As I wrote last week,
this month sees the 80th anniversary of Coventry City's
first ever promotion in the Football League from Division Three
South. This week in 1936 saw City, the league leaders, play their
nearest rivals Luton Town twice in three days. Going into the first
game, at Kenilworth Road, on Saturday 25th April 1936 only
goal average separated the teams who both had three games to play.
Only one team was promoted in those days and there were no play-offs
- it had become a two-horse race for the promotion place (and title).
The game was billed as
a battle beaten the two goal machines. City had the legendary Clarrie
Bourton who, whilst not scoring at the prolific rate of his
record-breaking 1931-32 season when he netted 49 league goals, had
scored 21 goals. Leading the Hatters' forward line was 22-year old
Joe Payne. Nominally a wing-half, two weeks earlier he had been moved
to centre-forward because of injuries and had netted 10 goals in a
12-0 thrashing of Bristol Rovers – a League individual scoring
record.
City captain George Mason shakes hands with Luton skipper George Fellowes at Kenilworth Road.
In front of a ground
record crowd of 23,559, Payne netted for the home side in the first
half but Bourton equalised 12 minutes from time to keep City top on
goal average. On the same day Aston Villa's relegation from Division
One was confirmed – their first since they had been founder members
of the Football League in 1888.
Two days later the
action moved to Highfield Road for a game re-arranged because of bad
weather in December. According to the Midland Daily Telegraph, City’s
officials anticipated a new record gate and manager Harry Storer
announced that an expert ‘packer’ had been employed to ‘ensure
that no standing space on the terrace and popular side will be
wasted’. The game kicked –off at 6.15, too late according to the
night-shift workers who would have to leave the match before the end
to ‘clock-on’ at 8pm, and the gates were opened at 5 pm.
A crowd of 42,809, over
11,000 more than the record set at an FA Cup tie against Sunderland
six years previously, crammed into the ground to watch a tense game
end 0-0.
The following day the
Midland Daily Telegraph under the headline “A Scene Of Chaos”,
described the aftermath: ‘Highfield Road looked this morning as
though it had been struck by a tornado last night. Cartloads of paper
and other rubbish was left behind by the record crowd ..…. while
the condition of the barriers smashed to match-wood on the Swan Lane
side, near to the corner of the old stand, provided ample evidence of
the crush.’
A rare
football-orientated editorial in the Midland Daily Telegraph summed
up one of the most memorable nights in the club’s history:
‘Coventry has never witnessed such a spectacle before – an
attendance nearly equal to a quarter of Coventry’s entire
population lined the ground, perched on the top of stands, clung to
advertising signs, fences and posts. Hundreds sat on the grass close
to the touchline; humanity was packed as close as it could be within
the capacious Highfield Road enclosure, and yet thousands who went to
see the match had perforce to remain outside.’
It was reported that a
large number of people ‘gate-crashed’ one of the entrances and
one Nuneaton ‘enthusiast’ sent a postal order for one shilling in
lieu of his admission. He admitted walking in through the broken gate
but evidently thought the game and the occasion was so worthwhile
that he paid his ‘honest-bob’ for it.
Amazingly no one was
hurt despite some madcap jinks by some spectators to get a better
view. On the top of the Spion Kop ‘rows of stones’ were erected
by supporters in order to get a better view of the action. The MDT
speculated that ‘many tons of packing from the back of the banks
must have been pulled up’ to form a makeshift grandstand. A major
disaster must have been narrowly averted. Spectators climbed
advertising hoardings, the old wooden scoreboard on the Kop and onto
the roof of the covered end as well as being forced from
uncomfortably packed terraces onto the perimeter of the pitch,
pre-dating the scenes 31 years later when 51,452 were shoe-horned in
for the famous Wolves game. The newspaper hypothesized that to enable
a capacity for 60,000 would ‘not entail much alteration to existing
conditions’.
The draw left City with
what looked like the easy task of beating Torquay in their final game
five days later to clinch promotion but they would be without captain
George Mason, injured in the first Luton game. Luton travelled to QPR
ready to pounce if Coventry slipped up. Another big crowd at
Highfield Road was expected for what promised to be a momentous game.
Congratulations to Adam
Armstrong for being selected for the PFA League One team of the
season. Since the PFA awards were instigated in 1974 only five City
players had previously been recognised in this way. Armstrong follows
Danny Thomas (1983), Kieron Westwood and Danny Fox (2009), Leon
Clarke (2013) and Callum Wilson (2014).
Finally, BBC CWR's
Clive Eakin has confirmed that Andy Rose was on the pitch for 35
seconds before he scored the winning goal against Bradford last week.
This is 12 seconds longer than the record set by Wayne Andrews at
Barnsley in 2006. His goal was also timed at 12 seconds from the
referee's whistle restarting play after the stoppage – this is
around four seconds longer than Kevin Drinkell's goal against Villa
in 1990, if the goal time is judged from the referee's restart of the
game.
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