"UP FOR T'CUP" IN REALITY

Evening Post, Issue 98, 27 April 1936, Page 8

"UP FOR T'CUP" IN REALITY

What an extraordinary business Association football has become in Britain was shown by the scenes at the Wembley Stadium on Saturday on the occasion of the English Cup final. This for many years has been a great national event, attracting enormous crowds from all over the country, but particularly from the districts represented by the rival teams on the field. Not seldom one of these teams—sometimes both— comes from the industrial North, where they still speak a county dialect in broad accents that are the delight of the cockney of the Metropolis. This year Sheffield United met Woolwich Arsenal—Arsenal for short—and one can be sure that all Yorkshire, or as many as could get there, were "up for t'Cup." But something else on Saturday was "up for t'Cup" too, well up, up above the ninety and odd thousand spectators from the North and elsewhere, putting their necks out of joint and, possibly, their noses, too, in sheer distraction. We read in the cable news:

Four autogiros and twelve aeroplanes flew over the match in relays, swooping down . . . and jockeying for position to secure more shots.

This sounds like an aerial outrage in Ethiopia, but one should hasten to add that the aircraft were armed with nothing more deadly than "telescopic cameras," and that the "shots" were taken, not fired, for making films of the match for the

myriads pf cinemas throughout the! land. All the same there was a bailie, a baltle of big business, between the stadium authorities and the newsreel companies for the valuable right or privilege to film the football final. The stadium people claimed the monopoly and took all precautions to guard it on terra firma, but they forgot for the' moment that "the sky's the limit," and the best they could do was to try to blind the down-pointing aerial cameras with a battery of searchlights, like "archies" firing blank. Into the legal merits of the case we cannot enter, but we can sympathise with, the players engaged in the game of the season under imminent fear of a crash in their midst, and the spectators, especially those "up for t'Cup," distracted between the aerial evolutions above them and the battle for the Cup in front. Fortunately, there were no casualties, but a few more Cup finals like this and the "gate" will thin out and there will be no spoils for the victors or anybody else. There are limits to the interference of big business with sport.