Our sporting necromancy correspondent Phil Ascough recounts a 50-year old tale of sorcery, spells and spoiled seasons.
It’s quarter finals week in the Carabao Cup, just two games from a showpiece Wembley final, and this season’s competition marks a bizarre anniversary for Hull City. Fifty years ago they really should have taken their place in the last eight of the competition – then known simply as the League Cup. As a Second Division team they should have been heading to play the mighty Spurs, then managed by former City boss Terry Neill, at White Hart Lane.
But they had lost 2-1 in the fourth round at Doncaster Rovers on 11 November 1975, despite dominating a match against a team two divisions below the Tigers. Defeat was entirely beyond their control. Not the result of a dubious penalty, the ball deflecting off an unseasonal beachball, a sudden gust of wind or the keeper missing a shot after being dazzled by the floodlights. No, Hull City lost the match because a witch put a good luck spell on Donny.
Rovers sat sixth in the Fourth Division table and the attendance of 20,476 was evidence that home fans sensed an upset. Their manager, genial and wily north easterner Stan Anderson, seemed a little apprehensive in his match programme notes – or maybe it was mind games. He wrote that City’s attendances were “among the poorest in the second division” and victory would give them a chance of “a big tie and a packed house at Boothferry Park”. He added: “One of the game’s top strikers is on view tonight in Ken Wagstaff. With a top club there’s little doubt that Ken would have been in the England set-up. Injuries over the last three seasons may have taken their toll but he’s still a player to be reckoned with. Let’s hope for a cracker tonight!”
City boss John Kaye and his team must have been fancying their chances as they headed west to Donny’s old Belle Vue ground. A Tigers line-up which included Ken Wagstaff, Alf Wood, John Hawley and Roy Greenwood should have had enough firepower to see them through, with Jeff Wealands a safe pair of hands in goal. But City couldn’t have imagined having to overcome the talents of my mum’s friend Connie, who worked as a secretary in Doncaster Rovers’ office and counted white witchcraft among her hobbies.
Connie told me her story when we met a couple of years after the match. I had just started a career in journalism. My mum was a district nurse in Doncaster and said I should go and see Connie, who worked 30 hours a week for the health authority, lived just a couple of villages away, and made great pizza.
Connie revealed she had been interested in the occult for as long as she could remember and her interest ranged from simple herbal remedies to actual experiments in witchcraft. She had cast spells over the years to help her friends move house, get married and become pregnant. A woman from Thorne told me that Connie hit the post with one pregnancy attempt involving a few stones and bits of a tree from Glastonbury. “I didn’t get pregnant,” the woman said. “But a lot of my neighbours did, and all the gardens bloomed!”
I was at the match at Belle Vue and remember Greenwood tormenting Donny’s defence. Wood scored for the Tigers but Connie’s witchcraft kept Waggy at bay. Goals from Peter Kitchen and Ray Ternent won the match for Rovers. Connie told me she had spent the early evening of the match touring the area near her home and collecting laurel leaves which she used to prepare a spell to give the team good luck.
Three weeks later hordes of Rovers fans decamped to White Hart Lane. I watched again as Donny turned on the style, took the lead, fell behind at the interval but equalised early in the second half. Rovers were rampant and would surely have won the game but for the wizardry of Pat Jennings in the Spurs goal. But just a minute after Kitchen’s equaliser, Donny’s captain Les Chappell rolled a back pass to the keeper, who missed it. 3-2, and the match ended 7-2 as the magic unravelled – or did it?
Connie told me she had only ever done one “dirty deed” and felt it was time for another: “By then I had had enough. The players began to think it was all down to them, so I gave up.” She didn’t stop there, for good measure adding a curse to stop Rovers from winning promotion for at least four seasons.
After beating the Tigers, Rovers won their next game but then embarked on a disastrous run of eight defeats in ten league games and dropped to 12th in the table. A run of form took them up to eighth, just three points off a promotion place, before, mysteriously, they fell away again. Rovers won only one of their final ten games and finished 10th. They spent four more seasons in Division Four before winning promotion.
After meeting Connie I rang Stan Anderson to ask him if he remembered her. He said: “Remember her? How could I ever forget her?”