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"Who was the first player to score on Christmas Day?" asks Sarah Tomlinson.
For a long time, Christmas Day matches were a regular feature of the English Football League calendar. The first was played on 25 December 1889, when defending champions Preston defeated Aston Villa 3-2 in a ding-dong match. The opening goal was scored after just six minutes by Preston's Scottish striker Nick Ross, making him the first man to score in the Football League on Christmas Day.
However, we don't think he'll be the first to score in a competitive match. A year earlier, Everton played two matches on Christmas Day: a Lancashire Cup match against Blackburn Park Road, followed by a friendly against Ulster FC. The opening goal - or 'point' as it was referred to in most newspaper reports - was scored by a Blackburn Park Road striker listed only as 'Gargett'. "Mackereth centered and Gargett scored with real beauty," said the Liverpool Mercury report. "This point was deservedly achieved and caused a lot of cheering." Everton eventually won 3-2.
But if we look at the Christmas Day games in Scotland, there was a goalscorer eight years earlier. There were three Scottish Cup Games on December 25, 1880, but as live scoring apps didn't exist 143 years ago, the details aren't so easy to pin down with certainty. What we discovered is that Rangers v Dumbarton and Arthurlie v Vale of Leven were both goalless at half-time, but Campsie Central v Queen's Park was a one-sided goal-fest. A report on qphistory.com shows that Queen's Park emerged 10-0 winners with goals for George "Geordie" Ker (3), John Smith (3), Johnny Kay (2) and Harry McNeil (2).
Assuming that order is chronological and Ker scores first, he will be the first footballer ever to find the back of the net in a competitive match on Christmas Day. And if not, then a tip of our festive party hat to one of the other three scorers mentioned.
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"I vaguely remember waking up on Boxing Day morning a few years ago (with a massive hangover) and seeing a caption on Football Focus with an old list of Boxing Day matches and loads of goals. Did it have something to do with the DTs or did this really happen?" Ken Davro wondered in 2000.
The story continues
We are not doctors, so our lawyers advised us not to comment on the floating spots in front of your eyes. But we can help you with the Boxing Day stuff. A staggering 66 goals were scored in the old First Division on 26 December 1963, leaving some teams wishing there had been a repeat of the previous season's Big Freeze (which had wiped out almost all football between Boxing Day and March). Here are the ads:
Blackpool 1-5 Chelsea
Burnley 6-1 Man Utd
Fulham 10-1 Ipswich
Leicester 2-0 Everton
Liverpool 6-1 Stoke
Nottm Forest 3-3 Sheffield Utd
West Brom 4-4 Tottenham
Sheff Wed 3-0 Bolton
Wolves 3-3 Aston Villa
West Ham 2-8 Blackburn
As if that wasn't weird enough, the results two days later - when many of the teams played the "second leg" - were unbelievable. West Ham, who had lost 8-2 at home to Blackburn, won 3-1 at Ewood Park. Manchester United, fresh from a 6-1 thrashing of Burnley, turned the tables at Old Trafford with a 5-1 win. And poor Ipswich, who had clearly been on the Christmas Day doll, avenged their 10-1 defeat to Fulham with a 4-2 win over the Cottagers at Portman Road. The two points did them good, mind you: they finished at the bottom.
"Do you know which football club opened its grounds for skating because the field was frozen?" Kim Vanderhoven asked in 2004.
The year was 1962-63 and England and Wales were experiencing the coldest winter since 1740 (by the way, Scotland had the worst winter since 1829). From Boxing Day 1962 to early March 1963, most of the British Isles were covered in snow, with temperatures five to seven degrees below average.
It is not surprising that there was hardly any football. In fact, the winter was so harsh that Barnsley only managed to play two matches from December 21, 1962 to March 12, 1963. En route in Halifax, however, they came up with an enterprising idea: why not use the Shay for ice skating?
Ironically, it happened on March 2, 1963 when - as the Manchester Guardian booklet "The Long Winter 1962-63" reports - most of the country finally experienced a thaw:
Troops have relieved a farm on Dartmoor that was closed for 66 days by six-metre snow drifts. With only fourteen postponed games in the Football League, football had its best day for eleven weeks. There was still no football in Halifax, but the local club opened its grounds as a public ice rink and hundreds skated there.
The stunt made a few bucks, but it did Halifax no favors: they only managed 30 points all season and were relegated to the fourth division, along with Carlisle, Brighton and Bradford Park Avenue.
"Has there ever been a club cruel enough to give its manager the boot on Christmas Day?" Simon Briggs wondered in 2006.
As heartless as it sounds, a club has They famously fired their manager on Jesus' birthday, and were even brave enough to ruin the festivities for one José Mário dos Santos Mourinho Félix. "I was nine or ten years old and my father [Félix] was sacked on Christmas Day," the Chelsea manager recalled during an interview in 2004. "He was manager, the results were not good, he lost a game on December 22 or 23. On Christmas Day the phone rang and he was fired in the middle of our lunch." Mourinho Jr. has himself come close to a festive dismissal: he was fired by Chelsea on December 19, 2015 and by Manchester United on December 18, 2018.
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Can you help?
"When Rico Lewis made his England debut against North Macedonia, he became the fourth England full-back in recent history to be born in Bury, Greater Manchester (joining Gary Neville, Phil Neville and Kieran Trippier). Considering that the city only has a population of 81,000 (the wider municipality has a population of 193,000), this seems a very impressive record. Are there other 'small towns' that have more consistently supplied players for certain positions in the England (or any other national) team?" asks Michael Barlow.
@TheKnowledge_GU Hello, we would like to know if any team other than Liverpool has a full alphabet of goalscorers?
- Michael Stretton (@MikeStretton80) December 16, 2023
"I follow the Swedish women's top division, OBOS Damallsvenskan, and can't help but wonder what the distance is between the top and bottom half of the rankings this season, where Hammarby won the title," begins Jonas Jacobson. "Early on, there seemed to be a big gap in the class between the top seven teams and the seven in the bottom half, and the distance between seventh-placed FC Rosengård (champions in 2022) and eighth-placed place placed Växjö DFF (newcomers from the second half level) was 19 points. So naturally I wondered: has there ever been a bigger gap between the top and bottom half of a first division table?
Several major British clubs started as church sides. Are there any professional teams that started as sides of a non-Christian religious congregation (mosque/temple/gurdwara/synagogue, etc.)?
- Ben (@BenJaneson) December 19, 2023
"Patrick Kisnorbo was recently fired at Troyes. During his coaching stint, his record was W3 D14 L23, a modest win record of 7.5%, which led to his club being relegated to Ligue 2. Yikes. Barring the interim managers (I would say at least ten games), does he have the title of worst manager in the 'Big Five' competitions?" emails Florian Labrouche.
"Over the weekend in Malta, a Brazilian player, André Carlos Penha da Costa, who plays for the second tier of Melita FC, scored his second consecutive goal of four goals for the club (in five days)," writes Jean Pierre Attard. "I was wondering if there is some kind of record for such a feat? I understand that the most consecutive hat-tricks is five."