For May 10th I'm going back four years to 2017 and another Cup Final. This time it's the Birmingham Senior Cup Final between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leamington.
Despite Birmingham not being a county, there is a Birmingham County FA. After the FA Cup (1871) and the Scottish FA Cup (1874) their Birmingham Senior Cup competition is the world's third oldest football competition. It's been running since 1876 and, for the trophy alone (see programme cover), it's a competition that's still worth winning. In fact, after the Scottish Cup, the trophy is the second oldest football trophy in the world (the original FA Cup having been stolen and almost certainly melted down).
These days, the County FA's bigger clubs do still enter the competition albeit that they don't prioritise it and tend to field reserve or Under-23 players who, nevertheless, are often stronger than the first team squads of the Non-League entrants. Matches between the bigger and smaller clubs are frequently close run affairs and, sometimes, the smaller clubs prevail. Such was the case in 2017 with the Brakes (Leamington's nickname thanks to their origin having been a car components company) having beaten Bedworth United, Nuneaton Town, Stratford Town and Walsall en route to the Final. This was held at Wolverhampton's Molineux stadium which theoretically gave Wolves home advantage. In practice however few, if any, of Wolverhampton's team that night will have put in an appearance at their club's home ground and nobody from Leamington was going to pass up the opportunity of playing at such a prestige football ground.
The Final attracted a healthy attendance of 920 and Leamington took an early lead thanks to a penalty scored by Rob Thompson-Brown after 15 minutes. It wasn't the last penalty that we were to witness that night. Wanderers substitute Andrew Sealy levelled things up after 68 minutes and there was no further scoring in the regulation 90 minutes. The game went straight to a penalty shootout which Leamington followers rather fancied as they had not-so-secret weapon Tony Breeden in goal. Breeden, bin man by day, was a huge character at Leamington, not unknown for the taking or saving of penalties and indeed it was he who took and scored the Brakes first penalty in the shootout. The bin man was about to trash Wolverhampton's chances of winning the Cup. After nine successful spot kicks, Breeden saved Wolverhampton's fifth penalty to win the Cup for Leamington. If you watch the video attached to my blog you'll note that Breeden was miles off his line when that man again Andrew Sealy took the final spot kick but that didn't bother the officials who must have wanted to get home for their tea. It was the first time in 141 years that the Final had been settled by penalties. Now that must be a world record!
CRB Match No. 2156
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