The Original Accrington Club

The original Accrington club was founded in 1878 in time-honoured club-beginning fashion; in a public house. This particular pub went by the name of ‘The Black Horse’ and still does to this day, in the same location on Abbey Street. They played their home games at the ground on Thornyholme Road which remains to this day as the home ground of Accrington Cricket Club. As their name suggests, they played in red. They were to be regular opponents of Rovers, mainly in friendlies before the start of the Football League. Probably the most amazing spectacle of all the games was provided by their first meeting, thanks to two huge lamps at each end of the Alexandra Meadows ground in Blackburn providing artificial lighting on 4th November 1878.. A huge crowd of 6,000 turned up to see Rovers win 3-0, although many more thousands watched for free on the adjoining hills. Rovers had by far the upper hand in their regular meetings, with Accrington not recording their first win over their neighbours until 1883, by which time the number of Rovers wins over the ‘owd Reds’ had already reached double figures and included a 3-1 win in a Lancashire Cup final. Below is a picture of the ‘owd reds’(copyright http://hem.passagen.se/accringtonstanley/ unofficial website). They did have better luck against other Blackburn teams however, most notably when they beat Blackburn 6-4 in the Lancashire Cup final 1881, the first of their three Lancashire Cup wins. Accrington were to become famous (or, rather, infamous) in 1884 when they were expelled from the FA for paying players and thrown out of the FA Cup competition that year (in which, for once, they were progressing nicely). Although they were only one of many clubs doing so at the time, they were the first caught and were made an example of. They soon rejoined the FA when professionalism was also welcomed as being inevitable. In their friendlies and local cup games with Rovers they continued to get a regular spanking and so, when the two clubs were drawn together in the 1887/88 FA Cup they viewed the match as their way to gain recompense for ten years of mostly continual defeats, especially as they had actually managed a rare win over Rovers 1-0 in the final of the East Lancashire Charity Cup the season before. They lost 3-1 though at home to Rovers so much for dreams!

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