[Lord Snooty]

March 24:

On this date in 1957, the famous, or should that be infamous, John Hilton Crowther died, in Blackpool, aged 77. He had pumped thousands of pounds into the club in 1918, a relative fortune, for which he never seemed to get the support of the local populace that he would've liked. Crowds were poor, averaging around 5,000, but making hardly any money in gate receipts. The ground had been redeveloped to hold 50,000.

So, in other words, our ground's too big for us.

Now down the other end of Leeds Road, there was another football club called Leeds City. They had been kicked out of the Football League for making some illegal payments to players. A bit of a steep punishment really when you look at what clubs get away with these days. West Ham got a slap on the wrist fine when they did the same with Carlos Tevez in 2007.

Anyway, they were out, but the city of Leeds had a massive fan base. And so it was proposed at a meeting in 1919 to form a new club called Leeds Urinals. Crowther, unknown to the rest of the Town directors, attended that meeting and decided to offer to the people of Leeds to move the whole of Huddersfield Town, lock, stock, barrel, manager Arthur Fairclough, Football League placing, blue n white striped kit and the team to play in that kit, into Bellend Road as the new team.

In other words, they wanted to do to us, what Milton Keynes did to Wimbledon.

Not gonna go into what happened next, but in the long run, Crowther went there, Town survived, went on to win everything in the next decade, while Leeds became a bunch of mediocre nobodies.

Crowther remained as Leeds chairman until 1924. He was the son of Joseph Crowther, a wealthy mill owner who had moved to Marsden from Golcar in 1867 and was the owner, along with his four brothers, of the Milnsbridge Woollen Mill in Huddersfield. In 1927, he married Mona Vivian, a famous actress of the time.

So while Crowther and his new team were languishing in the foothills of 2nd Division football, his old team had gone from strength to strength and on this date in 1928 were playing in their third FA Cup semi final. The first ones in 1920 and then in 1922, had both been won. This one, ended as a draw. It was played at Old Trafford and the opponents were Sheffield United.

Earlier in the season, Town had hammered the Blades 7-1 at Bramall Lane, so optimism would've been high. A crowd of 69,260 turned out to see this one and Alex Jackson and George Brown were on target for the Town in a 2-2 draw. The game was played on the Saturday. No hanging around in those days for ticket sales, police permission, fans making train travel arrangements or Sky Sports to disrupt all that, because the replay was arranged for two days time. Yes, this match was on Saturday, the replay was on Monday. It will be played at Goodison Park on the 26th of March.

The most recent game played on this date was in the successful promotion campaign in 2012. The game was against Charlton Athletic at the Galpharm Stadium and we won it 1-0 with a spot kick from Jordan Rhodes.

We had a game in another successful promotion campaign, this time in 1970. Points were dropped in this one though, well only one point actually as this was back in the days when only two points were awarded for a win. It was a 1-1 draw on a Tuesday night at Leeds Road against Swindon Town and we saw the first Town goal scored by new signing from West Brom, the Welsh winger Dick Krzywicki.

Despite the dropped point, we were still top of the 2nd Division table and this game was the fourth match in a sequence of nine matches unbeaten to the end of the season.