April 24th 2016. Leicester City v Swansea City. What a day.
There's never been an atmosphere quite like those closing minutes, with the chants spreading round all sides of the ground, '4-0 to the one man team!’ merging into ‘Barcelona – we're coming for you!'
That carnival mood had been set two hours earlier, with this wonderful Union FS tifo:
All the trophies we'd won are lined up there at the bottom, starting with the Second Division Shield in 1925.
This season marks the centenary of that first silverware, and I want to try something I’m not sure has been attempted before. I’d like to recreate that season ‘in real time’, following it game by game, exactly 100 years ago to the day.
Of Fossils and Foxes has an excellent summary of that season, but the full story needs to be told. If 2015/16 was our greatest ever season, 1924/25 is the second best. It marked the birth of Leicester’s first great side, our first trophy - and nearly so much more than that. If, as the tifo said, History really does Make Us Who We Are, these events are right at the heart of the club's identity.
I'm going to approach each part of the story from the perspective of a different character - and we start with a 13-year-old boy who was about to enjoy an extraordinary eight months.
Saturday August 30th 1924
Harold Lineker was awoken by the familiar sound of his father’s early morning departure. George was up and out of the house before sunrise, heading for the Wholesale Market in Yeoman Street, a short distance from their house in Northampton Street. There he would begin the daily routine of carting fruit and vegetables to the stall in the Market Place, 300 yards away.
Harold was approaching his fourteenth birthday. He’d sometimes help his father on the stall, but there were other demands on his time. He was crazy about football, and he played outside right for his school team, St. George’s.
It was a very small world, as you can see on the map below. The circles mark the stall, the wholesale market at the top, the school, next to the church from which it took its name, and his home just below that. A few years later, Charles Street, which you can see was then just a minor road, would blast through those buildings on Humberstone Gate and the character of the area would be changed forever.
There was no football pitch in the cramped centre of the city, of course, and when the school had a game, the boys had to drag the goalposts all the way to Welford Road Recreation Ground. Good practice, no doubt, for future years when Harold would be the one hauling the fruit and veg cart through the streets.
The season began, as ever, with new dreams.
He was hoping his performances for St.George’s would get him selected for the Leicester Boys team. If so, perhaps he could help them achieve something no Leicester team had managed before, and make it through the qualifying rounds of the English Schools Trophy.
Harold loved to watch football too, and when school fixtures allowed, he'd be at Filbert Street to follow his heroes in the blue of Leicester City.
Perhaps this season they would be promoted for the first time in his life. Maybe they could even lift a trophy - something they hadn't managed in the 40 years since the club was formed. It was time they had a run in the FA Cup too. They’d never got beyond the quarter-final stage.
In the season just ended, Arthur Chandler had scored 24 times in his first season with the club, though we managed only a mid-table finish. Manager Peter Hodge was about start his sixth season in charge.
These were the twenty two teams in Division Two:
Manchester United and The Wednesday, the only teams in the division who had won the League title, were favourites for promotion. Derby County and Chelsea were also strongly fancied. Not many mentioned Leicester.
Our season started with the toughest possible fixture - a trip to Old Trafford.
With regular full back Adam Black injured, this is how we lined up, in an orthodox 2-3-5 formation:
In the United team were Arthur Lochhead, future Leicester player and manager, and Sep Smith's older brother, Tom 'Tosser' Smith (his wikipedia page says he was called 'Tosher', but no - 'Tosser' is what his friends and teammates called him).
When the match kicked off, it was Lochhead who had the best early chance, his shot hitting 'the underpart of the bar', as the report put it. Then United got a dodgy penalty when Joe Spence 'fell over Johnny Duncan's feet'. The Leicester Evening Mail reporter, failing to hide his disgust, described it like this:
Spence fell with dramatic effect. He then limped to the side with the trainer's aid, as though he'd been seriously hurt. He remained inactive until the goal had been scored, then recovered.
In the second half, we laid siege to United's goal: In pace, craft and combinaiton, Leicester outplayed the home eleven. At least four times, shots flashed across the United goal with the defence utterly beaten (that's from the Athletic News, the paper based in Manchester).
We couldn't score though, and 1-0 was the final result. Everyone agreed that United had been lucky to win.
It's unclear how many Leicester fans were at Old Trafford - probably just a couple of hundred. At Filbert Street that afternoon it was a different matter. Almost 10,000 turned up to see the Reserves beat Peterborough and Fletton United. The local press thought it might be the highest ever gate for a second team match.
That gate needs a bit of explaining. For a brief period in the mid-20s our Reserves played in the Southern League Eastern Division, and our visitors that day were the reigning champions. We'd finished just a point behind in second place, so this game was the clash of the big two.
At Reserve games there was the added bonus of finding out how the first team got on as soon as the game finished. At 4.40, the bad news from Manchester was announced, and fans would have streamed out of the ground thinking 'It's the hope that kills you'.
Many would have headed for the centre of town, passing through the market, George Lineker picking up the news by word of mouth and hoping it wouldn't ruin Harold's weekend too much.
By 5.30, people would be snapping up copies of the Sports Paper, eagerly scanning the results:
Stand-out scorelines were the impressive away wins for newly promoted Portsmouth and Wolves, and Derby's ominous looking trouncing of Hull CIty.
Leicester had started with a defeat, but everyone who saw the game at Old Trafford could see the potential in the side. The directors, who had final say in team selection, had no doubts. They immediately decided to stick with the same XI for the next game. That was just two days away, on Monday evening, with Chelsea the first visitors to Filbert Street.
