The YouTube link above relives a happy day – Uwe Rosler’s first home game – when the Bees produced a great display of flowing football, one that really set the new Gaffer’s stall out, but as the home defeat to the Glovers back in August showed, we certainly don’t always get our own way against the Somerset outfit. This week Mark Croxford, one of the co-authors of the Big Brentford Book series, looks back at an afternoon that the Bees tried to forget.
On Saturday 18th November 1972 the name of Brentford was added to the lengthening list of Football League teams beaten by notorious non-league giant-killers Yeovil Town on their infamous sloping pitch at The Huish. Legend has it that the pitch sloped 8’ from sideline to sideline.
Bees fans made up almost 1,500 of the 9,447 all-ticket attendance with many travelling on the good old and much-lamented British Rail ‘Special’ which left Ealing Broadway at 10:40 and called at Southall and Hayes before arriving in Somerset at 13:00, all for the cost of £1.25 (75p for children under the age of 13). Match tickets were readily available for 40p each – as long as purchasers could get to Griffin Park’s reception desk between 09:30 and 12:30 on Sunday morning, 12th November. (Queuing for tickets? Surely not!!)
The match itself was an unmitigated disaster, as set out by the clearly disgruntled Brentford and Chiswick Times reporter.
Simply too bad to be true…
Yeovil Town 2, Brentford 1 (FA Cup 1st Round)
“Brentford did not win – nor did they deserve to. They were incongruously flattered that they took the lead and a clumsy goal it was too. At the end they were also flattered that the margin of defeat was just one goal.
A ghastly disappointment was this display.
Defence unsure; attack almost non-existent and hardly once perturbing ‘keeper Clark; form, cold as charity, dull and negative. They turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the occasion.
The high spirits and boundless enthusiasm of adventurous Yeovil never rubbed off on their opponents and it was a drab, inexplicable exhibition from the Bees.
There would have been no disgrace in being gallant losers to Southern League adversaries who have bigger scalps than Brentford on their FA Cup belt, but it was the way of things which stunned 1,500 supporters, who had gone optimistically to Somerset, into disbelief.
It will take some time to live down this particular defeat.”
He sounds disappointed? Just a bit! For the record, it was only Brentford’s second defeat by a non-league club in almost 50 years and in one of those strange twists of fate that football so often throws up, Yeovil’s winner was scored by Ex-Bee Cliff Myers, who had scored Brentford’s goal in the previous giant-killing humiliation, when Guildford City inflicted a 2-1 FA Cup embarrassment in 1967.
Skipper Alan Hawley was taken unwell on the journey from London and watched the game huddled in the stands suffering from a bout of ‘flu, whilst on the pitch Terry Scales ‘celebrated’ his 21st birthday.
“… in the 50th minute, Brentford had the effrontery to take the lead. One felt that the Bees should have humbly apologised for this lapse from good manners. A fumbling goal it was, in keeping with the all-round display. Docherty swept a long cross towards the far post, Mike Allen was running in and the ball seemed to hit his knee and go into the net.”
“… it was only token justice when an equaliser went to Yeovil in the 70th minute … the winning goal came in the 73rd minute. Hously centered and in darted Myers to head hard and true past Gordon Phillips. ‘Easy, Easy!’ chanted ecstatic Somerset supporters – and so it had been.”
