Tom Lappin: Matthews Final a distant memory but Blackpool are back at Wembley

Published on Saturday 22 May 2010 01:00

WHAT'S it to be for the travelling Premier League supporter next season? A happy stroll along the most gleefully vulgar seafront in Britain, with a stiff breeze from the sea blowing sand all over your stick of rock? Or a punch-up in the car-park outside Cardiff railway station with a stiff Welsh boot spreading teeth all over your injudicious away team scarf?

Every Englishman with an interest in today's Championship play-off final at Wembley will be willing a win for Blackpool, and not merely because Cardiff City has the most belligerent hard-core of supporters south of an Old Firm match. There aren't that many good guys left in the cast of Premier League football, but, given the chance, the cheery Seasiders might just fit the profile.

As we established last week in the FA Cup final preamble, its difficult to elicit much in the way of romance or a warm glow of sympathy for English football clubs. We can make an exception though in the case of Blackpool, a side with a rich if mostly unsuccessful history.

Their honours can be counted on one hand of a careless butcher, amounting to a Division Two championship in 1930, a stirring win over Bologna in the 1971 Anglo-Italian Cup final, oh and the most famous FA Cup final of all, in 1953.

YouTube footage of the 'Matthews Final' confirms that nostalgia tends to be founded on falsehood, with Blackpool's 4-3 win over Bolton Wanderers characterised more by laughably inept goalkeeping than the mesmerising dribbles of the eponymous hero. Still, it was all that one of England's greatest players ever won, and the club and town have been basking in its diminishing glow ever since.

Blackpool's football identity is more sepia-tinged than tangerine, and the club's past luminaries seem to carry a virtuous aura with them, from the legendary Stanleys, Mortensen and Matthews of the 1950s, through England luminaries Alan Ball and Jimmy Armfield to the unfulfilled career of the Scottish midfield genius Tony Green in the 1960s.

You'd probably have to stretch a point to make a case for Charlie Adam as one of football's nice guys, but his contributions to the team's success this season mean he deserves to be recognised as one of their most important players in years. The Championship is a place where players who wilted a little in the fierce spotlight of Glasgow football can thrive and develop. Adam will be in focus tomorrow, but Cardiff's squad includes fellow Old Firm refugees Chris Burke, David Marshall and Ross McCormack.

Adam has impressed sufficiently to be part of a creative midfielder transfer chain that could see him move to Everton, if Mikel Arteta shuffles off to Arsenal to replace Cesc Fabregas, if Fabregas returns home to Barcelona.

In the meantime, he will be the focus of a Blackpool side whose late charge into play-off contention has been achieved under the aegis of Ian Holloway, one of those managers long patronised as a colourful character, but whose achievements at Blackpool have already surpassed all reasonable expectations. The club had finished 19th and 16th in a tough division in the previous two seasons.

It's a provincial, lower-division club with a scruffy stadium and a sensible budget. The 500,000 Holloway spent on Adam last summer was the most conspicuous example of Blackpool's investment in playing staff, although the steady but unspectacular support of the Latvian banker Valeri Belokon has kept the club's finances comfortably above water over the last four years.

The actuaries who like to calculate these things suggest that today's match could be worth as much as 90 million over the next four years. Those kinds of figures are unthinkable at Blackpool, a club where the training ground is whipped by the gales coming in from the Irish Sea, and the stadium looks like an abandoned Meccano project.

The figures have all been calculated into the Cardiff plan. The chairman Peter Ridsdale, the man who dreamed the dream at Leeds United that cast the club into a nightmarish pit out from which they are just beginning to crawl, believes that you get what you pay for. "Give me a club's wage bill and I will tell you, within a position or two, where that team will finish in the league," is his contribution to the compendium of football quotations.

It's a belief system that would exclude romantic upstarts like Blackpool. Ridsdale is a believer in speculating to accumulate. His tenure at Cardiff has involved the brinkmanship of paying some of the highest wages in the division, building a new stadium and courting Malaysian investors. If Blackpool looks like a Division One club punching above their weight, Cardiff already has the trappings of a (struggling) Premier League outfit. Except for those troublesome fans. Cardiff is second only to Leeds in the number of its supporters with banning orders.

For all the cash though, Cardiff's strongest asset may be their astute and experienced manager Dave Jones. Just as Blackpool's may be Holloway. With Wembley looming, Holloway has cut back on the quips, accentuated a serious side that has always been there, but has tended to be overshadowed by his predilection for easy media-friendly lines like "I love Blackpool. We're very similar. We both look better in the dark."

Nice guys finish last in English football, and, should Blackpool make their unlikely ascent this afternoon, last is probably their destiny in next season's Premier League. For now though, 57 years on from their finest two hours, they have the opportunity to recapture a nation's affection. Oh, and 90 million. No pressure then.