Wednesday 8 July 2015

Blast from the Distant Past

During a recent random trawl on You Tube, I found some vintage Queen's Park footage I never thought existed. It comprises clips from our Scottish Cup semi final against Celtic at Ibrox in 1928. It prompted me to look up my copy of "The Men With The Educated Feet," a statistical and pictorial history of Queen's Park published in 1992.

As I've eluded to previously, Queen's were the giants of the Scottish game until the early 20th century, winning the Scottish Cup 10 times in the first 20 years and finishing runners up in 2 other finals. Our last flourish came in 1900 when, after initially taking the lead, we lost the final 4-3 to Celtic, 7 years after our last appearance at that stage. Pickings have been slim for us since but the 1920s seemed to see us adjust to playing in the professional leagues (remember we're an amateur club) and achieve some respectable results.

Season 1927/28 marks, to date, our last Scottish Cup semi final. Victories over Arthurlie (2-0), Morton (4-1), Kilmarnock (1-0 in a replay after a 4-4 draw) and Partick Thistle (1-0) got us to the penultimate stage. A goal from David Letham, his 6th of that season's tournament, was not enough however to prevent us going down 2-1 to a Celtic team which went on to lose the final 4-0 to Rangers. Maybe the Spiders would have fared better? We'll never know. The semi final footage can be viewed at this link:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQcTsyxK19U&feature=youtu.be

Interestingly, Queen's could have won a cup double that year as we made the final of the Merchant's Charity Cup (a tournament contested from 1877 until 1961) only to be defeated 3-1 by Rangers. We certainly had a good squad during that era as, in season 1928/29, we finished 5th in the top division, our best ever league finish. We were also rather flamboyant, scoring 100 goals in 38 league games and conceding 69! If we hadn't started the season with 3 consecutive defeats and shortly thereafter gone 8 games without a win, who knows what may have been achieved. In the squad at that time was our record goalscorer, J.B. McAlpine, who also held the club appearance record until it was only bettered in the late 20th/early 21st century by one of our modern day legends, Ross Caven. As mentioned before, McAlpine's name lives on with our headquarters named after him as shown below. The bar bistro within the building also features montages of legendary players with McAlpine being amongst them.

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