It was one of the most visually striking events of the interwar years and one of the first times that moving footage captured a major news event clearly. A vast crowd poured onto a football pitch, only restrained from covering it completely by a single mounted policeman and his white horse holding them at bay. In fact, the horse, Billie, wasn’t white, he was grey, it just looked that way in the newsreel. And he wasn’t alone – he just stood out more than the other horses, bays and chestnuts. But a myth was born.
The ‘White Horse Cup Final’ was the inaugural match at the newly-built Wembley Stadium. While it was in construction, finals had been held at – and failed to fill – the much smaller Stamford Bridge. So the FA wasn’t expecting what happened next: tens of thousands of people turned up, many, many more than the 125,000 the stands could officially accommodate; so many that the pitch became an overspill and only the horses kept it clear enough to allow play to proceed.
We now find ourselves in the unheard-of position of being odds-on to win a trophy, the Uefa Conference League
This famous match celebrates its centenary this Friday and, for West Ham fans like me, this moment marks 100 years of, mostly, hurt. Because, it almost goes without saying, West Ham lost that day, beaten comfortably 2-0 by Bolton Wanderers, which pretty much set the template for the Hammers – or Irons as the cognoscenti actually call them.
The club had only entered the football league in 1919, the same year that the music hall song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles was released – and the two’s fortunes, or rather the elusive nature of good fortune as the lyric describes, were to become entwined. For a club that has been going for some 127 years, we have, more than most, been characterised by failure. Fortune, for West Ham, is almost always hiding.
The only period in which we bucked this trend by tasting palpable success lasted for a mere 16 years, from 1964 to 1980, or just 12.5 per cent of our total history. This golden era saw West Ham practically take over Wembley and, in successive seasons there, win the FA Cup, the European Cup Winners Cup and then the World Cup – or famously saw us provide the Moore-Peters-Hurst spine of the England team that did. The trophy years continued with further FA Cup Wins in 1975 and 1980. And then stopped dead.
We have never won anything outside this 16-year window. On a personal level, it came to an end just as I was becoming a fan – so I caught the tail end of this period as a tantalising flavour of what life could be like as the supporter of a successful team, followed by a lifetime of disappointment. I started going regularly just after that 1980 zenith. By 1988, I was living in London and going to every home game. Naturally, my first full season saw us relegated. In fact, I’ve managed to support West Ham for only 36 per cent of their total existence but have witnessed all but one of our six relegations.
Sure, there have been some near misses. A couple of finals, a few semi-finals and so on. One of the latter, in the first leg of two, away to Oldham in the League Cup in 1990, we contrived to lose 6-0. In the semi-final of the FA Cup the following year, we lost to Nottingham Forest 4-0. There have been some good times: for every relegation, a promotion and so on. But our speciality has been spoiling it for other teams, most recently helping to kill off Arsenal’s title dreams earlier this month.
The nearest we’ve ever come to winning anything in this five decades run of recurring disappointment came in 2006 when we came very near indeed. Not at Wembley but Cardiff because the 1923-era national stadium was being rebuilt.
West Ham was beating Liverpool 3-2 with the clock in injury time – we just needed to hang on for another three minutes. But unlike the delirious fans around me, even at this advanced stage, I still honestly didn’t believe we could win. So when Steven Gerrard scored his spectacular equaliser, I was far from surprised. In fact, I felt almost a sense of relief that I could finally give up hoping for the impossible. Inevitably, we lost the penalty shootout that followed.
The reason I mention all this is that, despite a largely abject 2022-3 season, we now find ourselves in the unheard-of position of being odds-on to win a trophy, the Uefa Conference League. It may be a competition so obscure and lacking in historical prestige that it has eluded the trophy-hoarding likes of Ronaldo and Messi but it nevertheless represents palpable silverware, something we have now waited 43 years for. So we are not going to get sniffy about it.
West Ham are clear favourites. We just have to negotiate a semi-final against undaunting Dutch side AZ Alkmaar and we’ll be in a final, in Prague next month, against Basel or Fiorentina, both of whom look eminently beatable. What can possibly go wrong? Well, I’m not sure yet how it will go wrong, I just know that it will.
Our rivals Spurs are hardly renowned for winning things either – they haven’t won a trophy of any kind since a modest League Cup 15 years ago and haven’t won the league title since before the invention of The Beatles and sexual intercourse. Yet from this lofty pinnacle of supposed superiority, they like to put us down by describing matches between the two sides as ‘West Ham’s cup final’. But they’re wrong.
Our true cup final was the White Horse match. And for all the many disappointments, it gives us one point of distinction that no rival can ever match: the 1923 final saw the biggest crowd ever recorded at any football match anywhere ever. The police estimate put the number present at around 300,000, a figure that will never be surpassed, and many more than the official record crowd, 199,854 at the Maracana stadium for the 1950 World Cup Final between Brazil and Uruguay.
By this metric, West Ham are the biggest club in the world – just ahead of Bolton, currently stuck in the third tier. And we always will be. Even if we never win anything ever again, which we probably won’t.
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