First Touch writer Dave Bowler has been busy lately working on a new project. It’s a series of books to be released over the coming years by Curtis Sports called The Magic Of The Cup that will cover each historic FA Cup season from preliminaries to final, including exclusive interviews with those involved.
Each book release will be limited to just 1000 copies, all of them 196 pages. The first two books to be released are for seasons 1973/74 and 1967/68. It’s the perfect gift for every soccer fan, so order yours now.
The 1973/74 FA Cup season was one of the most remarkable on record, not simply on the pitch, but off it too. It brought us a first taste of competitive Sunday football in England as the nation grappled with the oil crisis and the three-day week and clubs battled to find electrical generators to fuel floodlit football.
Bideford played more FA Cup games in a single season that any other club ever has, before or since, and still only made it to round one. Newcastle United looked as though they might equal the record as they went through replay after replay before a riot threatened their very place in the competition.
But it all ended with Liverpool’s Bill Shankly winning the competition for the second time as a manager and concluding that that was fulfilment enough for any man, leaving the stage to the shock of a nation.
With a revealing director’s commentary on the season as a whole from Newcastle United’s Alan Kennedy – later a Liverpool legend – and full coverage across the season using contemporary and newly researched sources, “The Magic of the Cup 73/74” is the comprehensive story of a classic season in the story of the world’s greatest cup competition.
Here are a couple of excerpts from “The Magic of the Cup 73/74”
In this first excerpt, Duncan McKenzie reveals the secrets of a successful fitness regime, 1970’s style..
The concept of playing football on a Sunday became a reality during the 1973/74 season, and in this excerpt we learn how football navigated the challenges of the ‘Sunday Observence Act’ while upsetting some of the more traditional figures in the game.
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