There will be one game of top-flight football in England this Easter Monday. Arsenal’s match at Middlesbrough will be just the 10th played in the Premier League on the last day of the long Easter weekend in the last 10 years, a period in which one of the most dramatic and historic dates in the fixture calendar has gradually and silently been phased out. In the decade before that there were 56 Easter Monday games among the English elite; between 1988 and 1997 there were 79.
As on the Monday, so across the entire weekend. What used to be the season’s highpoint is now another footstep in its sprint to a conclusion. There will be the standard 10 Premier League games this weekend; a decade ago there were 16, with 12 top-flight teams playing twice across the four days. Skipping back 10 years at a time, in 1987 and 1977 (all top-flight Easter games in 1997 having been cancelled to allow England to play a friendly against Mexico) there were 21, in 1967 there were 24, and in 1957 there were 31. In that last year every top-flight team squeezed three fixtures into four days, with the final two games delayed until the Tuesday to allow Birmingham, West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa to bring the West Midlands to a standstill.
This, it must be admitted, is a little more football than is ideal. The result was knackered players producing occasionally wild results: perhaps most famously of all, it was on Easter Monday in 1936 that Luton Town introduced Joe Payne into their team to play Bristol Rovers. Having played in neither of their previous games that weekend, Payne was feeling particularly sprightly in comparison to both team-mates and opponents, and proved as much by scoring 10 times in a 12-0 win.
Three days earlier the same teams had played out a 2-2 draw in Bristol, which was anything but unusual. Until the mid-60s, and occasionally thereafter until the mid-70s, Easter traditionally saw sides play each other twice in a single weekend, usually with another match squeezed into the middle for good measure. Since then English sides have learned to shun Easter like a dieter avoids its chocolate eggs; Arsenal, for example, played eight Good Friday fixtures in the decade leading up to 1966, but have played just two in more than half a century since.
But if the purpose of football competitions is, at its heart, to pit teams against opponents of a roughly similar standard, to give them an incentive to play well and to add significance to their results, traditional Easter scheduling was a masterstroke. In its absence we miss out on perhaps the greatest, most testing and nerve-wracking annual jamboree of team sport ever conceived. As a long and difficult season drifted towards its conclusion, titles were won and lost over the space of three days.
“Easter, like Christmas, is a trying time for the Association footballer, and between [Good Friday] and next Tuesday nearly every league club will have contested three games and engaged in a series of railway journeys that are sometimes as wearying as a match itself,” wrote the Guardian in 1928. “The Easter rush is also a much more exciting business than that at Christmas, for it is the crisis in which championships, promotions and relegations are often finally decided.”
The truth of these words was to be proved immediately. That year Huddersfield, who had won three of the last four titles and had already qualified for the FA Cup final, went into the holiday weekend with a three-point lead over Everton at the top of the First Division, and with two games in hand. “Unless something sensational happens there is not much chance of the championship coming to Lancashire,” we wrote, “as Huddersfield have as many matches at home as Everton have altogether.” Everton went unbeaten from Easter onwards while the Terriers lost five of their last nine, were turned over at Wembley, and haven’t won a major honour since.
In 1957 both the First Division title and the relegation places were decided over the Easter weekend, with Manchester United securing the silverware with a hat-trick of victories while at the other end of the table Portsmouth, marooned four points adrift of third-bottom Cardiff, played the Bluebirds home and away on Friday and Monday, won both matches – and at home to Wolves on the Saturday – and forced the Welsh side down in their stead.
Top-flight teams were still playing three games in four Easter days as recently as 1978-79, but the magic was already dissipating. For there was more to this than just the compression of much football into little time. It was the practice of playing the same club twice that added spice and occasionally, as with those meetings between Portsmouth and Cardiff, proved decisive. This was a fabulous idea, and the league knew it. From the resumption of the league after the second world war until the late 1960s their calendar normally featured not one of these double-headers but three: one in August, one over Christmas, and the third at Easter.
The last season to feature a triple double-header was 1967-68, and the last league-wide double-headers of any description were played out in the August of 1974, with little drama. If there was a meeting at which it was decided to phase them out, we have found no evidence of it. But perhaps it’s time to phase them back in.
It would be difficult to convince modern footballers to attempt three games in four days, but the late-season head-to-head, played out over a few days across a weekend and the following midweek, seems a tradition worth resurrecting. It would make those fixtures different from all others in the calendar, adding intrigue and interest at a point when – for the many sides involved neither in the title chase nor in the relegation scrap – it may be starting to fade, and would be a rare innovation that would please both broadcasters and historians. The Premier League has served up a decent amount of drama these last few seasons, but surely excitement is one thing of which there can never be enough.
