South Wails?

Steve Carr's trip to Swansea City in the FA Cup detours via memory lane.

Sunday’s FA Cup tie at Swansea may well be my only away game this season, unless there is a dramatic upturn in the club’s fortunes. I’ve not been a regular away traveller for many years, and have never seen us win at Swansea, so my hopes aren’t high for this weekend. For some reason, I still believe in the magic of the FA Cup, even though it has already been 11 years since our last Quarter Final appearance, 18 years since our last Semi Final, and 58 years since our last Final...

West Bromwich Albion and Swansea City have been regular opponents for much of the last 20 years, but before that, meetings were few and far between. Here is a look at two previous visits to Swansea, which were significant for very different reasons.

Professional football was slow in coming to South Wales, and the top clubs of the 1890s, WBA included, carried out missionary work in bringing the game to outposts such as Swansea. On 20th April 1899 Albion took on a local amateur club ‘Swansea FC’ (not to be confused with Swansea Rugby Football Club, or indeed Swansea City, which was not formed until 1912 as Swansea Town) - although it was the St Helen’s Ground used normally by Swansea RFC and Glamorgan County Cricket Club that hosted the game.

The 5.45 kick-off reflected the fact that the game was being played on a Thursday evening, in an era when there was no such thing as floodlighting. What isn’t clear is Albion’s travel arrangements, as even with the late start, it would still have taken Albion several hours to have reached Swansea by steam train, with maybe a change or two along the way, and it is entirely possible that they would have travelled back home late that night on one of those train services which used to run through the night (which I have used myself in the past, but no longer operate) with players having to sleep in the carriages they were travelling on, arriving back in West Bromwich in the early hours of Friday morning, then having to travel to Nottingham on Saturday for a Leage fixture against Forest! After all, WBA had agreed to play for a guarantee, and unnecessary costs such as hotel bills would have eaten into the profits!

Albion fielded virtually a full-strength team for the game, featuring Joe Reader; George Cave, Amos Adams, Harry Hadley, Abe Jones, Jack Banks; Billy Bassett, Tom Perry, Albert Brown, Billy Richards and Ben Garfield. Albert Brown was tried out in the centre forward position, which had been a problem position for Albion all season. He was a trialist and the only one of the eleven never to appear in any League games for WBA, though he did feature in the FA Cup Final for Southampton just three years later!

The local amateurs were no match for the experienced professionals, and the game was little more than a stroll for Albion, who led 6-0 at half time and went on to win by 13 goals to 1, the scorers being Jones (3), Bassett (2), Richards (2), Garfield (2), Perry (2) and Brown (1). That makes 12 in all, as in all the excitement the name of one of the goalscorers wasn’t noted, which wasn’t that unusual in the Victorian era - a far cry from the 21^st Century when all manner of largely meaningless statistics are religiously recorded.

It is safe to say there won’t be a repeat of Albion’s first visit to Swansea, but I am hoping (though not expecting) for a better outcome than our only previous visit to Swansea for an FA Cup tie.

Had this weekend’s game not been switched to Sunday for live coverage on some obscure television channel, the FA Cup tie against Swansea City would have taken place exactly 39 years to the day since our only previous FA Cup clash. It was on 10^th January 1987 that Albion’s misfiring Division 2 outfit took on fourth division Swansea in a 3^rd Round tie, during the dark days of the Ron Saunders era. Albion had been relegated from the top flight the previous season, and were now in the early stages of a slide from promotion challengers at Christmas to relegation outsiders as the season drew to a close.

Swansea, meanwhile, had followed the trend set by Bristol City and Wolves by plummeting from 1^st to 4^th Divisions in quick succession, though 1986-87 proved to be a season of consolidation for them, with a mid-table finish. The Albion that team that day contained many well-known names and a considerable amount of experience: Stuart Naylor, Clive Whitehead, Colin Anderson, Carlton Palmer, Paul Dyson, David Burrows, Robert Hopkins, Derek Statham, Steve MacKenzie, Bobby Williamson, Garth Crooks, (sub: Martin Singleton). Those of you old enough to remember that dark period might ask themselves how many of those players would make it into Ryan Mason’s team? Alternatively, how many of Mason’s players would you choose in preference to Saunders’ selection?

Albion should have had enough ability and experience to win this tie, but instead fell behind after taking an early lead through Anderson, benefitted from a lucky late equaliser, and still went on to lose 2-3 in the closing stages. It remains the only time (to date!) that The Baggies have been knocked out of the FA Cup by a fourth-tier outfit.

It capped a miserable day for me personally, as upon arrival in Swansea I was one of a small group of lads who slipped away from the police escort to the ground, and instead found an empty pub a few hundred yards away. Big mistake!! We’d only been in there a few minutes when a group of around 20 lads from a local ‘firm’ piled in, which prompted the landlord to do two things. The first was to call the police and tell them the location of the ‘firm’. The second was to tell us to finish our drinks and get out while we could!! I’ve never been as scared as I was at that moment, as the locals were congregated around the only exit, and they had already clocked we were English. Time seemed to stand still as we edged our way out, trying not to look anyone in the eye, and it was a relief to get out unscathed.......................The joys of 1980s football!

By the way, there were less than 9,000 spectators there that day, and it will be interesting to see how that compares with the attendance at the 2026 game.