English Leagues the 70s: Chelsea Stoke City League Cup Final 1971 1972

Final
4 March 1972
Wembley Stadium,
London
Attendance: 97,852 
Referee: N. Burtenshaw 

   Stoke City, the second oldest club in the Football League (they were founded in 1863), at last walked off with a major soccer trophy for the first time in their 109-year history when they beat Chelsea in the 1972 League Cup Final at Wembley. Their only other Cup Final appearance was in the 1964 League Cup contest when they were beaten by Leicester City. Ironically Chelsea, their 1972 opponents, also did battle with Leicester City in the 1965 Final and their eventual win brought the League Cup to Chelsea for the first time.

Stoke City, under the expert managership of Tony Waddington, have proved themselves a great Cup-fighting force. They are an attractive soccer unit with skill and the determination to match. This determination to win was never more evident than in the 1971-72 League Cup and F.A. Cup competitions. Their road to the League Cup Final involved them in eleven matches. Four of these were against West Ham in the Semi-Final, and three games against Manchester United in the fourth round. Their duel with West Ham was truly a classic affair which began with a home defeat for Stoke in the first match by a goal to nil but in the return at West Ham they won by the single goal. There followed a replay which ended in a 0-0 draw but in the fourth meeting West Ham succumbed to Stoke by three goals to two. Over 170,000 people watched these four great games. Stake's three-match clash with Manchester United, resulting in two draws—1-1 (at Manchester), 0-0 (at Stoke)-with a 2-1 victory for Stoke in the second replay, was watched by over 130,000 fans. Stoke's other victims on the way to Wembley were Southport (second round), Oxford United (after a replay in the third round) and Bristol Rovers (fifth round).

Chelsea's route to the Final involved them in eight games. Plymouth were their first victims, then came Notts Forest (after a replay in the third round), Bolton (after a replay in the fourth round), Norwich (fifth round) and the two-match Semi Final against Spurs whom they beat on a 5-4 aggregate.  The Final itself began in a sensational way. The game was just four-and-a-half minutes old when Stoke struck the first blow. A throw-in by Peter Dobing led to a goalmouth scramble and shots by Terry Conroy and Denis Smith were blocked, but Conroy got his head to the ball to put it into the Chelsea net. A great start for Stoke City. Just when it looked as though Stoke would go into the dressing-room a goal up at half-time Chelsea came back into the match with a Peter Osgood goal a few moments before the whistle. Chelsea had created many chances for a goal but their forwards lacked the ability to press home their goal chances and the tough, resolute Stoke defenders stood firm. Then came the Osgood goal scored at the perfect psychological moment before Stoke could hit back. Would Chelsea now take the initiative in the forty-five minutes remaining? The second-half began with Chelsea on top, and with Alan Hudson and Chris Garland in great form. But the goals would not come for Chelsea. In the seventy-fourth minute, George Eastham, that skilful veteran of the Stoke side, settled the issue with an historic goal and his first in two seasons. Eastham, 35, was playing in his first Wembley Cup Final, and not even he in his wildest dreams could have dreamed it was to be his goal that was to win Stoke their first major Cup.

The goal move that took the Cup to the Potteries started out of defence. Peter Dobing relieved Chelsea pressure on his defence by starting a quick Stoke offensive with a long sweep of the ball to Terry Conroy. Conroy then found John Ritchie unmarked by the far post with a precision cross. Ritchie headed the ball down across the face of the goal to the waiting Jimmy Greenhoff who shot hard and low. The hall hit 'keeper'Peter Bonetti then bounced up. Dobing and Eastham rushed in, Eastham shouting to Dobing, 'leave it', and then coolly crashed it home for the winner. It must have been an emotional moment for the fair-haired George, born in Blackpool. His soccer career has been a topsy-turvy one. It began in Northern Ireland. In 1956, he signed for Newcastle. In 1960 he moved to Arsenal amid great controversy. In 1963 he got his first England cap against Brazil at Wembley and George was to play an important role in a new style England team introduced by Alt Ramsey. But George was eventually to lose his England spot to Martin Peters for the World Cup which England went on to win with a victory against West Germany at Wembley. 

 Eastham's playing days with Arsenal were also to come to an end. He was transferred to Stoke for £30,000, where this exciting schemer was to become part of manager Tony Waddington's plan to re-build a side which had much talent at its disposal. With the skills of Jimmy Greenhoff, bought from Leeds, John Ritchie and Peter Dobing, Stoke had attacking power which almost got them into the 1971 Cup Final. In the Semi-Final they were leading Arsenal 2-1 but Gordon Banks gave away a penalty in injury time from which Arsenal equalised, and Arsenal went on to win the replay, the Cup and the Double. Ironically Stoke again fell victims to Arsenal in the Semi-Final of the F.A. Cup in 1972. In the close season of 1971 Eastham went to South Africa but came back to Stoke City. His individual skill and highly intelligent reading of the game have played a major part in Stoke's success story. George Eastham must have been the proudest and happiest man of them all in that huge 100,000 crowd at Wembley on March 4, 1972 . . . the day when Stoke City, at last, won a major soccer trophy. But they can also thank their brilliant skilful 'keeper Gordon Banks for keeping Chelsea at bay, particularly in the dying moments when he brought off two miraculous saves from Peter Osgood, and Chris Garland, who pounced on an agonising back pass from Mike Bernard only to be deprived of a certain goal by the split-second timing of Banks who came out of his goal to smother the ball at Garland's feet.

