Matthews · 1953
The Matthews FA Cup Final
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.
A match is rarely remembered by the name of a player whose statistical line did not include the central scoring achievement. Stan Mortensen scored a hat-trick in the second half of the 1953 FA Cup Final at Wembley, the only Cup Final hat-trick at the old stadium in any year, and the central single scoring achievement of the afternoon. The match has been remembered ever since as the Matthews Final.
THE WIZARD OF THE DRIBBLE
Sir Stanley Matthews was born at 88 Seymour Street in the Hanley district of Stoke-on-Trent on the first of February 1915, second son of Jack Matthews, the Hanley featherweight boxer who fought as the Fighting Barber of Hanley and ran a small Hanley barber's shop. He was raised in the working-class Hanley terraces of north Staffordshire, was schooled at the Wellington Road School in Hanley, played for the Hanley schoolboys' team from the age of nine, and on the strength of his school-team performances was signed by Stoke City as an apprentice on the first of February 1930 in his fifteenth year for the standard apprentice wage of one pound the week. He made his Stoke City senior debut at seventeen on the nineteenth of March 1932 against Bury at the Victoria Ground, took his first England cap at nineteen in September 1934 against Wales at Cardiff, and held a place in either Stoke City's or Blackpool's senior first team and the England national team continuously for the next thirty-three years until his retirement on his fiftieth birthday on the first of February 1965.
He played for Stoke City through the 1930s (the famous Boy Wonder of the 1930s First Division), was transferred to Blackpool in May 1947 in his thirty-second year for a fee of eleven thousand five hundred pounds (then the highest transfer fee paid for a player of his age), and through the next fourteen years at Blackpool took the position of the most-celebrated single English football player of the post-war period. He was the inaugural recipient of the Ballon d'Or in 1956 (the European Footballer of the Year award), the first English player to win it, was Footballer of the Year in England in 1948 and again in 1963 (the only twice-winner of the post-war award), and was knighted in the 1965 New Year Honours List in his fiftieth year, the first professional footballer to be knighted while still playing.
THREE FINALS
He played in three FA Cup Finals for Blackpool: 1948 (lost 2–4 to Manchester United), 1951 (lost 0–2 to Newcastle United), and 1953 (against Bolton Wanderers). The two previous defeats had given him the unwanted reputation of the bridesmaid forward: the greatest player of his generation who could not win on the great Wembley afternoon. By the spring of 1953 he was thirty-eight years old, was widely thought to be in the closing seasons of his career, and the press build-up to the 1953 Final was that this would be his last chance at the Cup-winner's medal that had eluded him for fifteen years. The Blackpool team had finished fifth in the First Division that season; Bolton had finished fourteenth.
THE SECOND OF MAY
The Final was played in heavy May sunshine on the Wembley pitch in front of a Cup-Final capacity attendance of a hundred thousand. The Queen, four weeks before her Coronation on the second of June, was in the Royal Box with the Duke of Edinburgh. The BBC television broadcast went out on the new Coronation-week television network reach to an estimated ten million viewers, the largest single sporting television audience in British history to that date. The two captains (Harry Johnston for Blackpool, Willie Moir for Bolton) led the teams out at two-fifty-five in the afternoon.
Bolton scored first through Nat Lofthouse in the second minute on a long cross from the right wing that left the Blackpool goalkeeper George Farm flat-footed. Blackpool equalised at twenty-two minutes through Mortensen on a Mudie cross from the left. Bolton scored again through Willie Moir at thirty-eight minutes; Hassall added Bolton's third at the start of the second half on a header from a corner; Bolton 3–1 up with thirty-five minutes to play. The Wembley crowd settled into the assumption that the match was lost.
THE THIRTY MINUTES
Matthews took control of the right wing at the sixty-eighth minute and produced across the next twenty-two minutes the half-hour of football for which the match has been remembered ever since. He beat the Bolton left-back Ralph Banks three times in succession on a sequence of close-ball-control sidesteps; he laid in the cross that produced Mortensen's second goal at the seventy-first minute (Blackpool 3–2); he beat Banks again at the eighty-seventh minute and laid in the cross that the Bolton goalkeeper Stan Hanson punched out for a corner-kick. Mortensen took the resulting free-kick at the eighty-ninth minute (Bolton had committed a foul on Matthews on the corner-and-deep right side) and drove the ball straight into the top-right corner of the Bolton goal from twenty-five yards out for the equaliser at Bolton 3–3 (the Mortensen hat-trick).
Matthews took the ball again at the ninety-first minute, beat Banks for the fifth time in the half, ran the right by-line, and laid in the cut-back to the Blackpool left-winger Bill Perry on the edge of the Bolton penalty area. Perry struck the ball first-time low and hard into the bottom-left corner of the Bolton net. Blackpool 4–3. The Wembley referee Mervyn Griffiths blew for time approximately fifteen seconds later. Matthews was carried off the field on his teammates' shoulders to the standing ovation of the hundred-thousand crowd; the BBC television commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme called it the most dramatic Cup Final I have ever seen.
AFTER WEMBLEY
The match was watched live by approximately fifteen million people across the two BBC television channels of 1953 (the BBC Television Service main channel and the BBC Birmingham regional service), which was approximately a third of the United Kingdom population of the time. The combined television-and-radio audience pushed the FA Cup Final into the position of the central single annual sporting event of the post-war British calendar. The 1953 Cup-Winner's medal was Matthews's only major trophy of his career (he never won the First Division championship; Blackpool never finished higher than second-place in any of his seasons). He continued at the highest level of English football for the next twelve years, returned to Stoke City for the 1961 to 1965 seasons, and retired from competitive football on his fiftieth birthday on the first of February 1965, the oldest player to appear in the English First Division.
He continued in football administration and coaching internationally until his death at Newcastle-under-Lyme on the twenty-third of February 2000 in his eighty-sixth year. His funeral procession through Stoke-on-Trent on the third of March 2000 was attended by an estimated one hundred thousand mourners on the streets, the largest single funeral procession in the history of the Potteries. The Sir Stanley Matthews statue at the Britannia Stadium (now the bet365 Stadium) of Stoke City was unveiled in 2001 and shows him in the moment of the cut-back at Wembley on the ninety-first minute of the second of May 1953. The Matthews name in modern English sporting history carries the weight of that single half-hour.