Match Day Thread The Scottish Cup 1928 – The Hoodoo is broken

The Scottish Cup 1928 – The Hoodoo is broken

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• By Barrie Lochrie

1928 RANGERS 4 CELTIC 0


The Hoodoo is Broken


History tells us that it must have been a wonderful time to be a Rangers fan in May 1927. The team were the dominant force in the land, and had just regained the league title to win a fifth championship in the seven-year reign of legendary manager William Struth. The fans were not only watching a succession of big matches won and trophies lifted, but they were fortunate enough to see many players who are still regarded as amongst the best ever to wear the blue jersey. There surely can’t have been many who were unhappy at the exploits of McPhail, Meiklejohn, Cunningham, Archibald and Morton. Yet, to everyone associated with our great club in 1927, whether they were players, management, staff or supporters, there was something important missing.

The team had eased to the title with a game to spare, and had virtually sealed the club’s 15th championship by beating Celtic 1-0 at Parkhead on Monday 18 April as an added bonus in the run-in. So why were many of the supporter’s thoughts and many of the newspaper inches devoted to an unhappiness at Ibrox? The answer was the incredible and mystifying run of failure that the club were enduring in the Scottish Cup. Unlike modern football with the priority given to league titles and European progress, the glamour and prestige tournament that was seen as the biggest prize of all was the Scottish Cup. And since the legendary RC Hamilton had smashed home an unstoppable shot to seal victory in the 1903 final against Hearts, no Rangers captain had led his team to the ultimate glory in the Scottish game. By the time the next final was to be played, it would a drought that would have lasted 25 years.

Since 1903, there had been so many truly great Rangers players who had fallen victim of this Cup curse. William Wilton’s triple title-winners from before the Great War included club giants such as Jimmy Gordon and Willie Reid. And after the conflict finally ended, and the Cup restarted in 1919, great club servants such as Jimmy Bowie, Willie Robb and Athur Dixon tried and failed to land the national knockout competition. Then in that summer of 1927, two more stalwarts of multiple successes would take their leave from Ibrox without that one medal they had so badly wanted. Proud Ulsterman Bert Manderson had formed a formidable full back partnership for many years with his fellow Irish international Billy McCandless. After 12 years a Ranger, and with seven championship medals and over 450 appearances to his name, he moved south at the age of 34 to join Bradford Park Avenue in the Third Division. He moved there along with one of the greatest captains in Rangers history, the man who was the first leader on the pitch of the Struth era. The great Tommy Cairns had been a mainstay of the team for even longer, joining from Hamilton in 1913. He had won those same seven titles as Manderson, and he was also Bradford bound.

Cairns had led out his men in two Scottish Cup finals, as Rangers had reached the showpiece event in both 1921 and 1922, the first seasons of Struth’s reign. And he had suffered double heartbreak as red-hot favourites Rangers had crashed to surprise defeats against unheralded opposition. In the first of these, Cairns, Manderson, Dixon, Bowie and Robb were all in the side who lost 1-0 to Partick Thistle, the only time the Maryhill men have ever won the trophy. And typically of the Rangers Cup luck, the only goal had been scored when Bowie was briefly off the pitch to change his torn shorts and Thistle briefly had a numerical advantage. It was a strangely lacklustre occasion for the biggest club match of the year, with the match played at Parkhead instead of Hampden, and a tiny crowd of only 28,000 due to a combination of SFA greed doubling the usual ticket price, and a miners’ strike causing much of the country to grind to a halt.

Just twelve months later, another final against lowly Morton surely would mean Rangers joy at last, and all but Bowie were back, this time at Hampden. The result was another infamous 1-0 loss, with the Greenock team emulating Thistle by capturing the famous old trophy for the first and only time. This time Rangers were undone by a wonder goal scored by ex-Everton man Jimmy Gourlay, and then trying unsuccessfully to break down a resolute Morton defence with ten men after inside forward Andy Cunningham was forced off the field before the interval with a broken jaw.

Cunningham, by the start of season 1927/28, was now in the veteran stage of his Rangers career, and he started the campaign with a new leader on the field after the departure of Cairns. Manager Struth could have given the club captaincy to centre back David Meiklejohn, who was both a great defender and also a true leader. He had been signed from Maryhill Juniors back in 1919 by Wilton, and was the rock on which the Struth league successes had been built around. But the boss decided to give the honour of club captain to a man who had starred for the club even longer than Meiklejohn, the versatile inside forward Tommy Muirhead. A war hero who still carried the scars of battle from his younger days, Muirhead had arrived in 1917 from Hibs and was a man Struth regarded as having all the qualities needed to be skipper of the country’s biggest and most important club.

