GK: Thomas Hacking

DF: James Ward

DF: Arthur Warburton

MF: Thomas Gibson

MF: William Astley

MF: Jack Hunter

FW: Thomas Dewhurst

FW: Arthur Matthews

FW: George Wilson

FW: Jimmy Costley

FW: John Yates

GK: John Rawlinson

DF: Thomas French

DF: Percy de Paravicini

MF: Hon Arthur Kinnaird

MF: Charles Foley

MF: Arthur Dunn

FW: Herbert Bainbridge

FW: John Chevallier

FW: William Anderson

FW: Harry Goodhart

FW: Reginald Macauley

Referee:

Major Marindin

The 1883 FA Cup final was contested by Blackburn Olympic and Old Etonians at the Kennington Oval. Blackburn Olympic won 2–1 after extra time. Jimmy Costley and Arthur Matthews scored for Blackburn; Harry Goodhart for Old Etonians. It was a watershed match for the sport, as for the first time in an FA Cup final a working-class team playing the 'combination game' (passing) were triumphant over a team playing the public school tactics of 'rushing' and 'scrimmages'.   

Despite protests that the venue favoured southern teams, the FA insisted that the final would, as usual, be played in London. About 8,000 people came to the Kennington Oval on 31 March, most of them wearing top hats and supporting the public school team.

Old Etonians started strongly and, to no one’s surprise, scored first. But as the game wore on, Olympic’s greater fitness told and once they had equalised at the start of the second half they looked the more likely winners. Old Etonians almost won in the closing minutes but Hacking, the first goalkeeper to show that agility could be more valuable than size, denied them.

In extra time it was no contest. Old Etonians were dead on their feet. James Crossley, a weaver, scored after just three minutes and Olympic had little difficulty holding on. They had become the first northern team to win the FA Cup. 

The establishment didn’t take defeat gracefully. Old Etonians complained about Olympic having done so much preparation (how unfair!), while the Times insisted that they had won mainly through foul play.

The players were too busy being hero-worshipped to care. Thousands turned out to celebrate their return, with three brass bands struggling to make themselves heard above the cheers. One local paper even wrote an editorial worrying that the obsession with football had gone too far and would lead to young men neglecting their work and families. As if.

The team celebrated at Hunter’s pub. Amid the back-slapping speeches came several calls for the team to stick together to build on this success. Perhaps other clubs had already been sniffing around. Full-blown professionalism was still a year or two away, but there were ways and means of making it worth a player’s while to join your side. 

Sure enough, by the start of the next season Olympic had lost their goalkeeper to Blackburn Rovers. Others soon departed, amid talks of splits in the camp. They reached the semi-final of the FA Cup in 1884, but Rovers won it. Power had shifted. Rovers won the trophy the next year, too. And the next.

Olympic simply fell to pieces. As the game leapt forward into a new era, the team who had started it all off couldn’t keep up. They lost their best players and their debts increased. By the end of the decade they had gone out of business.

The innovations that they had helped introduce, however, especially the new playing style and the emphasis on fitness and preparation, lived on. Professionalism was accepted and teams from the industrial north and midlands became dominant. Blackburn Olympic might not have survived into the 1890s, but they took the public school old boys down with them – football was now a working man’s game.

From WSC 236 October 2006