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Latics v Blackpool, Lancashire Senior Cup 1970


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Here's another of my reminiscences and queries from way back in the Neolithic age, which one or two veteran fans may be able to assist with:

 

I was madly obsessed with the club by the second half of the 1969-70 season (ie the dawn of the Frizzell era), but one particular fixture seems to have evaded my radar entirely. Recently discovered that we played Blackpool in the quarter final of the Lancs Senior Cup. On the cover of the programme for the Tuesday night Lincoln game on 10 Feb, there's a picture of Reg Blore scoring with a diving header at the Rochdale Road end, which the caption says earned us a replay at Bloomfield Road. So I assume the home tie ended 1-1, and most likely took place on 3 February.

 

Does anyone have any details of that replay (score, scorers, etc) that they can share? I think the Latics must have won, because they played Burnley away in the semi-final of the competition a few weeks later. I was at that game - what a disaster (0-4)!

 

EDIT: I was at the Local History Library yesterday researching the early 1970 period, but the microfiche copies of the Oldham Chronicle for late January-early February are badly degraded and unreadable! So no luck on that front.

 

 

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Thanks for that, LaticsPete!

 

I remember that 3-0 win against Man City pretty well. It was in mid-January and was Jimmy Frizzell's first game in charge. The performance was an absolute revelation after the abysmal stuff we'd witnessed towards the end of Jack Rowley's regime. The Latics attacked non-stop from beginning to end, and could easily have scored seven or eight. Jim Williams captured the new spirit of optimism with the headline of his Chronicle report: 'Forget your troubles - Repeat this form". And they did! Pity only 1400 paying punters turned up that night.

 

Fun fact: City's keeper for this game was Harry Dowd. It must have been a very different experience for him after being a first team regular the previous season and appearing in front of 100,000 at Wembley in the FA Cup final eight months earlier.

 

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Yeah, and we also played them in an end-of-season friendly at Boundary Park. I don't know what sort of line up they had in the Lancs Cup games, but they brought their full strength team over for the friendly, and we completely outplayed them. Jim Fryatt and Ian Wood scored our goals in a 2-0 win.

 

Blackpool were relegated after just one season in the top division in 1970-71, but they didn't give a bad account of themselves at all. They had quality players like Tony Green, Tommy Hutchison, Micky Burns and Alan Suddick, and achieved a famous 4-0 FA Cup win against West Ham.

 

 

 

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I was somewhat fascinated by the Lancashire Senior Cup as a competition. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Latics used to put out full-strength first team line ups, and opponents from the first division usually fielded reserve sides which often contained one or two future star players plus a few fading big names. The Liverpool side we beat in 1970-71 included Tommy Lawrence, Ron Yeats, Peter Thompson and Ian St John. That game attracted fewer than 3000 spectators, and attendances were sometimes lower, even against the likes of Man City and Man Utd, so the Oldham public was obviously not quite so fascinated by the competition.

 

The last LSC match that I recall was at home to Man Utd early in the 1971-72 season. We lost 1-0 to a late goal by (I think) John Aston. I'm wondering whether the club actually even entered the competition in the years that followed. Maybe not, as they seemed to be concentrating their efforts in that period on the Texaco Cup, which morphed into the Anglo-Scottish Cup.

 

The Latics won the Lancs Senior Cup in 1967, beating Barrow 2-1 in the final at Boundary Park. That must have been a slight consolation for the way their season fizzled out after a great opening three months. It was just a couple of years before my time, so I'd be grateful for any reminiscences about that match!

 

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