Albionship 3000

The Football League resumed just as this season will end, with the Throstles winging their way to Swansea, albeit that back on August 31st 1946, Swansea City were then still just a Town, playing their football on the Vetch Field rather than the Liberty Stadium.

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It wasn’t a top tier fixture either, this being the curtain raiser on Division Two, but if all of those things will have changed by the time we go there in May, let’s hope the result remains the same – we won 3-2 with goals from our oldest living player, Frank Hodgetts, and two from the man he succeeded in that position, Dave Walsh.

A week later, we kicked off at The Hawthorns by beating Tottenham by the same 3-2 scoreline, Dave and Frank on the scoresheet again, Ike Clarke weighing in with a goal too. By the end of September 1946, Ike was to write himself into the history books with the first postwar hat-trick for the Albion. Indeed, he went one better by scoring four as we won 7-2 at Newport County.

That result stood as our best away win after the eradication of Hitler until Easter Monday, April 18th 1960, when we smashed Birmingham City 7-1 at St Andrew’s, both Ronnie Allen and Derek Kevan scoring hat-tricks, Alec Jackson completing the scoring. We played Blues again the following day at The Hawthorns. It finished 1-1, Kevan on target again. It was a vintage period for ‘The Tank’ as on March 19th, he’d become the only Albion man to score five in a post-war league game as we defeated Everton 6-2 at The Hawthorns.

Returning to Ike Clarke for a moment, he had the honour of notching the first Hawthorns hat-trick of the post-war years too, and that was an Easter event too, this time on Easter Saturday, April 5th 1947, when he got all three goals in the 3-0 win over Bury. In spite of Albion’s goal scoring exploits in that first season – 19 goals for Clarke, 28 for Walsh – we finished seventh, ten points short of promotion.