STOKE CITY - Banks; Marsh, Pejic, Bernard, Smith, Bloor, Conroy, Greenhoff, Ritchie, Dobing, Eastham (Substitute: Mahoney).
CHELSEA - Bonetti; Mulligan, Harris, Hollins, Dempsey, Webb, Cooke, Garland, Osgood, Hudson, Houseman (Substitute: Baldwin).

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The English Leagues in Reviews : The Seventies, Season 1978 1979 Special

   At Forest Brian Clough's side included ex-Derby players John McCovern, John O'Hare and Archie Gemmill,together with former Liverpool stopper Larry Lloyd. Clough added Kenny Burns, turning the former Birmingham City bad boy into the Footballer of the Year. There was also Viv Anderson, a young attacking full-back who became England's first black player when he took the field against Czechoslovakia on 29 November 1978. But the key acquisition was probably Peter Shilton, bought from Stoke for £270,000, the highest amount ever paid for a goalkeeper. Forest lost just three games all season, conceding only 24 league goals, and took the title with four games to spare. Clough followed in the illustrious footsteps of Herbert Chapman in taking two clubs to the championship. Forest also got the better of Liverpool in the 1978 League Cup Final, a John Robertson penalty settling the issue at Old Trafford after a goalless draw at Wembley.  Having been pipped for domestic honours twice, Liverpool made sure they didn't finish the season empty-handed by retaining their European crown. FC Bruges were their Wembley opponents. 

The Belgians set their stall out defensively, inviting Liverpool to try and break them down. The Reds managed to do so just once, Dalglish chipping the keeper delightfully for his 3oth goal of the season. Between 19 November 1977 and 9 December 1978 Forest were unbeaten in the league. Their only defeat in any competition was an FA Cup quarter-final tie with West Bromwich Albion, who won 2-0. Having beaten the country's form team, West Brom went down to Ipswich in the semis, and it was the East Anglian club who were the surprise winners of the trophy. That game will be remembered for the Roger Osborne goal which beat favourites Arsenal in the final. Osborne was so overwrought with the occasion that he was substituted, apparently through sheer nervous exhaustion. His goal took the Cup to Portman Road for the only time in the club's history.

Televised Football has come a long way since the first experiment in 1937 when the Daily Herald predicted that a time would soon come when we would regularly watch football by the comfort of our firesides. After the early success of that first transmission from Highbury, the annual televised match for those wealthy enough to own TV sets was the Cup Final. Yet it was not until 1953, when the Coronation sparked off the mass purchase of cheap sets, that football really arrived in the average living room. And the Stanley Matthews Final of that year was tlje first sporting event to be seen in millions of homes. But for the remainder of the 1950s, televised football was generally restricted to internationals, Cup finals and the odd friendly. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that league soccer found its way onto the small screen, when a live fixture between Blackpool and Bolton was shown on the Saturday evening of September 10th 1960. But the game was a grave disappointment, and plans for regular live televised Saturday football were quickly dropped. Four years later, on Saturday August 22nd 1964, the BBC introduced edited football with highlights of the afternoon's clash between Liverpool and Arsenal shown that evening under the title 'Match of the Day'. 

 Only 75,000 watched that first programme, transmitted on BBC 2, but once the series had been transferred to BBC 1, it soon became one of the nation's favourites with Saturday night crowds returning home early from pubs, dance halls, and cinemas for their weekly diet of David Coleman and Jimmy Hill. Appropriately enough, Anfield was also the venue for the first colour transmission of football when BBC cameras captured the action between Liverpool and West Ham for 'Match of the Day' on Saturday November 15th 1969. Independent television's inaugural broadcast from a soccer ground came in January 1956, when the third round Cup replay between Bedford Town and Arsenal was transmitted in some regions, but ITV generally lagged behind the BBC whose years of experience had given them a near monopoly of sports coverage. It was not until 1978 that ITV really made its mark when it signed a lucrative contract with the Football League to guarantee edited soccer on the channel every Saturday evening beginning in August 1980, instead of in their traditional Sunday afternoon slot. The contract, stolen from under the noses of the BBC, was negotiated by Michael Grade of London Weekend Television and was said to be worth more than £9 million over three seasons. BBC chiefs who had automatically assumed that the League would again sign a deal with them were furious.

Football remained surprisingly untroubled by drug scandals. Only a handful of cases have ever come to light, thanks usually to the tabloid press. In the mid-1960s Albert Dun-lop, the Everton goalkeeper, claimed in the People that he had taken drugs and that on one occasion he was so totally confused towards the end of a match because of the number of stimulants he had swallowed that he had to be stretchered off the field. He also claimed that he was not the only Everton player involved in drugtaking, but after an internal investigation no action was taken by the Football League, either against the club or Dunlop. Perhaps the most famous case was that of Willie Johnston, the former Glasgow Rangers and West Brom-wich Albion winger who was sent home from the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina after failing a drugs test. Johnston always maintained his innocence but the Scottish FA had been severely embarrassed before a watching world and Johnston who had played just one game in Argentina never played again in the blue shirt of Scotland. Just a few months after the John ston affair, Stan Bowles, the 28-year-old Queen's Park Rangers' striker went public in the Daily Star, claiming that he had taken drugs. He told the newspaper that he had tried amphetamines and valium and added that in his opinion some drugs should be legalised. 

 Bowles however was a controversial character, well known for his gambling and drinking and the Football League did not appear to take his allegations too seriously. The following day Charlie George, the former Arsenal favourite, revealed that drug taking among footballers in America where he had played was widespread. But again with players either retired or with no specific or provable allegations it was impossible for the League to take much action. Bowles almost certainly touched on a scandal that went much deeper and it remains surprising that, even to this day, the press has continued to ignore investigations into an area which could offer some rich journalistic pickings.

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