldiers, Germans rose up from their trenches and meandered out into no-man's land, unarmed, carrying "boxes of cigars and seasonable remarks. What were our men to do? Shoot? You could not shoot unarmed men."
While there was continued gunfire across the front – this is a heartwarming story, not a fairytale – it seems most soldiers opted to give it up for the festivities, such as they were. Remarkably, football matches broke out. A report in the Guardian on Boxing Day 1914 describes how, in one region, "every acre of meadow under any sort of cover in the rear of the lines was taken possession of for football".
Further evidence comes by way of a letter published on New Year's Day from an unnamed British Officer. "I hear our fellows played the Germans at football on Christmas Day," he writes. "Our own pet enemies remarked they would like a game, but as the ground in our part is all root crops and much cut up by ditches, and as, moreover, we had not got a football, we had to call it off." A letter in the Times on the same day from a Major said a German regiment "had a football match with the Saxons [a British regiment] who beat them 3-2".
Whether the matches were quite as ordered is a moot point. In 1983, a former Cheshire Regiment officer told of a game which started when "the ball came from the German side. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part. I had a go at the ball. I was pretty good then, at 19. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was no sort of ill will between us. There was no referee, and no score, no tally at all. It was simply a melee – nothing like the soccer you see on television."
An edible trophy was up for grabs, in the shape of a hare. "The grey tunicked Germans the one side, and the kilted Jocks the other. The game was won by the Germans, who captured the prize. But more was secured than a hare. A sudden friendship had been struck up, the truce of God had been called, and for the rest of Christmas Day not a shot was fired along our section."
5. Dick, Kerr Ladies 4-0 St Helens (December 26, 1920)You couldn't keep Dick, Kerr's large munitions factory in Preston out of the news in 1920. Here's a headline that's unlikely to be beaten in the history of All Newspapers, from the Times in July that year: OUTPUT INCREASED BY ALLOWING SMOKING. "'Smoking Time' at Messers Dick Kerr's large works at Preston has proved such a success that the experiment is being extended. Three months ago, the men were granted permission to smoke 15 minutes each morning and afternoon. The management have now decided to allow smoking from 9 to 10.30am, and from 3 to 4.30pm. The grant of the privilege has resulted in increased output."
Two 90-minute breaks to suck down tabs every day! Truly the past was a different country. Anyway, while the men were wheezing around the factory, the women were wheeching round the world. They made the Times five months later, when a crowd of nearly 15,000 spectators watched the all-female Dick, Kerr works team – star turn the famous Lily Parr – take on a French XI in Paris. "An unfortunate incident marred the close," reported the paper. "Four minutes before full time, the crowd, evidently displeased because a corner kick had been given against the French team, broke onto the field and the referee was forced to close the game, the score then standing at one goal each."
The women's game – which had taken hold while the menfolk were at war – was proving thoroughly popular. And so it would prove on Boxing Day, when it was reported that between 45,000 and 53,000 fans turned up to Goodison Park to watch Dick, Kerr take on St Helens in a charity match for "disabled and unemployed soldiers and sailors" who had suffered in the Great War. Over 14,000 unlucky people were locked out. Only Manchester United drew a bigger crowd that day – the more things change, etc. – with a 72,000 gate at Old Trafford for the visit of Aston Villa. (United lost 3-1, for the record.)
The Dick, Kerr game raised £3,000 for charity. However charity was something in short supply elsewhere. The FA were becoming increasingly worried that the women's popularity was overtaking that of the men – which was the height of childishness, seeing crowds of 50,000 had turned up at Sheffield United, Spurs and Liverpool that day, with 40,000-plus attendances at Birmingham, Cardiff and Arsenal – and soon enough they would ban women from playing, citing spurious medical reasons.
The Manchester Guardian, reporting the announcement of the ban, has had better days at the office. "Few people will quarrel with the decision," it brayed. "If largish crowds have been drawn once or twice for matches between teams of women, those crowds are a symptom not so much of an interest in football as of an appetite for the sensational in athletic spectacles … Cricket, lacrosse and hockey are good enough for the ladies … With these to go at, the most virile young woman might leave Association alone without any great feeling of deprivation." The FA – the state of these people – would not lift the ban until 1971.
6. Brazil 2-2 Argentina (December 25, 1925)There are plenty of other noteworthy incidents which have taken place over the period immediately surrounding Christmas. In 1860, the first-ever game between two clubs took place in Sheffield, between Sheffield FC and Hallam. One hundred and nineteen years later, in the same city, Wednesday thumped United 4-0 in a game which became known as the Boxing Day Massacre.
On Christmas Day 1933, Grimsby Town beat a snivelling Manchester United 3-1 at Old Trafford. A day later, they won 7-3 at Blundell Park. The most successful club in the English league, suffering their lowest ebb in their worst-ever season – they finished one point off relegation to the Third Division North – right there.
A game between Sunderland and Bury on Boxing Day 1962 put paid to Brian Clough's playing career. Bury striker Bob Stokoe was on hand to accuse Clough of "codding", thereby ensuring the British literary and film industries were given a much-needed boost in the early 21st century.
For fans of more recent football – we know there are a few of you out there somewhere, we know there are – Boxing Day 1999 saw Chelsea field the first all-foreign starting XI in the history of English top-flight football.
Chelsea and Aston Villa drew 4-4 in 2007.
And Phil Brown made a right eejit of himself by giving his Hull City side their half-time teamtalk on the pitch at Manchester City in 2008. A loveable eejit, though, no?
But pride of place has to go to Argentina, who on Christmas Day 1925 needed a draw against Brazil in the final match of that year's Copa América to make off with the trophy. They managed it, but only just. Brazil went 2-0 up in Boca Juniors's Bombonera stadium, but Argentina fought back and Manuel Seoane popped up with the equaliser. It was fitting that Seoane had the final word, as he'd scored a hat-trick against the same opposition in a 4-1 win a fortnight before. An international trophy isn't too bad a Christmas present, is it?
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