There's never been an atmosphere quite like those closing minutes, with the chants spreading round all sides of the ground, '4-0 to the one man team!’ merging into ‘Barcelona – we're coming for you!'
That carnival mood had been set two hours earlier, with this wonderful Union FS tifo:
All the trophies we'd won are lined up there at the bottom, starting with the Second Division Shield in 1925.
This season marks the centenary of that first silverware, and I want to try something I’m not sure has been attempted before. I’d like to recreate that season ‘in real time’, following it game by game, exactly 100 years ago to the day.
Of Fossils and Foxes has an excellent summary of that season, but the full story needs to be told. If 2015/16 was our greatest ever season, 1924/25 is the second best. It marked the birth of Leicester’s first great side, our first trophy - and nearly so much more than that. If, as the tifo said, History really does Make Us Who We Are, these events are right at the heart of the club's identity.
I'm going to approach each part of the story from the perspective of a different character - and we start with a 13-year-old boy who was about to enjoy an extraordinary eight months.
Saturday August 30th 1924
Harold Lineker was awoken by the familiar sound of his father’s early morning departure. George was up and out of the house before sunrise, heading for the Wholesale Market in Yeoman Street, a short distance from their house in Northampton Street. There he would begin the daily routine of carting fruit and vegetables to the stall in the Market Place, 300 yards away.
Harold was approaching his fourteenth birthday. He’d sometimes help his father on the stall, but there were other demands on his time. He was crazy about football, and he played outside right for his school team, St. George’s.
It was a very small world, as you can see on the map below. The circles mark the stall, the wholesale market at the top, the school, next to the church from which it took its name, and his home just below that. A few years later, Charles Street, which you can see was then just a minor road, would blast through those buildings on Humberstone Gate and the character of the area would be changed forever.
There was no football pitch in the cramped centre of the city, of course, and when the school had a game, the boys had to drag the goalposts all the way to Welford Road Recreation Ground. Good practice, no doubt, for future years when Harold would be the one hauling the fruit and veg cart through the streets.
The season began, as ever, with new dreams.
He was hoping his performances for St.George’s would get him selected for the Leicester Boys team. If so, perhaps he could help them achieve something no Leicester team had managed before, and make it through the qualifying rounds of the English Schools Trophy.
Harold loved to watch football too, and when school fixtures allowed, he'd be at Filbert Street to follow his heroes in the blue of Leicester City.
Perhaps this season they would be promoted for the first time in his life. Maybe they could even lift a trophy - something they hadn't managed in the 40 years since the club was formed. It was time they had a run in the FA Cup too. They’d never got beyond the quarter-final stage.
In the season just ended, Arthur Chandler had scored 24 times in his first season with the club, though we managed only a mid-table finish. Manager Peter Hodge was about start his sixth season in charge.
These were the twenty two teams in Division Two:
Manchester United and The Wednesday, the only teams in the division who had won the League title, were favourites for promotion. Derby County and Chelsea were also strongly fancied. Not many mentioned Leicester.
Our season started with the toughest possible fixture - a trip to Old Trafford.
With regular full back Adam Black injured, this is how we lined up, in an orthodox 2-3-5 formation:
In the United team were Arthur Lochhead, future Leicester player and manager, and Sep Smith's older brother, Tom 'Tosser' Smith (his wikipedia page says he was called 'Tosher', but no - 'Tosser' is what his friends and teammates called him).
When the match kicked off, it was Lochhead who had the best early chance, his shot hitting 'the underpart of the bar', as the report put it. Then United got a dodgy penalty when Joe Spence 'fell over Johnny Duncan's feet'. The Leicester Evening Mail reporter, failing to hide his disgust, described it like this:
Spence fell with dramatic effect. He then limped to the side with the trainer's aid, as though he'd been seriously hurt. He remained inactive until the goal had been scored, then recovered.
In the second half, we laid siege to United's goal: In pace, craft and combinaiton, Leicester outplayed the home eleven. At least four times, shots flashed across the United goal with the defence utterly beaten (that's from the Athletic News, the paper based in Manchester).
We couldn't score though, and 1-0 was the final result. Everyone agreed that United had been lucky to win.
It's unclear how many Leicester fans were at Old Trafford - probably just a couple of hundred. At Filbert Street that afternoon it was a different matter. Almost 10,000 turned up to see the Reserves beat Peterborough and Fletton United. The local press thought it might be the highest ever gate for a second team match.
That gate needs a bit of explaining. For a brief period in the mid-20s our Reserves played in the Southern League Eastern Division, and our visitors that day were the reigning champions. We'd finished just a point behind in second place, so this game was the clash of the big two.
At Reserve games there was the added bonus of finding out how the first team got on as soon as the game finished. At 4.40, the bad news from Manchester was announced, and fans would have streamed out of the ground thinking 'It's the hope that kills you'.
Many would have headed for the centre of town, passing through the market, George Lineker picking up the news by word of mouth and hoping it wouldn't ruin Harold's weekend too much.
By 5.30, people would be snapping up copies of the Sports Paper, eagerly scanning the results:
Stand-out scorelines were the impressive away wins for newly promoted Portsmouth and Wolves, and Derby's ominous looking trouncing of Hull CIty.
Leicester had started with a defeat, but everyone who saw the game at Old Trafford could see the potential in the side. The directors, who had final say in team selection, had no doubts. They immediately decided to stick with the same XI for the next game. That was just two days away, on Monday evening, with Chelsea the first visitors to Filbert Street.
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