In 1966, England famously won the World Cup, but this memory is about a FA Cup tie a few months before Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick at Wembley.
The competition had reached the semi-final stage and Chelsea had been drawn to play Sheffield Wednesday at Villa Park in Birmingham.
However, the memory starts two weeks earlier when my friend John and I queued outside Stamford Bridge early on a Sunday morning to buy tickets. You were allowed to buy two tickets – they cost five shillings which equates to 25p each in today’s money!!!
On the day of the match we drove up to Birmingham in my friend John’s A40 with his dad and another friend.
The weather in the morning and early afternoon was terrible with a lot of rain.
We arrived at the ground and got a good place standing behind a crush barrier.
That was our first mistake of the day as the crowd pushed forward you had to push back to breathe!!!
The second mistake of the day was that there were a lot of Sheffield Wednesday supporters behind us and we got pelted with penny coins, but I made the most of it and pocketed about 15 of them!!!
By the time the rain had stopped the pitch just looked like a muddy field. In those days there was no such thing as under-soil heating.
As both teams played in blue, both teams had to change their colours. Sheffield Wednesday played in all white whereas Chelsea chose, on the instructions of their manager Tommy Docherty, to play in AC Milan colours of black and red stripes. We didn’t see this a good omen.
The game was very scrappy due to the state of the pitch, but Sheffield Wednesday adapted far better to the conditions than Chelsea.
The Owls went on to win 2-0 with goals from Graham Pugh in the 55th minute. Then Jim McCalliog, typically an ex-Chelsea player, finally killed the game off in the 90thminute.
The day got even worse for us as we had to spend a further 90 minutes getting out of the car park!! NOT a day we wanted to remember!!!
