Sunderland vs Blackpool in November 1974 was a clash between two promotion-chasing teams, and whilst they were both focused on the result more than anything else, the two managers also had extra reason
to try and come out on top.
Visiting gaffer Harry Potts was making a return to his home county, with the Hetton-le-Hole native keen to impress back on familiar ground. Meanwhile, his opposite number Bob Stokoe was reacquainting himself with the club he’d left to take up his post at Roker Park in 1972 — Potts coincidentally being the man that replaced him at Bloomfield Road shortly afterwards.
Since his job swap, Stokoe had experienced one of the best-known fairytales in football, although following up on his famous 1973 FA Cup win with promotion was proving harder than Sunderland first hoped, with the 1974/1975 campaign starting well but now enduring a sticky patch.
Consecutive defeats at Hull City and then Cardiff City had certainly slowed progress, and it wasn’t long into this latest fixture that a sense of frustration started to bubble to the surface.
A failure to make the most of their chances was getting to the Lads, although matters weren’t helped by swirling winds and the Tangerines’ determination in defence.
The visitors made themselves extremely hard to break down and as a result, showed little interest in attack. The closest they came to a goal in the first half was actually when Bobby Kerr attempted to cut out a hopeful cross and sent the ball over his own bar. Other than that, the only drama seen in the Sunderland box before the break was when Jimmy Montgomery was cautioned for dissent having disputed a decision with the referee and kicked the ball away in anger.
As for those openings at the opposite end, much of them came from the performance of Vic Halom, who forced several errors across the Blackpool rearguard.
Poor finishing undid a lot of the hard work however, and when the attempts looked good — as was the case when Ron Guthrie blasted an accurate shot from just a few yards out — goalkeeper John Burridge was able to display spectacular reflexes.
The pattern appeared to be continuing shortly after the break when Burridge once again sprang into action and got across to stop Pop Robson from scoring, but persistence was the key and it finally paid off for the striker in the forty ninth minute, when he rose to head a Kerr cross from the byline into the net, the move having commenced with a quickly-taken thrown in from Bob Moncur.
That prompted Blackpool to come out a bit in search of an equaliser, but they found no way past either Moncur or his defensive partner Dave Watson, and they walked off at full time having never really tested Montgomery.
It was that lack of bite that eventually cost the Seasiders.
They eventually finished the season with thirty eight goals — the lowest tally in the top half of the table and only seven scored on the road — whereas the Black Cats came a lot closer to going up, only to fall short right at the end – results against the three sides that pipped them to the promotion spots being the telling factor.
Saturday 9 November 1974
Football League Division Two
Roker Park
Attendance: 24,939
Sunderland 1 (Robson 48’)
Blackpool 0
Sunderland: Montgomery, Malone, Moncur; Watson, Guthrie, Porterfield; Kerr, Towers, Hughes; Halom, Robson
Unused: Finney
