'Fancy! A lot of working chaps beating a lot of gentlemen!'
1879, the third round of the FA Cup. A football team from the humble Lancashire cotton town of Darwen take on Remnants - a Berkshire club of the moneyed and well-connected - and beat them. It is football's first ever giantkilling.
Their reward is a quarter-final with the mighty Old Etonians. It pitches rulers against ruled, rich against poor, champions against underdogs, old tactics against new, the inventors of the game against the upstarts. It is an encounter that is seen as symbolic. And, hidden at the heart of the encounter, lies the bitterest controversy.
Underdogs is a fascinating story that covers the very birth of football and its development towards the game we recognise today. Storyteller, football connoisseur and historian, Keith Dewhurst, shows how 130 years ago, at its beginning, football was already reflecting the modern game closely - money talks, cheating abounds, and victory is secured whatever the cost.
'Fascinating... The beginning of professionalism, a change in the style of playing, the end of southern amateur Oxbridge chaps dominating football... Keith has done an excellent research job in recreating the times and tensions' Spectator
Keith Dewhurst has been a yarn tester in a cotton mill, a reporter for the Manchester Evening Chronicle, and a columnist for the Guardian. Six of his seventeen stage plays have been premiered at the National Theatre, and he is the author of more than twenty television plays, two novels, two movies and a theatrical memoir.
Title: Underdogs: The Unlikely Story of Football?s First FA Cup Heroes
Author: Dewhurst, Keith
ISBN: 9780224083140
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 2013-02-07
Number of Pages: 320
Weight: 0.3401 kg
Fascinating... The beginning of professionalism, a change in the style of playing, the end of southern amateur Oxbridge chaps dominating football... Keith [Dewhurst] has done an excellent research job in recreating the times and tensions -- Hunter Davies * Spectator *
Keith Dewhurst...does a sound job of explaining how Darwen's exploits presaged a seismic shift in football power, as the upper-class amateur ethos of clubs based mainly in the south inexorably lost gruond to the more hard-nosed, and increasingly more skilful, approach of clubs in the North-West. [A]story of FA Cup magic -- Simon Redfern * Independent on Sunday *
It is a brilliant story, and Dewhurst tells it with forensic detail... Full of fascinating facts and some wonderful anecdotes as he traces the early development of football into a mass sport as the aspiring sons of the industrial classes went to public schools and brought the game back home with them... Fascinating stuff -- Sarah Crompton * Daily Telegraph *
An absorbing historic insight into their unlilely cup run, as well as the game's early struggle to establish itself * Four Four Two *
If you're looking for a true, well-written football story highlighting class divisions, how the game changed and early evidence of the will to win set in Victorian England, then Keith Dewhurst's Underdogs will not disappoint * Birmingham Post *