From Glossop to Barnsley, via Northampton and Swindon, half a dozen solitary ventures into football's top flights
1) Glossop (1899-1900 First Division)
The Manchester City Project may be on the verge of realising a bountiful harvest, but this part of the world has already seen what a rich benefactor can achieve, many years before. Just over 10 miles east of Manchester lies the Derbyshire town of Glossop. The current population is around 30,000; back at the end of the 19th century, the figure stood at 20,000 or so. Not the ideal base for a top-flight football team, then. Ah but.
Step forward Samuel Hill-Wood, the Eton-educated son of a local mill owner, and county cricketer. Hill-Wood decided to plough large sums of money into his local team – Glossop North End – and with his Tory connections down south, pulled a few strings to get the club elected to the Second Division of the Football League in 1898. He did not hang about, enticing some of the best Scottish talent [note to surprised kids: ask your dad] to Derbyshire with mega wages and offers of jobs in his mill. (In a move predating the plot of hit John Inman sitcom Take A Letter Mr Jones by over 80 years, one player became his secretary.)
Glossop North End – thanks in the main to their delightfully nicknamed star defender James 'Punch' McEwan – won immediate promotion behind none other than local giants Manchester City. (For the record, they had ended the campaign three points ahead of Manchester United.) Rechristened for the top flight as Glossop – the North End dropped, it is rumoured, in deference to Preston, hugely admired by the Derbyshire club's founders – the new boys were not popular at first, considered a bunch of scruffs with ideas above their station.
But they soon won the country over with a recipe irresistible to English tastes: regular displays of abject uselessness, with the odd victory against all odds. Take the signature results of their season: a 9-0 defeat at champions Aston Villa in the second match of the campaign – and a 1-0 win in the return fixture in December. Some turnaround, especially as Villa were on the way to retaining their title. (That match, incidentally, was watched by a crowd of 6,000; no great shakes, until you realise it was pretty much a third of the town's population.)
Wild fluctuations, sadly, would be the pattern of Glossop's season. Despite that torrid 9-0 thrashing at Villa in their second game, Glossop actually won two of their first four, scraping into the top half of the nascent table. But they would only win another two matches all season. This despite the unearthing of some new talent: 'Graceful' Arthur Goddard, who later won the title with Liverpool; Herbert Burgess, who won the league with Manchester United and managed Roma to second place in the first-ever Serie A; and Herbert Birchenough, who ended up faffing around in nets for United, but was happiest in the train yard making steam engines.
Glossop ended the season rock bottom, never to return to the top flight, with Hill-Wood said to be vaguely embarrassed that his project very publicly failed to bear fruit. He scaled back his investment, and having become local MP in 1910, spent more and more time in London. Glossop finished bottom of the Second Division in 1914-15, and were not re-elected. Meanwhile after the war, a saucy scoundrel called Henry Norris helped Arsenal to bodyswerve their way into the top flight. Norris would eventually be turfed out of office by the FA in 1927 for financial shenanigans, allowing Hill-Wood to slip into his shoes; his time as chairman coincided with the club's golden era in the early 1930s under Herbert Chapman. Hill-Wood's grandson Peter is chairman to this day; meanwhile Glossop remains the smallest place in the country to have ever hosted a top-flight team. Not a bad legacy, all in all.
2) Leyton Orient (1962-63 First Division)
In the grand scheme of things, the big promotion news of the 1961-62 season was the return to the top flight after an eight-year absence of Liverpool. Dem a come, to borrow a phrase from Charles Shaar Murray's legendary review of Be Here Now by Oasis, fe mess up de area seeeeeerious.
But try telling that to supporters of Leyton Orient.
The second oldest club in London, Orient had never spent so much as a season in the top flight. Few expected them to go up in 1962, with Shankly's side and Sunderland – with star striker Brian Clough – expected to win promotion. But they had just hired Johnny Carey, freshly sacked in the back of a taxi by Everton, despite having reorganised a poor side and led them to fifth place in the league, laying the foundations for the team that was just about to bring the title to Goodison under Harry Catterick.
Carey quickly organised a team with a solid base – staunch defenders Malcolm Lucas, Sid Bishop and Cyril Lea – and a potent attack in David Dunmore, who scored 22 times that season. With a game to go, Orient needed to better Sunderland's result to grab the second promotion slot behind Liverpool. The Mackems could only draw at Swansea, while Malcolm Graham scored twice against Bury to seal the deal. After the match, director Leslie Grade, the famous theatre impresario, asked Graham to name his reward. The two-goal hero, caught in the moment, asked for nothing more than a glass of fizzy booze. Years later, he wistfully told Neilson Kaufman, Orient's club historian: "If I would have said Mr Grade, you can pay off my house bond, he would have joyfully done it."
