Matthews Brilliance Overshadowed Only FA Cup Final Hat Trick

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Matthews Brilliance Overshadowed Only FA Cup Final Hat Trick

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How Stanley Matthews' wing wizardry lifted a nation in austerity and eclipsed hat-trick hero Stan Mortensen


With Blackpool taking on Bolton Wanderers in the Championship on Saturday, their most famous meeting in the coronation year Cup final remains unforgettable

Stanley Matthews dominated coverage of the 1953 FA Cup Final overshadowing Stan Mortensen's hat-trick

By Jim White

“Get the ball to Stanley, he’ll win it for you.” Joe Smith, manager of Blackpool, at half-time during the FA Cup final, 2 May 1953.

Few footballers have been as cruelly served by epithet as Stan Mortensen.

In 1953 the Blackpool and England striker scored the only hat-trick ever recorded in an FA Cup final at Wembley. But it was not him to whom the Blackpool manager was referring. Nor in the roll-call of football heroes, is it his name that has been forever associated with Blackpool’s surging, nerve-jangling late win over Bolton.

Instead folk memory has subsequently insisted Mortensen was but a bit player in what has been known ever since as The Matthews Final.

Mind, Stanley Matthews was not bad that afternoon. His virtuosity on the right wing electrified the nation. And how the nation was in need of a bit of electrifying. Eight years on from the end of the war, rationing still held sway, austerity retained a deadening grip. At Wembley, however, in front of the new monarch, just a month away from her official coronation, here was a game that spoke of possibilities ahead, of the optimistic virtues of playing to the final whistle.

And Matthews was a man built to keep going. He embraced the kind of fitness regime which was anathema in a game in which, back then, the standard physical preparation involved a pint, a chip butty and 20 Capstan Full Strength. Even aged 38, as he was in 1953, Matthews was way fitter than his younger adversaries.

Yet for all his accomplishments – largely by dint of his most productive years coinciding with the war – Matthews had won nothing. He had been on the losing side in the 1948 and ’51 Cup finals. When his team arrived at what was to be the first final broadcast live on television, there was a sense across the country that finally his time was due.

In the first half, it did not look like fate was finally going to look kindly on the Wizard of the Wing. With little hint of the epic that lay ahead, Bolton were 2-1 up at half-time (Nat Lofthouse and Bobby Langton the scorers for Wanderers, Mortensen for Blackpool). Up till then, Matthews’s magic had been largely neutralised by insistent marking.

Even after Joe Smith had given his simple half-time instruction to get the ball to Stanley, for those hoping for a romantic conclusion, there was a further setback 10 minutes into the second half.

There was a degree of comedy about Bolton’s third goal which suggested providence was mocking Matthews. The Wanderers left-half Eric Bell had torn his hamstring soon after half-time. Before the days of substitutes, he was obliged to stay on the pitch, limping around doing not much more than trying to get in the way. Somehow, however, he found himself in the Blackpool area at precisely the right time to score what appeared to be the decisive third Bolton goal.

It was then, when everything seemed to be conspiring against him, that Matthews took things into his own hands. The wingman seized full advantage of the space afforded him by Bell’s incapacity. He tore down the now largely unoccupied right flank, pulling the Wanderers back line all over the pitch.

By now, every time he got the ball, the crowd hummed in expectation. Continually galloping to the byline, he swung over cross after delicious cross. With 22 minutes left, as if laser-guided, a Matthews cross landed perfectly on Mortensen’s forehead to bring Blackpool back into the game. Then, at 3-2, Matthews cut inside again only for the tormented Bolton defence to hack him down. Mortensen hammered the resulting free-kick into the net for the equaliser, completing his hat-trick.

As the end hove into view, there were 21 players on the Wembley pitch, their legs already drained, resigned to half an hour’s extra-time. Not Matthews, however. In the second minute of injury time, he hared to the byline and pulled back another exquisitely inviting cross.

For once it was not Mortensen’s forehead it found. Instead, the South African Bill Perry met the brilliant assist. The most unlikely of turnarounds was complete, victory was Blackpool’s.

The winning manager made it immediately clear whom he held responsible for victory. Smith dashed to embrace his Wizard at the final whistle. As they made their lap of honour, the Blackpool players too carried Matthews shoulder high. Mortensen was delighted to join them.

For evermore this was immortalised as the Matthews Final, the perfect sobriquet to sum up the happy amalgam of wish fulfilment and glorious achievement. Which meant the scorer of the only Cup final hat-trick was to find himself permanently in the shadows. As the journalist Matthew Engel wryly observed on Mortensen’s passing in May 1991, even in death he was not immune to being upstaged by his colleague. Wrote Engel of the ceremony: “They’ll probably call it the Matthews Funeral”.

This is an edited extract from A Matter of Life and Death: A History Of Football in 100 Quotations by Jim White, (Head of Zeus, £20)
The older I get the better I was.


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