Mud, sweat and beers - When Halifax Town toppled Manchester City in the FA Cup 40 years ago

A hypnotist called Romark would probably want some of the credit too.

He had been hired by City boss Malcolm Allison before Crystal Palace’s 1976 FA Cup semi-final with Southampton, but Allison refused to pay for his services, so the hypnotist put a curse on his side. Who lost.

Four years later, he was at it again when Halifax manager George Kirby brought Romark to The Shay before City’s visit.

“He hypnotised us all and I don’t think he’s taken us out of it yet!” recalls former Town defender Geoff Hutt, one of the players who attended a reunion event at The Shay on Saturday.

“There was some grudge between George Kirby and Malcolm Alison, I don’t know what was behind it.

“But George did anything he could do upset him, and he got Romark in. It turned out to be an excellent day.”

Kirby should have asked Romark to cast a spell over the pitch, which was in a dreadful state on Saturday, January 5, 1980 after three games in six days over Christmas.

“For the Walsall game (in the previous round), the pitch was unfit to play on,” recalls groundsman Norman Southernwood, “that was dangerous because there were patches of ice and snow.

“We played Huddersfield and Peterborough after that. By the end of the Peterborough game the frost was coming in quite hard, and all week the frost got further into the pitch until the Thursday when the sun came out.

“The game was always 50-50. Overnight we had a rain shower which left the pitch like a lake in the morning.

“You couldn’t fork the water away because the frost was still in the ground below. The top was a quarter to half-an-inch soft on top, so the referee said ‘if you can remove this water, I’ll have a look at it’.

“There were lots of people turning up to see if they could help, and Brian Hendy (Halifax’s trainer) played a massive part, because he went away and came back with sponge foam, which people cut up to pieces, stood on it, dragged it about and put it into wheelbarrows, squeezed it off on the speedway track.

“Even Manchester City supporters came out to help. The referee came back and said ‘yes, I think we can play’.

“When it came to putting in the corner flags, you couldn’t get them in because the frost was still in the ground, so we had to put a metal bar in to break through the frost layer to get the corner flags in.”

”I lived just up the road so I knew what the weather was like in the lead up to the game,” says Town skipper Dave Evans.
“I thought the game was going to be off when I woke up on the Saturday morning.

“But the job the supporters did was fantastic, cleaning the snow and water off the pitch.

“I knew it was going to be a bad pitch, but having watched the game back, we played a lot better than I thought we did.

“We played some decent football on the day.

“The pitch was very much a leveller because they had some star players, but I don’t think there was any inferiority complex from us.

“George Kirby said to us ‘just go out there and show what you can do, it’s man on man’.”

”It was such a leveller,” says match-winner Paul Hendrie.
“When we got there we saw how desperate the supporters were to get the game on, there were fans there with forks and even towels people were putting on the puddles. It was unbelievable.

“When it got the go-ahead we were kind of rubbing our hands together because you’d rather play them on that than an all-green pitch.”

”Paul was all over the pitch, he was everywhere,” says Evans. “It was a good goal, it came at the right time in the game as well.
“I think it would have been a different story if the goal had come in the first-half if we’d had to have held on for 50 minutes.”

”You couldn’t believe it,” says Hutt. “It was fantastic to see it go in the net.

“It’s no mean feat to beat Joe Corrigan, this big 6ft 7in keeper.”

The man himself was just as surprised as everyone else.

“Micky Kennedy threw it up the line, it came to Andy Stafford, who put a cross in,” he recalls.

“It had gone past me, I don’t think it was a great cross to be honest because it didn’t go in the box!

“I’d seen it go past me and saw John Smith about 20 yards out. He laid a first time ball in-between the centre-half and the full-back, and I ran onto it.

“Luckily enough it went into the back of the net. I hit it well, I’m all right-footed but it came to my left foot.

“I was just in shock I’d scored! Everybody was going mad.”
Goalkeeper John Kilner was named man-of-the-match.

“Yeah but it could have been one of many players on the day,” he says.

“I made two or three saves but Paul scored a great goal, John Smith played well, Micky Kennedy was fantastic.

“We out-battled them on the day, even though everybody talks about the pitch. We wanted to win that game more than they did.
“Obviously we had a bit of luck in certain areas but we played better than they did on the day.”

Not a bad result for a United fan.

“It’s the best win I’ve ever been involved with,” Kilner says. “Everybody wants to talk about it if they know you were involved in it.
“I’m from Manchester so there’s a lot of City fans I’ve come across over the years.

“They make excuses about the pitch, but it’s a great memory.”

”It was such a big thing for Halifax Town to beat a team of Man City’s calibre,” says Hutt.

“It ranks up there with the big FA Cup shocks like Hereford against Newcastle, although we’re never mentioned as much as that one.”

”After the game, I remember a supporter coming up to me,” recalls Hendrie, “he was smaller than me so he must have been small, and he gave me a 50 pence piece, and said ‘here, get yourself a drink’ and I said ‘what am I going to get for 50p!’
“Great memories, it’s something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.”

“I’ve got the CD of the game,” says Evans, “and I’m going to show it to my grandson because he’ll never believe what kind of pitches we played on!”