Matthews

On the afternoon of Saturday the second of May 1953 at the old Empire Stadium at Wembley, in front of a capacity crowd of one hundred thousand and a television audience of approximately ten million (the largest single sporting television audience in British history to that date, two years before the introduction of commercial television), Blackpool Football Club came from behind to defeat the Bolton Wanderers 4–3 in the FA Cup Final on the back of the second-half performance of Sir Stanley Matthews, thirty-eight years old, the Stoke-on-Trent-born right-winger universally remembered ever since for that single afternoon of the second of May. With twenty-two minutes left and Blackpool 3–1 down, Matthews took control of the Wembley right wing in a half-hour exhibition of close ball-control, late-cut crossings and supply that produced Stan Mortensen's hat-trick (the only hat-trick scored in an FA Cup Final at the old Wembley) and the eighty-ninth-minute winner from Bill Perry. The game has been remembered universally ever since not as the Mortensen Final (despite the hat-trick) but as the Matthews Final, on the strength of Matthews's third successful FA Cup Final appearance after two losses in 1948 and 1951, and on the strength of the Empire Stadium crowd's chant when the final whistle blew and Matthews was lifted onto his teammates' shoulders. The match is the central single sporting memory of the early post-war British public, and the FA Cup Final of 1953 stands as the foundational moment of the modern football-and-television relationship.

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