Of course, Meiklejohn and Muirhead were also victims of the cup hoodoo, and both men were determined that this new era on the pitch would start with overdue Scottish Cup glory. Despite the title returning after a season away, the latest cruel Cup exit had hurt, and the newspapers were ramping up the headlines of a curse in the competition with each passing year. 1927 had seen Rangers lose in extra time at Ibrox to Falkirk in a replay, before an Ibrox midweek crowd of 80,000, which was significantly more than the Old Firm league fixture earlier in the season. It was a game Meiklejohn missed through an injury picked up in the first drawn match, and the team had to play all of extra time with ten men after an injury to McCandless forced him to leave the fray.

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The Rangers players had a new teammate who knew what it took to win the Cup for the new season. Struth had persuaded Airdrie to sell their international inside forward Bob McPhail for a fee of £5,000, a man who would go on to set all kinds of records in a legendary Rangers career. He had been a key player in the 1924 Scottish Cup win for The Diamonds, and was seen by many as Struth adding even more firepower to an attack that was already the most potent in the country. And by the time the Scottish Cup started in January 1928, Rangers were at their expected place at the top of the table, and Struth had added another Cup winner to his squad. He was another war hero, the experienced defender Jock Buchanan was signed from recently relegated Morton in December, a player the manager remembered only too well for his magnificent display in the 1922 final for the Greenock team.

The draw was kind in the opening rounds, Rangers having very little trouble in progressing to the quarter-finals without too much effort. Second Division East Stirling were swept aside in the opening round in January, a crowd of 5,500 inside Firs Park to see the prolific centre forward Jimmy Fleming score a hat-trick in a 6-0 hammering that saw McPhail, Cunningham and right winger Sandy Archibald all get on the scoresheet too. There was another hat-trick in the next round, Cowdenbeath being beaten 4-2 at Ibrox before 30,000 with McPhail this time the treble scorer. Fleming grabbed the other, in a game where the scoreline looked closer than the game itself. Rangers had scored three times in the space of just three minutes midway through the first half, and were never in any serious danger from then on.

The third round in late February saw Rangers drawn to play a team who no longer exist. King’s Park sound like another team based in the Hampden area of Glasgow, but they were in fact based in Stirling, and were the forerunners to the formation of the more recognised Stirling Albion, who were formed after the demise of King’s Park in the 1940s. The tie was at Ibrox, not their Forthbank Park, a name used decades later when Stirling Albion relocated to their current home. King’s Park never played in the top flight during their brief existence, but in early 1928 they were challenging for promotion from the Second Division and had the best team in their history as a league club. And they gave a full-strength Rangers a few worries before the favourites eventually showed their class in the second half. The 20,000 home crowd gave the plucky underdogs a fine reception at the final whistle as their players left the field after a 3-1 Rangers victory that took goals by Cunningham and Morton in the last quarter hour to finally end their resistance.

The quarter-finals saw Rangers again enjoying a favourable draw, being paired with the only Second Division side left in the tournament in Albion Rovers. If the internet had existed back in the spring of 1928, familiar conspiracy theories would have been plastered all over it, as holders Celtic were given the toughest match possible outside an Old Firm clash, travelling to face a Motherwell team who were the only team within a realistic distance of the Old Firm in the title race. Celtic won 2-0, and Rangers made the odds of a first Old Firm final since the riot in 1909 a lot more likely as they saw off their Coatbridge opponents 1-0 thanks to a Cunningham strike in front of 24,000 at Cliftonhill. The chances of that dream final grew even more likely when the Big Two avoided each other in the draw for the last four, with Celtic to play a different Glasgow derby against Queens Park while Rangers had an inter-city duel with Hibs.

Perhaps surprisingly, the venue for the semi-final was Tynecastle, Rangers being the ones to do the travelling. But if this gave Hibs any ideas of home advantage, these were quickly dispelled once the semi-final kicked off in Gorgie in front of terraces packed with over 43,000 spectators. It took Rangers less than two minutes to hit the front when Archibald struck, and by half-time the fans were already planning their day at Hampden as they had seen McPhail double the lead. A comfortable 3-0 win was completed by a youngster signed from Dundee United the previous summer and who was playing his first-ever Scottish Cup match for Rangers. Jimmy Simpson, playing as an inside forward, sealed the win, before returning to the reserves for most of the remainder of the campaign. Simpson, of course, would become a defensive rock for Rangers and Scotland in the next decade, but this teenage version had still to be converted from attack to defence by the manager and played in the role he had occupied at Dundee United before his move to Ibrox. Celtic beat Queens Park 2-1 at Ibrox on the same afternoon, and the final that the whole country wanted to see was now a reality.

