THE MAGIC OF THE CUP: Featuring... the FA Cup Third Round 1978-79 - Sheffield Wednesday v Arsenal.

A little over eight miles to the north of Hillsborough, where the first match of an epic five game FA Cup Third Round tie between Sheffield Wednesday and Arsenal commenced on a snowy January afternoon, stands the town of Rotherham... the home of the Millers of Rotherham United, whose Millmoor ground was hemmed in between an adjacent scrapyard and a railway junction that stands just under the bridge from the now disused Masborough Station.

If the Gunners needed any advanced kind of warning that they would need to take their Third Division south Yorkshire hosts seriously in the FA Cup, then they were given a reality check right at the start of the 1978-79 season, when they crashed out of the League Cup at the hands of Rotherham, another third tier club.

The first ever FA Cup Final I actually attended, had been played just a few months earlier at the end of the 1977-78 campaign, when Ipswich Town beat Arsenal 1-0 at Wembley, courtesy of a Roger Osbourne goal in the seventy seventh minute. It was far from being a classic game by any stretch of the imagination, but the better side had won, to provide Bobby Robson with his first ever silverware as a manger. Prior to kick-off, the Millers fans taunted the visitors with the chant: "We love you Ipswich we do" and they responded with a cheerful refrain of: "Do you know where Wembley is!?"

The travelling Arsenal fans cheered Rotherham when they ran out onto the pitch, before realising that the Millers also wore red shirts with white sleeves. Everything had started well for Terry Neill's side, when Frank Stapleton gave them a fourth minute lead, but a rampant home team had overcome their deficit and were actually in front before half-time, with goals from Richard Finney and Dave Gwyther, while John Green added a third after the interval.

It was an impressive scalp for Rotherham, because top-flight teams didn't play under-strength teams in the League Cup in the Seventies and this was Arsenal's strongest available eleven who'd been put to the sword.

The League Cup humiliation, also proved to be Malcolm 'Supermac' Macdonald's last ever game, after the knee-injury he was recovering from was aggravated by poor tackle (AKA bad foul) during the game,

A couple of weeks prior to the trip to Millmoor, my dad had started renting some land that he was going to convert into an allotment, once it had been cleared. When the League Cup draw had been made, I'd looked at the logistics, for a friend and myself to make the relatively short journey to Rotherham under our own steam... but found that though it would be easy to get there, the train times for return leg of the journey would mean having to leave the game before half-time. Retford is well placed to get to anywhere in the country from, just don't expect to be able to get back home again.

Trains frequently whizz through the town on the East Coast Mainline, but very few of them ever stop there, particularly at night... and it's still that way to this very day too.

It was the during the school Summer holiday, so my dad, who actually hated football with a passion and strongly disapproved of me going to games, which of course, made my chosen pastime of travelling the country in pursuit of as many matches as possible seem even more appealing, came up with a solution; whereby, he'd take us to the game, if we got stuck in 'helping' with the land clearance project, while he was at work during the days leading up to the game. I swear, my back still twinges whenever I walk past that plot on Victoria Road en route to Retford Station, even now. But he was suitably impressed by our efforts and we were on our way.

Having parked up near the ground in a car-park that we were told would be locked up at 10PM sharp and any cars still left in there after then would be shut in overnight, we made our way to the ground. 

For reasons known only to himself, my dad got into a conversation with a police constable and introduced us as being people who weren't from Rotherham... what the effing hell did that have to do with anything? We weren't from north London either! But we were marched past the Millmoor pub and down the narrow lane that led to the away end, which was fairly sparsely populated, but did have a few coach loads of boisterous Arsenal boot-boy types inside. The overall attendance on the night was 10.481.

As the away fans were kicking the same gates and trying to get out, the very same policeman who'd put us in here was telling everyone: "Until you lot calm down, you're not getting out there and I'm in no rush to go home tonight... you can stay here all night for all I care!"

My dad was having none of it and told the officer that he had to get back to move his car by 10PM or it would be locked in the car-park under the bridge .

My dad had a full beard at the time and was fairly stocky too, hence was told by the unsympathetic law-enforcer: "You're not going anywhere Wolfman, so calm your  f*cking self down!". 

I looked on gobsmacked as the scene unfolded, 'Wolfman' didn't taken kindly to being called names while being locked in the ground against his will... and he was actually grappling with the policeman... and having muscled his way past him, was lifting the latch on the gate to open it, another policeman drew his truncheon, but my dad was on a mission by now and officer number two was soon out of the equation too. The young skinheads from London were loving it and a spontaneous chant: "Wolfman is our leader!" went up.

"Who is that crazy bastard with beard?" one of them was asking; he's my dad but keep it to yourself!

He shoved the two of us through the gap in the gate as the away fans spilled out and the locals who'd been shouting threats from outside. indicating they were trying to force the gate to get into the away end, were backed off as scuffles broke out all around us. We took a sharp left, kept our heads down and managed to get back to the car in one piece, only to find that the police were there too... but they weren't laying in wait to ambush the wolf guy, they were taking the details of the cars that had been damaged when somebody had launched tins of paint off of the rail bridge. 

