CITY 4 COVENTRY CITY 2
League Cup 5th Round Replay
16th January 1974
attendance 25,409
scorers
City Summerbee(65), Lee(80 & 83 pen), Law(87)
Coventry Alderson(35 & 68)
Ref Pat Partridge
City MacRae, Barrett, Donachie, Doyle, Booth, Towers, Summerbee, Bell, Lee, Law, Marsh – sub Leman(unused)
Coventry Glazier, Coop, Holmes, McGuire, Craven, Dougdale, Cartright, Alderson, Stein, Carr, Hutchison – sub Green
The Replay at Maine Road was played in torrential rain which left the pitch a sea of mud. Yet the abysmal conditions only added to the enjoyment of the match, which was played at an unusual time of 1-30pm midweek, due to restrictions on electricity from the miner’s strike.
Saunders’ City did everything but score as they pounded away at Coventry for half an hour. Then against the run of play Coventry took the lead through the diminutive Alderson, who was on the mark with a shot that Keith MacRae possibly should have saved, but he saw the ball bounce off his arms and trickle into the net.
Shortly before half time Glazier made a superb save from Bell, and the City fans were thinking they would never score.
The second period was much like the first and eventually It was Summerbee who scored the equaliser with just over an hour gone.
Within three minutes, however, Alderson had struck again, swooping on to a Bell mistake, to beat three defenders before scoring a great goal. It seemed all over. But City fought back again with two goals from Francis Lee, the second being a penalty, City were now 3-2 up.The tie was then settled when Denis Law made it 4-2 very late in the game.
The headlines the next day proclaimed City as “THE MUDDY MARVELS” in what was one of the best ties ever played in the League Cup.
I was a 14 year old youngster at the time and managed to save up my paper-round and pocket money and wag school to attended both games and can still remember them well, a group of us jumped on a service train from Piccadilly to Coventry via Crewe for the original 5th round game at the old Highfield Road ground (2-2) which was a few days before Christmas 1973 and the replay was played 3 weeks later at the old Maine Road ground (4-2) in mid January 1974.
…..The memorable part of these two games was that they were both originally scheduled to take place on Wednesday evenings with 7:30pm kick-off’s but due to the power-cuts and black-outs of late 1973 and early 1974 both games actually kicked off at 2pm on the original scheduled Wednesday afternoons and i will never forget the replay at Maine Road which was played in near monsoon conditions and all of us stood in the Kippax Street soaked to the skin and shivering to death.
…..Am i also right in thinking that Maine Road was the only football ground in the Country at that time to have its own emergency power generators in place to light up those 4 huge floodlights if ever needed which meant the game was always going to be played and the reason for the early kick-off’s was to ensure that the supporters got away from the ground safely due to the said Power-cuts and Black-outs……”Happy Days!”