1893 And All That

Govan & University of Manchester  3  Hindley Juniors  0

Manchester Football League – First Division

Admission / Programme – No / Online

It wasn’t ever going to be a straightforward Saturday as far as football was concerned.

The arctic blast that had engulfed the Country over the previous week had pretty much rendered everything on grass postponed, and we even had a situation whereby given the snow and the depth of the frost, games on plastic were disappearing fast.

I’d pretty much resigned myself to a local game on one of the surviving 4Gs, when I decided on the Friday night to have a cursory look at the lower divisions of the Manchester League. Blog readers will be aware that I try to stay on top of all things in the Premier Division, but noting that quite a few clubs played on the artificial stuff lower down the divisions, I wondered if anything might jump out.

Top of Division One were Govan & University of Manchester, and I spotted that they were based in the Fallowfield area of Manchester, playing on a 4G at the Armitage Centre. The home game against Hindley Juniors was still showing as on, but it was apparent as well that other games on 4G in the locality were off.

Saturday morning came, and while doing my Stepfather duties, which effectively entails sitting in a car park at Elvaston Country Park in Derby, I found contact details for the Manchester League clubs and sent the Govan Secretary (Tom) a text. After a brief and helpful exchange, the game was confirmed as on, I just had the journey over the Peak District to contend with!

In all fairness, other than some queuing traffic in Buxton, the journey was fine, interspersed with snow showers on higher ground, sleet on the not so higher ground, and of course as I meandered under the M60, bearing in mind we were now in Manchester, it was just rain, and lots of it.

The Armitage Centre is a pretty easy place to find, you just plough up the A34 towards the City Centre, turn left at a roundabout onto Moseley Road, and there it is, a huge campus on your right hand side.

Owned by the University of Manchester, the Armitage Centre is a big venue - more on that later, and I can only assume Govan FC (as they were known up until the start of the season), have joined forces with the University and that in turn means they have access to the facilities, and that includes a very good floodlit 4G surface with a viewing area down one side.

I had a little wander around the place and bumped into a couple of chaps who I knew from the spectrum scene, it was only then that I realised I was actually at a very historic venue. One of the chaps came out with a line that for a brief second threw me…

“They played an FA Cup Final here back in the 1890’s”

I suddenly recalled reading an article in Groundtastic magazine about former FA Cup Final venues, and indeed one of them was Fallowfield Stadium, which just so happened to be on the site of what is now the Armitage Centre.

History lesson time then. Fallowfield Stadium was an athletics and cycling venue that was built in 1892, but it rose to prominence in 1893 when the FA Cup Final between Everton and Wolves was hosted. The capacity was supposedly just 15,000 spectators, but allegedly close to 60,000 rocked up, with many unable to actually view the game which Wolves won 1-0.

The stadium also hosted the 1899 FA Cup semi-final replay between Liverpool and Sheffield United but that game had to be abandoned due to a crush in the crowd (I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions). A couple of Rugby League Challenge Cup Finals took place at the venue, but it spent the bulk of its life as an athletics and cycling venue, however in the early sixties the University bought the venue before it was demolished in 1994.

So, feeling a sense of history, with umbrella aloft, it was time to settle down and watch the game, which to be fair had attracted a reasonable handful of spectators who were clearly keen for a game of football.

Govan, who had won all bar two of their games this season, found Hindley, who sat next to bottom, a tough nut to crack in the first half, and the gulf in league positions was not obvious to see. A few chances came and went for both sides, but we finished 0-0 at the break.

The first goal came early in the second period, with two further strikes following to secure the three points for the hosts. For the record, the goals were scored by Donnchadh Barry, the impressive Sandro Mastro-Stefano and Louis Rhodes.   

Govan, who it also has to be said have a very good social media platform, and indeed produced an online programme for the game which was something of a surprise, march on at the top of the table and look a very good bet to make Premier Division football their destination for next season.

It had been an awful day weather wise, but with temperatures slowing rising as the rain continued to pile down, it was a feeling of both satisfaction and of nostalgia that was overriding as I made the journey back down the A34 and the A6 into Derbyshire.

Now, which one of the 110 issues of Groundtastic was that article about Fallowfield in……this could be a long search!