By the time the day of the final dawned, the two finalists were in contrasting form. Rangers had stretched their lead at the top of the table with a run of impressive performances, the latest being a thumping 4-0 win over Dunfermline the previous Monday. The title was now almost theirs, although there would be bad news for club captain Muirhead. He had returned to the team against the Fifers after a spell out injured, and although he played his part in the win, it was obvious that he was not yet fit enough to start in the biggest game of the season, and manager Struth had to inform him that he would not be leading out Rangers on Final day. Celtic, meanwhile, had suffered a slump in form, with successive 3-1 defeats to Airdrie and Motherwell ending any remote hopes they harboured of snatching the championship. Their one shot at glory now was the Cup, and as holders and record twelve-time winners, their pedigree in the competition was second to none. They also had the memory of their last Hampden meeting with Rangers to boost their confidence, a scarcely believable 5-0 semi-final win in 1925, when the Rangers curse never looked more evident.

Glasgow came to a virtual standstill on Saturday 14 April 1928, with a record attendance of 118,115 packing into the national stadium and thousands more locked outside when the Hampden authorities decided the stadium was full. Estimates of the numbers of unlucky punters left outside vary, but even the most conservative reports suggested another 5,000 were left wishing they had arrived a bit earlier. In Muirhead’s absence there was no doubting who would skipper Rangers in their quest to finally end the hoodoo, Davie Meiklejohn leading out these eleven men in blue:

Tom Hamilton, Dougie Gray, Bob Hamilton, Jock Buchanan, David Meiklejohn, Tully Craig, Sandy Archibald, Andy Cunningham, Jimmy Fleming, Bob McPhail, Alan Morton.

It was a typical April day in Glasgow, the weather reminding everyone that summer hadn’t yet arrived. The rain held off, but there was bitter wind blowing, and it almost reached gale force prior to kick-off. The coin toss looked vital, and Meiklejohn lost it. Celtic skipper Willie McStay was in no doubt the best decision to make, he opted to harness the conditions and shoot with the wind at his back. It took a while for both teams to get accustomed to the tricky conditions, with Celtic wasting an early corner when right winger Paddy Connolly’s kick was caught on the wind and sailed a good ten yards behind the Rangers goal. It was then the turn of skipper Meiklejohn to be made to look foolish, when his attempted crossfield pass blew behind him and he had goalkeeper Hamilton to thank for preventing a bizarre own goal.

Rangers were only seen in flashes in attack, finding it difficult to move the ball forward with any control. But they did force a corner of their own, and very nearly scored with their first real attack. Goalkeeper John Thomson flapped at Morton’s delivery, and had to produce an impressive diving stop to recover his mistake just as both McPhail and Fleming converged on the loose ball. But the first half was mainly a tale of Celtic possession and territorial dominance, and of determined and resolute Rangers defending. With Gray especially impressive in his tackling and reading of the play, the opening period ticked on without any great threat to the scoreboard.

Then, just a minute after Rangers had seen a rare breakaway end in Fleming heading wide from a decent position, goalkeeper Tom Hamilton produced the moment of inspiration that made the Rangers support think this would finally be their day. Winger Connolly cut inside from the right and unleashed a scorching shot that looked destined for the far corner of the Rangers net. Somehow, Hamilton stretched to his full-length to get a hand to the ball and keep it out. The ball then fell to left winger Adam McLean as he ran into the box from the other flank, but his effort with the rebound went high and wide. It was a stunning moment, and one that post-match would be identified as game changing. And as the opening half reached its closing stages, there was Hamilton again to deny McLean and keep the scores blank.

No doubt Rangers were the happier team at the interval, surviving the wind assisted onslaught, and now with the elements in their favour as they tried to finally end the jinx that was the talk of the football nation. And they started the second half like a team who knew that their day of destiny had arrived. Celtic were immediately pinned back in defence, as the Rangers forwards sent wave after wave of attack towards Thomson’s goal. Could Willie Maley’s green and white rearguard hold as steady as Struth’s steel defence had done? The record crowd got their answer after just ten minutes.