Good old-fashioned honesty appears to have been the watchword. Orient enjoyed a fruitful September, with wins over West Ham, Manchester United and (happily for Carey) Everton, but after they rounded off a spectacular month with a win at Fulham – the team comfortable in 12th spot – the wheels came off. Orient would not pick up two points again until the middle of April, when they won at Bolton.
In February, Carey had been asked by the board if he would like to buy some new players. Knowing the jig was probably up anyway, he replied: "Gentlemen, don't waste your money." There would be one last bittersweet victory – at home to still upwardly mobile Liverpool – before they ended the season with a 3-1 loss at Old Trafford, a result which helped relegation haunted Manchester United stay up, Manchester City going down with the Os instead.
Orient have only come close to regaining top-flight status once, in 1974, when manager George Petchey's side ended their Second Division campaign a point behind promoted Carlisle United. All of which we'll be hearing more about after this brief interlude …
3) Northampton Town (1965-66 First Division)
Success eluded Dave Bowen as a player – albeit only just. He was captain of Arsenal in the late 1950s, but the club were going nowhere. He was captain of Wales at the 1958 World Cup, too, but despite some staunch displays his side were nudged out of the tournament at the quarter-final stage by Pele. And he played at Camp Nou in the second leg of the first-ever Fairs Cup final, but the London representative side he was part of were trounced 6-0 by Barcelona, the sour half of an 8-2 defeat.
So no medals. Bowen had no tangible success as a manager, either, upon taking over at Northampton Town in 1959, a Third Division championship in 1963 apart. But then some things are worth more than bits of silver. Bowen's Northampton went on one of the great journeys in league history – from the Fourth to the First and back again in nine seasons – which for a club the size of the Cobblers is as memorable a managerial achievement as you can get.
Bowen joined Fourth Division Northampton from Arsenal as player-coach, but soon took over as manager. Within three seasons he had taken the Cobblers to the Third; another two, and they were in the Second. After a season of consolidation, Town started quietly climbing the division with a series of one- and two-goal wins. Key players included Scottish left half Joe Kiernan, defender Theo Foley, and left winger Barry Lines – the only player to stay with Northampton for the entirety of their journey up and down the league. But the star of that promotion campaign was keeper Brian Harvey, who saved seven penalties, two in the same game against Terry Paine, England's spot-kick specialist of the time.
Northampton's single season in the First Division appeared doomed from the off, if you're a sucker for simple superstitions: it took them 13 games to register their first win. Even so, that came against West Ham United, who had just won the Cup Winners' Cup, and by the end of the season would lift the Jules Rimet Trophy. Not a bad scalp. Equally enjoyable were the two wins over local behemoth Aston Villa.
Poor Bowen didn't have any money to upgrade his squad, though. "You can take the club out of the Third Division, but you can't take the Third Division out of the club," quipped one national paper that season. Northampton's careful ways embarrassed the players on more than one occasion. The club preferred to travel to away games on the morning of the match, therefore saving money on hotels. Twice the team were running late and caught short, once forced to change into their kit on the train, another time in their goldfish bowl of a coach while sat in a traffic jam.
Northampton were in the thick of the relegation scrap all season, though with three games to go – and nine wins under their belts – they sat two points above the bottom two. Below them, Fulham, who had already been beaten 4-2 at Craven Cottage in a match which saw Rodney Marsh end up in goal. This time, in front of a record crowd of nearly 25,000 at the County Ground, there would be no such luck for the Cobblers. At 2-1 up, a perfectly good goal was hooked from the Fulham net, and disallowed: the linesman had fallen over, while referee Jack Taylor (later to take charge of the 1974 World Cup final) was hanging around in the centre circle and decided he couldn't award the goal in all certainty. Fulham went on to win 4-2, leapfrogging Town and staying up.
It was the end of the dream. Northampton went straight down to the Third, Bowen forced to sell to save money. Bowen left, to be replaced by Tony Marchi, who in turn made way for Ron Flowers, the man who took Town back to the Fourth.
4) Carlisle United (1974-75 First Division)
So, then, George Petchey's Leyton Orient. What a balls they made of their promotion bid in 1974. Clear in second place at the start of February, they were trounced 3-0 by Carlisle United, at which point the touching of cloth became disturbingly audible. As mentioned previously, Orient ended the season in fourth place, one point behind the Cumbrian side, who under that season's new rules became the first-ever club to be rewarded with promotion for finishing third. Orient would have pipped Carlisle had they beaten Aston Villa at Brisbane Road on the last day, but Petchey's side could only draw. Ah well, a second season in the big time would have been scarcely deserved; they'd won only two of their last 15 games.
