“Which team had the first away following in football?” tweets @djgcfum.
Here’s Alasdair Brooks with quite an answer: “This is difficult, given the lack of verifiable records for the formative period of football, and the difficulty of deciding what constitutes ‘football’ (assuming that the question means ‘association football’) before the formal codification of a single set of rules, and deciding what constitutes an ‘away following’ in the 19th century.
“All those qualifiers aside, I’ll put in a vote for the original Wanderers FC (1859-87), winners of the first-ever FA Cup in 1872. Founded as ‘Forest Football Club’ in 1859, they changed their name to Wanderers in 1863. The were giants of the Victorian amateur era who won the FA Cup on five occasions in the 1870s (72, 73, 76, 77 and 78) and there are three reasons for nominating Wanderers:
“1) Their name reflects their lack of a fixed home ground; for much of their history they were a travelling team who accepted challenges to play at their opponents’ grounds (though they did sort of settle on the Oval as a semi-permanent home from 1869). So anyone who wanted to see Wanderers play in their ‘wandering’ period would have been forced to follow them playing away.
“2) In the era of the stiff-upper-lip amateur gentleman player, they drew their players from multiple public schools; one of the reasons for their rapid decline in the 1880s was the formation of multiple Old Boys teams, splintering Wanderers’ player base. So they would have drawn support from multiple public school old boys, regardless of where they were playing.
“3) They played in the first-ever international club match, losing 5-0 to Queen’s Park at Hampden in 1875. I can’t find figures proving there was any away support at this match, but it seems likely. The match drew a crowd of over 11,000 – the largest crowd at that point to have watched a match in Scotland – and the programme charmingly asked that attendees ‘please do not strain the ropes’. So if nothing else, it seems likely that they had the first international away following.”
All this, of course, depends how many constitutes a following. Does distance travelled matter as well? If we want to be specific, Andrew Wright has a suggestion: “If the criteria are eg a five-figure number travelling 100-plus miles, I’ll suggest the 15,000-plus with Manchester City at the 1904 FA Cup final, played at Crystal Palace in London. That year saw the first all-Lancashire final, City v Bolton. The newspapers said half the 61,374 crowd travelled from the north, with many sleeping on the platforms at St Pancras and Euston the night before the game.
“No doubt there were Bolton fans among them, but it’s probable they were the minority as Wanderers were a Division Two team at the time. Top-tier City had the advantage of an ally in the Great Central Railway, who put on the first ever supporters’ special trains, and advertised them with a poster showing the City hero of the time, and the slogan Billy Meredith secures the Cup. He wants you to see the match and travel in comfort …
“Serendipitously, City won 1-0 with a goal from Meredith. The National Football Museum used to have this poster on display; they even worked out that it correctly predicted which end of the ground Meredith would score.”
Rising star
“Sheffield United’s John Lundstram has now scored a league goal in each of England’s top four tiers,” writes Tom Ayres, “with 10 across the four divisions. Has anyone achieved this with fewer goals?”
Yes. Jimmy Willis bagged for Darlington – for whom he played between 1988 and 1991 – in Division Four, before signing for Leicester. He then went on loan to Bradford, scoring once for them in Division Three, returned to Leicester, and added goals in Divisions Two and One, the last of which was his ninth.
It’s also worth mentioning Steve Finnan, the first player to score in England’s top five divisions. He started in the Conference with Welling United, then skipped to what is now the Championship, netting for Birmingham, before filling in the lower-league gaps with Notts County and completing the feat with Liverpool. Since then, Gary Hooper has done likewise, opening his account in the various divisions with Grays Athletic, Southend, Hereford United and Norwich – and in between times, scoring for Celtic in the Scottish Premiership.
British and Irish Lions
“An excellent start to the season for Sheffield United,” begins Robert Farmey. “It’s worth looking at their starting XI lineups over the past two games which have contained only British and Irish nationalities. When was the last time this was achieved in the Premier League?”
You must be forgetting the existence of Sean Dyche, Robert. Only last season, on Boxing Day, Dyche picked the following Burnley side: Hart; Lowton, Tarkowski, Mee, Gibson, Taylor; Westwood, Cork, Hendrick; Vokes, Barnes. Of course, Ashley Barnes played an Under-20 game for Austria in 2008, but remains from Bath. The British-Irish connection didn’t help Burnley, they lost 5-1 at home to Everton.
And here’s Wouter van Dael on a slight tangent into Belgium: “When Jean-Marc Guillou (of 1978 World Cup fame) was hired as manager of KSK Beveren in 2001, he immediately took to importing players from the academy he had helped found, L’Académie de Sol Beni in Côte d’Ivoire. Although he was fired a year later, several coaches after him continued this tradition. This brings us to 16 September 2004, when Beveren fielded an all-Ivorian XI (including Emmanuel Eboué) in their Uefa Cup match against Levski Sofia. What’s more, all 11 players were from the city of Abidjan. It should be noted this only lasted until the seventh minute, when injured goalkeeper Boubacar Barry was replaced by German-born Mark Volders.
Knowledge archive
“There’s a buzz in the local blogosphere that an Indonesian coin was used by Jack Taylor, the Englishman who refereed the 1974 World Cup final between Holland and West Germany. Why? Why? Why?” pleaded Ujang Salemba back in August 2006.
Reader Anthony Knight was all over this one. “Jack Taylor used the coin for the game as it had been specially crafted by the Indonesian mint – only three were made, one of which was presented to Taylor for his services to football and it was very heavy.”
There’s even a picture of it on this website, if that floats your boat.
Can you help?
“Is it a stretch to say that this season five Premier League teams are managed by local lads? Steve Bruce, Frank Lampard, Roy Hodgson, Chris Wilder, Dean Smith. In this case let’s define local as in, say, born within the city limits or within 10 miles of the ground. Has this been beaten in the Premier League era?” asks Michael Darbyshire.
A player named Aboudourahamaneseïti Toure (no, I'm not making that up) debuted this season for Beziers in the National 1 (French 3rd tier).
— Yes, That's A Twitr (@yesthatsatwitr) August 20, 2019
Is he the professional footballer with the longest first name?
(Either by letters or by syllables, if that results in different answers.)
I read somewhere that Bradford City won 9 penalty shootouts in a row. Can any team boast a better record of consecutive penalty shootout wins?
— Thanos Michael (@thanos_sk) August 20, 2019
“This is probably going to be a pain to research,” admits Eric Bader, “but here goes: which player has made the most appearances for a club without ever winning a game?”
• Email your questions and answers to knowledge@theguardian.com or tweet @TheKnowledge_GU.