We were lucky, some of the vehicles were covered in white gloss paint, but ours was untouched. 

It was a very subdued journey home, we figured that if my dad didn't want to talk, it was probably best practice for us to keep schtum too... but when he dropped my mate off, he called out "Thanks Wolfman!"... and then  legged it away into the safety of the night, cheers pal! It was my dad's first, last and only ever football match, but maybe he now understood that when the authorities treated football supporters like caged wild animals, then that is exactly why they'll respond in kind. 

Although to be fair, there were a fair few there on both sides of those gates who only went to football for the aggro. 

He finally spoke when we got home: "Not a word to your mum about what just happened... we could've avoided all of that crap if you hadn't decided to be a football fan!" And added: "I could've got arrested because of you!" Because of me!?

Hmm, I wasn't the one who'd just wrestled with one policeman, left another one on his backside with a knuckle sandwich and forced the gates open, causing a punch-up between opposition fans to break out. But I kind of knew that it would all end up being my fault, but I kept my gob shut. He was the hooligan gang leader (albeit, just for one day)... and I was merely a football fan and innocent bystander, who'd visited yet another ground and got a new programme to add to my collection. Innocent until proven otherwise m'lud. Besides, I wasn't about to argue with him, because that looked suspiciously like a full moon glinting through the clouds.

The season passed by, relatively trouble-free, apart from a couple of games where being fleet of foot probably stopped me from getting a good kicking. These were heady times if you didn't keep your wits about you... but that was part of the fun of it

Going incognito became my thing, because I'd long since noted that is was better to travel sans any football colours, because if the opposition fans didn't nick your scarf, then boozed up middle aged men who supported the same team(s) as you, certainly would, without a moments hesitation.

I'd set myself a target of watching a game in each round of the FA Cup this season, from the first through to the final. A lot of people pick a non-league game in the preliminary qualifying rounds to watch and then travel in turn to watch whichever team wins that particular game, in the next round and so on. 

But I figured that in theory you could end up seeing the same team playing at home in every round if they kept winning, thus you wouldn't be visiting very many grounds over the course of your quest. 

So I opted to pick a different team/ground in every round and see where it went. 

So far I'd watched: Barnsley 5 v Worksop Town 1 in the first round and Doncaster Rovers 0 v Shewsbury Town 3 in the second. I also saw my first ever Anglo-Scottish Cup tie in October, when a crowd of 5,287 watched Mansfield Town beat Partick Thistle on penalties in the quarter finals, following a 3-3 aggregate score.

For the record, the other 'Scottish' teams the Stags played in the competition were: Notts County, Norwich City, Leyton Orient and Burnley, the latter of who knocked the Stags out at the semi-final stage, via another shoot-out, at Turf Moor, following a 2-2 draw over the two legs.

So anyway, January arrived and we decided that although a whole load of fixtures were falling foul of the weather (it always seemed to snow a lot more back then), our FA Cup third round tie of choice was only being played thirty miles away and it wouldn't take long to get there by train and bus... and besides, even if the game was called off, Sheffield was a bit of a haven for record shops at the time, so it wouldn't be an entirely wasted trip.

A phone-call to to ground when we arrived in the 'Steel City' confirmed that the game was on, so we headed up t'Penistone Road on our latest escapade into the unknown.

 

For the record, this was an afternoon that only four FA Cup third round matches survived the big freeze, so we were lucky to get to a game in at all. By rule of thumb, if you were seeking out a football match that was likely to beat the blanket of snow that was covering the whole of country, then Sheffield probably wouldn't be at the top of your list. Terry Neill, the Arsenal manager wasn't best pleased that the game had passed a pitch inspection and after seeing the players slipping and sliding about on the bone hard surface, I reckon he might have had a point, but this third round cup tie was up and running... and it continued to run for a whole five hundred and forty minutes across the month of January, the same amount of time that it would take a team winning all of their games at the first time of asking to reach the actual final.

The scene was set thus: Wednesday were a struggling third tier side... and were perilously looking at a potential drop to the fourth division, until Jack Charlton took over as their manager in October 1978 and steadied a sinking ship as the Owls just about clawed their way up the table. They had seen off both Scunthorpe United and Tranmere Rovers after replays in the previous rounds of the FA Cup. While their recent league results had seen them lose away at both Swansea City and Colchester United, draw 0-0 at home against Lincoln City and Chester City, and their most recent result had been a 3-3 draw on Boxing Day at Chesterfield, such was the paucity of their usual level of opposition. Arsenal by comparison, had recently reached the third round of the UEFA Cup and had only lost once in their previous twelve games in Division One, which included a Liam Brady orchestrated five goal thrashing of Tottenham at White Hart Lane a couple of weeks before this initial third round showdown at Hillsborough.

Next time that you're team is winning and you're tempted to sing: "Can we play you every week!?", my advice would be, to be very careful what you wish for.