Jimmy Fleming found space and sent an accurate shot arrowing past Thomson and heading into the Celtic net. Many observers thought it had crossed the line before Celtic captain McStay threw himself in the air and punched the ball back out. Rangers claimed that his actions were irrelevant as the ball was already in, Fleming had scored. But after consulting with his linesman, referee Mr Bell pointed to the penalty spot. Obviously, in modern football, Rangers would then be playing against ten men as McStay would have been sent off. But such rules were still a long way away, and the skipper took his place at the edge of his penalty area and awaited the Rangers kicker to place the ball on the spot. The 118,000 held their breath, wondering who would step forward to take such a massive kick. There was. Of course, only one answer. The Rangers captain understood the responsibility of such an honour, and he strode forward from his defensive position and took the ball.

In years to come, Meiklejohn would often be interviewed about these historic moments. He would talk of his dismay at the goal not given, and of the sense of injustice he and his teammates felt at the penalty being awarded rather than celebrating a legitimate goal. But the reality was he now had to score from twelve yards. He told of how in his mind flashed thoughts of the great colleagues who had strived so hard to win the cup but who had suffered ill-luck and had left the club never having savoured the joy of holding the country’s premier silverware. As he stood with the ball on the spot, Meiklejohn said he “died a thousand deaths” worrying the consequences if he was to miss. Would that signal another year of heartache and mocking headlines? He composed himself, and ran forward…

To the watching crowd, Meiklejohn looked the calmest man inside Hampden. As many at both ends of the stadium could hardly bear to watch, his firm low shot was a scorer from the moment it left his boot. This time, it really was 1-0 to Rangers, and this time there would no more talk of hoodoos. The weight of a quarter of a century of painful history had been lifted, the day of Rangers glory had arrived. The remainder of the match was simply a case of the winning margin.

The Celtic goal remained under siege, and if not for the agility of Thomson, a second goal would have followed within minutes. But there was no stemming the blue tide, and after 68 minutes Thomson was beaten again. An Archibald corner caused havoc inside the Celtic six-yard box, and when the ball dropped invitingly between McPhail and Fleming, it was Bob who reacted first to steer the ball into the gaping net and enjoy the roar from the Rangers end that could surely be heard back on Edmiston Drive. With still over twenty minutes to play, the Rangers fans could now relax and enjoy the feast of football being laid before them. And that feast had two more delicious moments for them to enjoy.

Just two minutes after McPhail had eased any worries that may have existed, the party got even louder when Rangers scored a magnificent third. Right winger Sandy Archibald was a forward of goals, pace and aggression. He also had a fierce will-to-win, with Celtic boss Maley once paying him the compliment of saying “so long as Archibald is on the pitch, we can never be sure of victory over Rangers, no matter the score”. His spectacular shot from the edge of the box in the 70th minute flew into the top corner, Thomson getting fingertips to it but having no hope of keeping such a powerful and precise strike out. The winger then ran back towards the centre circle, arms aloft and dancing a jig of delight, this day he had waited for so long bringing out a wild celebration back in the more refined days of 1928.

Another goal would represent the biggest ever Scottish Cup defeat for Celtic, but most of the Rangers team now seemed happy to coast to the end and enjoy the occasion. Not Sandy Archibald. With five minutes left, a Fleming shot was blocked by McStay and the ball sailed out towards the Rangers right. There was Archibald in space, and he trapped the ball instantly, took one stride forward, then launched a guided missile of a shot that flew into the net before Thomson could even throw out a hand. It was the perfect ending to an iconic afternoon, with the final score of Rangers 4 Celtic 0 making headline news across the country.

It seems fitting that the goals that day were scored by three of the greatest servants the club has ever had. Meiklejohn with over 600 appearances and 12 league titles, and the man who captained the club to two clean sweeps of league, Scottish Cup, Glasgow Cup and Charity Cup. McPhail, who won seven Scottish Cups in his career (scoring in five different final matches), and who was the club’s official all-time goalscorer until a certain Ally McCoist came along. And Archibald, who started more league games than any other player in Rangers history, and whose 13 league titles remains the most for any player in Scottish football history.

Almost a century later, the Scottish Cup final of 1928 is still one of the most celebrated and special days in the history of the club. The following week, a 5-1 win over Kilmarnock sealed the league title, and the first-ever league and cup double for Rangers. And with the hoodoo now consigned to the dustbin of history, Struth and Rangers would go on to claim many more Scottish Cups, winning five more before World War Two, including three in a row between 1934-36. The old trophy would also reside in Ibrox in three successive years between 1948-50, with Mr Struth eventually lifting it ten times. Incredibly, though, it would be the only final against Celtic in his long managerial career. There wouldn’t be another Old Firm final until 1963, a gap of 35 years. It too, would be an occasion that is special in Rangers history, and the tale of 1963 will be told in another article.

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^^^^ didn't read LOL