Paul Gardner made his first Blackpool appearance on 21st September 1976, the opponents, Arsenal. It was a home match in the 1st round of the League Cup and there were over 18,000 fans at Bloomfield Road, most of whom were no doubt hoping for a home win. None of them would have seen a black player in the colours of Blackpool before as Paul was, we believe, the first. It wasn’t to be a winning debut as the match ended in a 1-1 draw. Paul was at right back and it was Arsenal’s outside left, George Armstrong who scored the Blackpool goal. Nevertheless, Paul kept his place for the replay.
We don’t have the programme for that game, yet, but we do have a programme for another game against Arsenal that Paul played in that season. In fact three of Paul’s first five professional appearance in the Blackpool first team were against Arsenal as the League Cup tie went to not one but two replays. These days, with extra time and penalties, many cup ties drawn after ninety minutes don’t feature one replay let alone two.
Were footballers made of sterner stuff in those days? Replays were the norm and two replays was by no means unheard of. Indeed, in 1971 there had been an, almost, endless cup tie between Alvechurch and Oxford City which went to five, yes, five, replays. After the initial 2-2 draw on 6th November, reporter, Jim Rosenthal, working for the Oxford Mail, commented ‘in this competition you only get one bite of the cherry.’ How wrong he was! Subsequent games ended 1-1, 1-1, 0-0, 0-0 before Alvechurch, who had been 2-0 up in the first game, finally triumphed 1-0 on 22nd November. One Alvechurch player commented ‘we didn’t know the Oxford players at the start but we were on first name terms by the end.’ The same player, one Graham Alner, recalled the manager’s pre-match team talk (which was the same before every game) as, the not quite Churchillian, ‘go out and give it some tonk and bottle.’ Whether it was worth all the effort is debateable, Alvechurch, having played nine games in eighteen days lost 4-2 to Aldershot in the next round.[1]You can read more about this tie in ‘Football’s Strangest Matches’ by Andrew Ward, where it appears along with many other entertaining stories. Undismayed by his inaccurate forecast, Jim Rosenthal went on to have a stellar career in broadcasting.
Our programme comes from the second replay and, although he isn’t mentioned in ‘The Blackpool Players’ feature, Paul’s name is in the team line up at No.2.
Whoever owned the programme we secured, in additional to spilling tea on it, had a go at the crossword on page 5. The clue for one across was ‘United from Layer Road.’ In spite of having the ‘L’ and ‘S’ from other answers they failed to get ‘Colchester’. Shame on you!
Another name that jumped off the page for me was that of Blackpool’s No.5, Paul Hart. Paul had a brief stint as manager of my team, Crystal Palace, towards the end of a turbulent 2010/11 season. Fifteen points from the final fourteen games (including a nerve jangling 2-2 draw at Hillsborough on the final day of the season which saw Palace survive at Sheffield Wednesday’s expense) was enough, just, to save Palace from relegation. In another Palace connection, George Wood was in goal for Blackpool, he went on to play 221 games for Palace from 1983 to 1987.
But I digress, again!
After Paul Gardner’s baptism of fire (three games against Arsenal and one each against table topping Chelsea and Bolton) manager Allan Brown commented ‘the boy has had hard matches every game he has played … he has responded superbly.’
It was the away game at Bolton on 2nd October when Paul picked up his first win bonus (the result was a 3-0 win). Again the programme doesn’t include him in the pen pictures of the visiting players but his name is there on the team sheet at No.2.
Still a teenager, he had established himself in the Blackpool defence and went on to make a total of 25 appearances that season and to play in 175 games for Blackpool before leaving to join Bury in August 1982.
Now, I said at the start that ‘we believe’ Paul was Blackpool’s first black player. There are plenty of suggestions on the internet that the South African, Bill Perry, who played for Blackpool from 1949/50 to 1961/62, was of mixed heritage. By the definition we used in Football’s Black Pioneers this would make Bill black. We were keen to believe this, after all, if we could prove he was black this would be a real scoop and re-write English football history (Bill Perry played for England three times in 1955/56, over twenty years before Viv Anderson who is officially recognised as England’s first black full international). Try as we might we could not find the evidence to support the claim, indeed all the evidence we found suggested that Bill Perry was a white South African.
The fact that some photos do suggest he may have had some mixed heritage didn’t convince us – pictures can be misleading, and just because something is repeated on the internet doesn’t make it true. Nevertheless, as a nod in Bill’s direction and in recognition of his outstanding service to Blackpool (a total of 436 appearances) we secured a copy of the programme from his final game for Blackpool wearing the No.11 shirt. In a neat piece of (almost) symmetry Bill’s last game for Blackpool was played at Bolton’s Burnden Park ground, there was no win bonus for Bill though as the game ended 0-0.
References
| ↑1 | You can read more about this tie in ‘Football’s Strangest Matches’ by Andrew Ward, where it appears along with many other entertaining stories. |
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