FA Cup Run 1964/65 Complete Programmes

Those small sized programmes where in vogue from our relegation to the Fourth Division until we regained our Third Division status in time for the 66-67 season............about four seasons then?

I actually saw ALL those cup ties in 64-65, the First Round at Canterbury was quite novel as we ran out easy 6-0 winners with two goals apiece from Stubbs, Northcott and Cox, they played in the hated green and the stadium was a dog/speedway track in reality................and yes, the venerable Vic Groves DID play!

I'm struggling with the Colchester game, although I did see it; there's nothing I can recall about it. I'm more lucid of a later FA Cup tie with them when Plainmoor was snow bound.

The Tottenham games of course are legendary and whenever I sit down and fondly recall the absolute pinnacle of my Torquay United memories these will be the games that come out on top.

I well remember running around the school playground exitedly as the news spread like wild fire that WE had drawn Spurs and it was at HOME into the bargain as if it were yesterday! The great Spurs, the iconic Pass Masters packed with full internationals and the recent British Record transfer signing Alan Gilzean. Jimmy Greaves, Cliff Jones, Bill Brown, Alan Mullery and a pair of fullbacks who unknown to us would be significant in the future of Torquay United.............a young Cyril Knowles and Ron Henry who is the grand father of last week's opponent in a Stevenage shirt and the same name.

Queuing up and snaking around Plainmoor during that Western League game with Bideford with 8,000 others to get our hands on those precious tickets................I bought mine from that canteen counter at the top of the old Popular Side. Packing into the specially created "Boys Pen" in that piece of spare room between the bye line and the front of the Babbacombe End by the odd shape of the ground in those days. The surreal sight of over twenty thousand heads and faces packed into Plainmoor. the rumbustious explosion of pure joy and disbelief as we first went ahead before falling behind again only to equalise with two late, late Stubbs specials and the ground almost falling apart in the delirium and bedlam that followed.

The abortive train trip up to London that ended in heartbreak at Paddington with news over the public address system that the game was off, pitch waterlogged they said. What at Tottenham, super Spurs? We were incredulous and tearful. Angry and full of conspiracy theories about how they must have flooded it not wanting to face us with a weakened side on a heavy pitch. I remember the trip home for it's feeling of forlornness, actual physical pain that our big night out had been stolen from us. Walking out into the night at Newton Abbot station knowing full well that we should be packing into White Hart Lane at that very moment. I was sure I would never get the money or parental permission to go up the next week. Well I didn't get the permission and those pratts at school made all sorts of stupid threats about the dire consequences of bunking off again, but what did I care? Nothing was going to keep me from getting on that train again, and nothing did.

The trip to White Hart Lane in those days (no Victoria Line then) meant taking the overground from Broad Street to White Hart Lane Station and then walking into the High Road.............I had never seen such seas of humanity, police horses, traffic at a stand still, the smells of food - the cries of the vendors ~ "Peanuts, fresh roasted peanuts; who wants peanuts?" I remember getting ripped off and buying a fake programmer (they were the scam of the age then in London) consisting of a cover and nothing else and then having to seek the REAL DEAL ~ one of those crap Tottenham austere programmes of the day that were nothing to write home about. Spurs weren't at all commercially aware in those days what with their fusty old boardroom and offices in the "Red House" in Tottenham High Road and Bowler hatted club chairman and all that sort of image.

I remember the towering "Shelf Stand" with it's Golden Cockerel on high barely visible in the fug of cigarette smoke cut through with the blueish beams of the floodlights. The mud heap of a pitch and the fabulous welcome given to OUR lads as they ran out. Yes, London was genuinely delighted to welcome this little club and had turned out fifty eight thousand strong to welcome us..............not that the previous 13-2 hammering of little Crewe Alexandra in similar circumstances has anything to do with that

We went behind, Stubbsie equalised, Greaves hit a fabulous hatrick as Cliff Jones destroyed us and we got beaten 5-1...................so what? It was fabulous, it was the absolute dogs and 44 years later the hairs are standing up on the back of my neck again as I recall it.

Had I listened to my school and my parents, I would never have experienced that and my life would have been infinitely the poorer for it.

Adlington, Smith, Allen, Benson, Bettany, Wolstenholme, Atkinson, Cox, Stubbs, Northcott and Somers "twelfth man" Tolchard......................I'll be reciting that team in my dotage in some old people's home one day and they'll wonder what the hell I am on about ~ but I'll know, I most certainly will ~ 'cos I was there!

I can't match Merse's memories of the games against Spurs in 1965 but I can offer a few pages from The Soccer Syndrome by John Moynihan, first published in 1966. Amongst other things it recalls an era when the words "Spurs", "spivs" and "hangers on" often appeared in the same sentence:

Indeed hang your head in shame Devon boy!

I travelled up to the smoke for that game at newly relegated Orient who were in the midst of a revolution both on and off the pitch. They had reverted to their original "Clapton Orient" red and white from blue and white, they had dropped the pre-fix "Leyton" from their name. Their new match day programme was the same little size as those at Plainmoor we have been discussing and they were blooding some young guns from their youth production line.................produced on a training ground (Copper Mill Lane E17) from which you could see both the floodlights of White Hart Lane and those at Brisbane Road depending on which way you were facing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but featuring in the O's line up that after noon was a very young Barry Fry, and equally inexperienced John Still, another with a management future Tommy Taylor and Paul Went who went (forgive the pun) onto much greater and better things than turning out in an almost empty ground with a "crowd" of just 2,200 rattling around in it and the visiting Gulls running out 2-0 winners thanks to two Ronnie Barnes goals.

The day had begun auspiciously for me with a conducted tour of the marble halls and dressing rooms of Highbury from Dave Sexton who was an acquaintance of my very good friend John who had fallen in love with the Gulls as a result of those Tottenham cup ties, I well remember his father dropping us back to the supporters coach in Sussex Gardens W2 in his black cab after the match leading to all sorts of unfounded conjecture as to the "Merse Millions" before we departed The sights and sounds of London for a through the night travail back over Salisbury Plain and the rural delights of our little kingdom by the sea.................happy days!

Merse, you are absolutely right. the game was played on Monday 18th January and the original programme was used for the match. Attendance was 55,081; the largest we have ever appeared in front of.

My abiding memory of this game is Stubbs' equalising goal when he left Maurice Norman (then the current England centre-half) for dead before hammering the ball past Bill Brown. Greaves also missed a penalty. There was also a big bust up between United keeper Terry Adlington and our "psycho physio" Harry Topping who had to be separated by the referee.

That's such a good example of the Fairy Land these academics lived (and still) live in................totally devoid of any grasp of reality and cocooned in a false world where they are a big bullying fish in a small pool. Don't have to produce to ensure a living wage; and don't have to survive in the cut throat real world.

How on earth would a day off school sabotage an individual's education? How is it any different to the enforced days off for the bloody teacher's training, "man flu" or industrial disputes they instigate? It was OK to have half a day off for bloody speech day but to have a day off to go an epic occasion was of course an affront to their self importance, their total control over young minds.....................I hated that fake school is God atmosphere, as far as I was concerned I was there for my benefit not their's and if I wanted a day off I bloody well took it. I was equally as intelligent as them, had the same human rights and THEY were employed to be there for MY benefit, not vice versa.

W4nkers, the lot of'em!

great memories of that wonderful game in jan. 65 stewart. as you say the emotion of the time tends to erase some of the moments.
it wasnt stubbsy who rattled the crossbar in the final minutes, it was the old warhorse tommy northcott.