On this Day in 1934 Manchester City Won the FA Cup Final
By David Crook
On the 28 April 1934 Manchester City lifted the FA Cup for the second time – 30 years after the first time they had won the trophy.
Manchester City had an interesting and exciting road to the 1934 FA Cup Final. Beaten finalists in 1926 and 1933, there was a clamour amongst the fans to win this major trophy for a second time.
City had a team populated with some legendary names during this period, Fred Tilson, Matt Busby, Frank Swift and Eric Brook amongst others.
As the FA Cup competition began to hot up, City faced Sheffield Wednesday in the 5th round playing out for a draw. This game set a record crowd at Hillsborough of 72841 and this level of interest by the fans continued in the competition.As was normal for the day, the match was replayed on a weekday afternoon at Maine Road where nearly 690000 fans packed the ground to watch City progress.
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The quarter final was at Maine Road against Stoke City and also set an attendance record which still stands! A total of 84569 fans squeezed into City’s ground which is still a UK record attendance for a team playing at home! The Stoke City team even featured a young Stanley Matthews!
City progressed to meet Aston Villa in the Semi Final where we comfortably won 6:1 to secure a place in the final for the second season running. But this time City were determined to win!
An amazing 93258 fans filled Wembley Stadium to the rafters on a wet Saturday 28 April 1934. Lots of extra train services had been put on to transport Northern fans to the Capital City.
City were playing Portsmouth in the Final and many of the pundits of the day were tipping Portsmouth to win. The newspapers of the time reported how Wembley Stadium were catering for these fans by having meat pies for the Northern fans and sandwiches for the Southern fans! Some 50000 pints of beer were delivered to Wembley in readiness.
The young Manchester City goalkeeper, Frank Swift, would later rue his decision to forego gloves in the wet conditions as the opening goal by Portsmouth was generally regarded as a goalkeeping error. The fantastically named Septimus Rutherford hit a shot which slipped through Swift’s hands.
The game would remain like this until the 74th minute when Fred Tilson scored to bring the game level. Then City did what we seem to do best, we played to the very end and in the 88th minute Tilson netted the winner.
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City had won the FA Cup for the second time, putting aside their loss from the year before and in doing so became a formidable team. The majority of this Manchester City side then went on to win the title in 1936/7 and the Charity Shield in 1937.