So to Carlisle, who had put together a run of four wins in their last five matches to snatch promotion. (Here, at the celebration shindig, is a hot-and-horny John Gorman. Children, click at your peril.) Little was expected of Alan Ashman's side – "Carlisle's staff of 18 players may be too thin to survive," opined the Guardian on the opening day of the season – but a shock was in store. Not only did United take all 18 members of their playing staff down to London for their first match at Chelsea, they also brought everyone else in their employ, from ticket sales to tea lady, three train carriages' worth.
This motley crew were rewarded within two minutes of their First Division debut, Bill Green scoring the opener, Les O'Neill sealing victory later on with a cross that confused Peter Bonetti. O'Neill scored two more goals in Carlisle's second outing, a win at Middlesbrough, also newly promoted. The fairytale was complete after the third game, a 1-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur, Chris Balderstone – who also played county cricket for Leicestershire – scoring a winning penalty that sent Carlisle top. Top!
But the only way is down. Carlisle won another nine matches, but that wasn't enough to stop them finishing rock bottom, four points adrift of opening-day fall guys Chelsea. Still, those wins made a difference: they included a double over Billy Bingham's Everton, which effectively cost the Merseysiders who finished only three points behind eventual champions Derby County, the title.
5) Swindon Town (1993-94 Premier League)
Swindon should, of course, have spent at least two seasons in the top flight of English football. In 1990, Ossie Ardiles' pretty side won promotion from the second tier with a win over Sunderland in the play-off final, only to be kept down as a result of financial chicanery in the boardroom. But three years later, with a new board in place, and a new manager in Glenn Hoddle, Swindon sashayed through the play-offs again, winning a tumultuous final against Leicester City 4-3, the boss himself scoring the opening goal.
Hoddle, however, left for Chelsea in the close season. His assistant manager, sassy John Gorman, took charge. And oversaw one of the most disastrous starts to a top-flight season in many a year. As well as being the boss, Hoddle had been Swindon's most accomplished player. In addition to his departure, the club's best defender, Colin Calderwood, had also left, for Spurs. Incoming striker Jan-Aage Fjortoft would prove to be a canny buy, but the Norwegian's quality alone would not be enough.
Swindon lost their opening game at Sheffield United, then another at home to Oldham. Events quickly spiralled out of control: the third game was a 5-0 County Ground spanking at the hands of Graeme Souness's Liverpool – Graeme Souness's Liverpool – while the fourth was a 5-1 shellacking at Southampton. Swindon would not pick up three points until the tail end of November, a 1-0 win over QPR.
The season became a sequence of awful skelpings: 0-4 v Arsenal, 2-6 v Everton, 0-5 v Aston Villa, 1-7 v Newcastle. Arguably their only truly memorable result of the season was a 2-2 home draw against eventual double winners Manchester United, but even then that brave scoreline is chiefly remembered for Eric Cantona's preposterous Gene Kelly tribute act along the breastplate of John Moncur.
There was no drama in this relegation, apart from a small sugar rush of shame: in the final game of the season, at home to Leeds, Swindon had to avoid conceding five goals in order to keep their season's goals-against tally in two figures. With a bitter flourish, Chris Fairclough scored Leeds' final goal of a 5-0 win in the very last minute.
It would be interesting to see how Paolo Di Canio would cope with a season like that.
6) Barnsley (1997-98 Premiership)
Anyone after a trite parable about the insidious effects of watching modern top-flight football? Oh look! Here's one!
In the second week of the season, Danny Wilson's popular underdogs – "none but the churlish could fail to wish Wilson and his side well", ran the Guardian eve-of-season prediction which saw the Tykes placed 19th out of 20 – hosted Ruud Gullit's Chelsea. The visitors eviscerated their hosts 6-0, Gianluca Vialli scoring four. "We're gonna win seven six!" crooned the Oakwell faithful, unleashing a new classic for the times on a highly impressed nation. Self-awareness? In the Premiership? Wow.
But despite an eyebrow-raising victory at Roy Evans's Liverpool, who had serious title pretentions – the Guardian's tip for the title, folks – and a majestic FA Cup run which included victories over Tottenham and Manchester United, Barnsley's league form never got going. And the pressure told on their fans. By the end of March, with relegation looming, the aforementioned hapless Liverpool came to Oakwell. Somehow they won 3-2. Oh alright: assisted by three dubious red cards awarded to Barnsley players, they won 3-2.
Ludicrous decisions all, but that didn't excuse fans pelting on to the pitch with the hope of clacking referee Gary Willard upside the head. (Willard was required to cower in his dressing room for the best part of two hours after the game, before a police getaway car could be arranged.) Or the ludicrous conspiracy theories. Self-awareness? In the Premiership? No.
Barnsley finished 19th, by the way. We don't get everything wrong.
• Many thanks for their invaluable help to Tom Sutcliffe, Neilson Kaufman and Frank Grande, the club historians at Glossop North End, Leyton Orient, and Northampton Town.
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
