Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Khaki cup final. It was both a controversial and poignant match and one of the few FA cup finals to have been "named".
Reading around the event I have come across lots of details that I was unaware of, for example on the completion of the match the football league suspended professional status for the duration in response to the growing criticism of the continuation of football during the war. On a similar theme the players were directed not to smile in the official photographs out of respect to the casualties. The decision to play the match in Manchester was due to the fact that Crystal Palace had already been requisitioned by the army and the travel restrictions in place meant that the majority of the crowd was made up of pals battalion volunteers from the Manchester area in training prior to the slaughter of 1916, rather than travelling fans of the clubs concerned. It seems that the match can be seen as a tipping point in the way the war was viewed within the country, the realisation that the scale and magnitude of the conflict was fundamentally different to anything that had happened before. At the start of that final season, the popular view was that the war would be over by Christmas by the time of the cup final the grim reality was clear.
Reading around the event I have come across lots of details that I was unaware of, for example on the completion of the match the football league suspended professional status for the duration in response to the growing criticism of the continuation of football during the war. On a similar theme the players were directed not to smile in the official photographs out of respect to the casualties. The decision to play the match in Manchester was due to the fact that Crystal Palace had already been requisitioned by the army and the travel restrictions in place meant that the majority of the crowd was made up of pals battalion volunteers from the Manchester area in training prior to the slaughter of 1916, rather than travelling fans of the clubs concerned. It seems that the match can be seen as a tipping point in the way the war was viewed within the country, the realisation that the scale and magnitude of the conflict was fundamentally different to anything that had happened before. At the start of that final season, the popular view was that the war would be over by Christmas by the time of the cup final the grim reality was clear.
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