Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Over the years Manchester United have given Hull City little to celebrate. They have, after all, won 11 of the teams’ past 12 meetings stretching back more than four decades, in which time the only game Hull didn’t lose – a goalless draw in May 2015 – ended with them getting relegated. In all Hull have won only 16% of the teams’ 25 league matches and just once in knockout competition. As they prepare for Tuesday’s first leg of their EFL Cup semi-final, there is very little by way of historical encouragement. What little there is, however, is rather spectacular.
In January 1952, Hull were engaged in a battle against relegation from the Second Division while United were on their way to securing a first top-flight title in more than 40 years, and for whom their FA Cup third-round tie fell in the middle of a run of 10 wins in 16 undefeated league games. Meanwhile, between September and December, Hull had lost 10 of 12 matches, drawing the others, and if they were toiling on the field of play they were in chaos off it.
At the start of September their player-manager, Raich Carter, had sensationally resigned for reasons never made public, and after remaining for a while in a playing capacity was told to leave the club altogether. He opened a confectioner on Hull’s George Street and turned out for non-league Leconfield until, as fans demanded his recall, a truce was agreed a couple of months later. In his absence Hull sold their other star player, Don Revie, to Manchester City, and Carter was ushered back into a weakened team in December, taking his place at Old Trafford the following month.
Carter, a brilliant inside-forward who also played three first-class cricket matches for Derbyshire, had earned his place in English football history by then, as the only man to win the FA Cup both before and after the second world war. He also captained Sunderland to the league title in 1936, was their top scorer in four of seven seasons and won 14 England caps, though the war prevented him accumulating the honours and with them the lasting acclaim his ability deserved. “Carter’s football was a concept, an ideal, a fulfilment of ordinary men’s dreams,” David Miller wrote in the Times on the player’s 80th birthday, in 1993. “Few in the artistic field – and Carter made the game an art – created such an impression on so slim an international portfolio. A James Dean of football.”
Carter’s name would still merit inclusion on a list of England’s 20 greatest players, and as a manager he was not always popular – “He was a nice man but he loved himself” was the verdict of the great John Charles – but he still won promotions at Hull, Leeds and Mansfield. Greatness was rewarded differently then; by the mid-60s he had taken and lost a job in a branch of the Co-op in Hull, and was living off unemployment benefit.
At the time this game was played he was 39, and though he had lost some of his dynamism, somehow matches continued to revolve around him. “It was said of Whistler – probably by himself – that he mixes his paints with brains. That is what Carter does with his football,” read the Guardian’s match report. “Only so could a player hope to get through a gruelling cup-tie at strolling pace and yet leave his mark on the proceedings. Carter walked about the field, at first, with the cool demeanour yet watchful eye of a departmental manager in a multiple store: unobtrusive if things were going smoothly, on the spot if advice if advice or help were needed. One of these days, maybe, we may see him dispense with the formality of wearing shorts and take the field in tail coat and striped trousers.”
The report, written by Donny Davies under the byline of An Old International, must be one of the greatest pieces of sportswriting published by this newspaper. After his death in the Munich air disaster six years later Davies was described by Neville Cardus as “the first writer on soccer to rise above the immediate and quickly perishable levels of his theme and give us something to preserve in terms of character vivid imagery, and language racy of Lancashire county. He was not only the best of soccer reporters; he was also something of a poet.” Never was the description more apt than of this report. “To say that the Cup favourites met their Waterloo would be both trite and trivial,” he wrote. “Say rather that they met their Marathon, their Arbela, their Hastings, their Pultowa, their Blenheim, their Saratoga – their anything and everything you like up to the limit of the 15 decisive battles of the world.”
Sid Gerrie scored the first, Carter playing a key part in creating the goal, and after Jack Rowley had missed a chance to equalise for United from the penalty spot Ken Harrison headed in the second. United claimed that Roger Byrne would have reached Eddie Burbanks’ cross first had he not been shoved out of the way. “There was a distinct push,” concluded Davies, enigmatically, “but only sufficient to move an empty wagon on the railway.”
United had other chances but found Joe Robinson in fine form in the Hull goal. Robinson, who had let in four when his Blackpool side came up against United in the 1948 FA Cup final, was making his first appearance of the season in the absence of the injured Billy Bly (victim of 14 career fractures, who had played most of the teams’ previous Cup meeting, in 1949, with a broken nose, and who owned a confectioners of his own on Anlaby Road).
Sadly the result did not preface a thrilling upturn in Hull’s fortunes. They were knocked out by Blackburn, another mediocre Second Division side, in the fourth round, and avoided relegation only by winning their final three games (though after a succession of near-misses they went down four years later). Carter hung up his boots at the end of the season, inevitably scoring the winner in his final game, but was soon to don them once again as player-manager of Cork Athletic, where he won the FAI Cup in 1953 at the age of 40. After spells managing Leeds, Mansfield and Middlesbrough he returned to live in Hull until his death in 1994, sitting on the pools panel for many years despite a growing dissatisfaction with modern football. “The game today? Rubbish,” he said in 1990. “I’d sooner watch rugby league. Now there’s a game.”
Hull also won their next meeting with United 2-0, though they had to wait more than two decades for it, and since that day in November 1974 their encounters have brought nothing but woe. They approach their latest visit to Old Trafford with a recently appointed manager, in poor league form and embroiled in an ongoing relegation battle, which is not exactly an encouraging combination – though those old enough to remember Raich Carter and the team of 1952 know different.
