Those Were The Games
Gillingham’s Biggest Cup Win
Published by Eccles on November 6, 2009
Gillingham v Gorleston – November 16th 1957
On only five occasions in their history have the Gills entered the FA Cup at the “big boys” stage, as one of the final 44 clubs. Otherwise it’s been entry at the First Round stage (or in our early days one of the Qualifying Round stages) to face two or more rounds of cut-throat battle before emerging as one of the twenty clubs to join the “big boys” in the round of the final 64, played in the New Year.
Banana skins abound in this cut-throat world as clubs from the lower leagues are forced to take on ambitious non-league outfits, and there can few Football League clubs who do not bear scars across their backs from lashings they have taken at non-league hands. For Gillingham, by 1957 the names of Blyth Spartans, Margate, and Walthamstow Avenue were burnt into memory, and since that time the names of Folkestone, Maidstone, Welling and Burscough have been added. Would “Gorleston” join the role of shame?
Gorleston. Who were they? No-one was quite sure when that pairing came out of the hat, but a careful examination of AA books revealed that Gorleston was a suburb of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. They were going well in the Eastern Counties League and had battled through from the Second Qualifying Round, winning a fierce local derby against Great Yarmouth Town 3-2 along the way.
Inevitably the talk about banana-skins gathered pace. Seeing as Gills were within a minute of losing to Yiewsley in the First Round the previous season (1956/57) no-one was that confident. Certainly The Gorleston Gazette was upbeat. “Gorleston have quite a good defence and their forwards, if not up to the defence, are liable to do the unexpected with that quick breakthrough. We think Gorleston will give Gillingham a run, and the League side can’t afford to give them too much encouragement”.
But the Norfolk side suffered a blow when both their goalkeepers were unavailable through injury. They called up sixteen year old Stanley Evans to man the fort, and despite the fate that befell him, Evans earned rave reviews from all sides. Said the Gorleston Gazette “Evans was anything but easy to beat and earned the tributes of both players and spectators alike.”
The Gills side that faced him that day, in front of a Priestfield crowd of 8,123, was:-
(Traditional 2-3-5) Chic Brodie; Bill Parry, Jack Hannaway; Les Riggs, Jimmy Boswell (Capt), Davie Laing; Brian Payne, Jimmy Fletcher, Ron Saunders, Wendall Morgan, Ron Clark.
After fifteen minutes of cat and mouse football, the first chance presented itself, and Gills’ captain Jimmy Boswell needed a full-blooded sliding tackle to stop Gorleston’s centre-forward Simpson from bursting through on goal. That woke the Gills up, and they quickly roared up to the Gillingham End and scored two in a minute – the old one-two by Saunders and Fletcher. Gills were now up for it, and it looked like they’d sealed a comfortable win when Ron Saunders scored again after 39 minutes to make it 3-0 at half-time. Ron should have had a hat-trick by then too, but he’d blasted a penalty wide after Wendall Morgan had been brought down.
In the second half the Gills ran riot. No-one was really prepared for what came next as Gorleston were totally swamped by a twenty minute barrage. They had no answer to the brilliant build-up play of Wendall Morgan, who had one of his best games for Gillingham, or Les Riggs’ lethal throw-ins which he effortlessly launched from the touchline deep into the goalmouth. And if that wasn’t enough to cope with there was Ron Saunders at his unstoppable best. Ron made it 4-0 after 52 minutes when he completed his hat-trick, and then left-winger Ron Clark made it 5-0 after 55 minutes. Wendall Morgan finished off a mazy run with a shot after 70 minutes to get the goal that he throughly deserved.
At 6-0 Gills now looked to be easing down, and Gorleston put together some attacks of their own. But the visitors pushed their luck a bit by scoring. It came after 77 minutes, and was a neat move through the home defence for Sells to sidefoot past Brodie. It bought one of the biggest cheers of the afternoon, but it must have riled Saunders and Co, as in the last ten minutes they smashed in another four. Ron Clark (80) made it 7-1, a couple of solo efforts from Ron Saunders (82 and 85) brought his personal tally to five, and Jimmy Fletcher (88) brought the final score to 10-1. And it could have been more. Sixteen year old Stanley Evans pulled off some incredible saves along the way, and kept his very best ones for right winger Brian Payne, the only Gills forward not to score. It is not often that a keeper who has let in ten gets a standing ovation as he leaves the field at the end, but it happened on this occasion.
8,000 deliriously happy Gills fans weren’t quite sure where that performance had come from. Gills only scored 33 goals at Priestfield that season in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the cut and started 1958/59 in the new Fourth Division, so ten in one match was something special. It still ranks as Gills best ever win in the FA Cup.
And how many managers get the chop after their team wins 10-1? Long-serving Archie Clark did. A week later his 18 year reign was brought to an end when he was introduced to new manager Harry Barratt – on the train going to Shrewsbury! It was a controversial decision. The directors felt that Archie, a traditional “trilby hat” manager, had run out of steam and a new approach from a new “track-suit” manager was needed. But they didn’t do it cleanly and pay Archie off, they moved him upstairs to a sort of Administration Manager job. No-one knew what the job entailed – including Archie. In the summer of 1958 he was made redundant from it as part of a cost saving exercise. The Board did have some conscience at that point and gave him six months pay (other long-serving stalwarts made redundant at the same time got just one week’s pay) but it was a shabby way to treat the man who had built the team that got us back into the League in 1950.
New team manager Harry Barratt meanwhile was unbelievable. These days he would be regarded as one of football’s great characters, but back then most people thought he had a screw loose. Recruited from managing Kent League side Snowdown Colliery, his rants about playing coal miners and six foot Texans became legendary, as did some of his off-the-wall training routines and team talks. But initially it looked as though he might have the Midas touch.
In the Second Round of the FA Cup Gills faced a tough tie at The Den. Millwall went ahead when they scored after a scandalous foul on goalkeeper Chic Brodie, but Jimmy Fletcher equalised and then in the Wednesday afternoon replay Gills went goal crazy again and thrashed the Lions 6-1. Our best ever win over them, but sadly for every Gillingham schoolboy, heard and not seen. No floodlights in those days, so the match kicked off on Wednesday afternoon at 2.00pm – and no-one dared to bunk off school to go along. Doing Latin declentions and algebra while the sounds of 8,500 Gills fans going progressively Cup crazy drift through the window is no joke.
The Gills had reached the Third Round of the Cup for the first time since 1948 (see Part 19), and with a goal difference of 17-3 were tipped by many to cause an upset when they visited First Division Nottingham Forest. Barratt wasn’t convinced, and in an utterance that showed some kind of weird reverse psychology declared that if the team won he would jump in the Trent after the game. Would he really? Probably, but we never found out. Forest were building the side that won the Cup the following season, and although Gills gave it their best, they were comfortably beaten 2-0 with two first-half goals.
An FA Cup campaign that had started with our biggest ever win had finished in a whimper.
Eccles
Those Were The Games
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