On Good Friday, West Auckland – winners of the first ‘World Cup’ in 1909 – are up against Newton Aycliffe in the Durham Challenge Cup final. Andy Potts visits the club that won football’s first major international silverware in a distant era.
Nobody quite knows how an amateur team of coalminers from County Durham ended up representing England, the home of the game, at a tournament that is referred to by football historians as the first World Cup.
The trophy was conceived by Sir Thomas Lipton of tea fame. The much-travelled merchant hoped that the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy would become the footballing equivalent of his blue riband America’s Cup sailing challenge, established in 1851.
Hosted in Turin in 1909, home of the burgeoning Italian game, Lipton’s groundbreaking international football tournament was to involve four clubs. Italy’s was a Juventus-Torino XI. England’s was West Auckland.
There’s a tenuous theory that West Auckland’s initials had led to confusion with Woolwich Arsenal. Still south of the Thames and yet to grace the English top flight, the Gunners weren’t exactly blazing at that stage in their history. What is true, of course, is that the FA blazers reacted to Glasgow-born Lipton’s initiative with all the foresight and perception that would later obstruct England’s entry into the real World Cup for 20 years.
While Germany and Switzerland also nominated their top teams, England took the view that Johnny Foreigner was hardly to be encouraged and went back to brandy, cigars and parochialism. It’s likely that one of Lipton’s staff had connections with the Northern League and the invitation landed in West Auckland’s lap.
That doesn’t diminish the team’s achievement. Fund-raising for the epic voyage to Italy and getting a team together, West Auckland actually went on to win the first ‘World Cup’ thanks to 2-0 victories over Sportfreunde Stuttgart and FC Winterthur. Two years on, they did it again. First they beat FC Zürich 2-0 then Juventus, again the hosts, 6-1 in the final. It’s true that the Vecchia Signora lacked the prestige of today, but there’s no doubting the conclusive triumph West delivered.
The competitions also gave one young player, Jack Greenwell, a taste for continental football before a remarkable globe-trotting career that deserves greater recognition in his homeland. Greenwell mostly played for Crook Town, a few miles up the road from West, but his greatest claim to fame came in Catalonia. He played for and later coached the mighty FC Barcelona, where his victories in the Copa del Rey earned him a special place in the club’s history. Later he moved on to Latin America, coaching Peru to victory in the Copa América in 1939 – the only European to win it.
While Greenwell earned international fame, West Auckland floundered. The costs of travelling to Italy forced the club out of business. The trophy, awarded in perpetuity after the second win, was pawned to the landlady of the local hotel – but the cash wasn’t enough to stave off bankruptcy in 1912. A reformed club emerged in 1914, just in time to be disrupted by World War I. The momentum was lost forever.
West Auckland continued in the venerable Northern League but have barely filled the boardroom with silver. Not even the Thomas Lipton Trophy remains. It was stolen from the workingmen’s club in the village in 1994. Its replica is better secured than the original while the decor at the club’s Darlington Road ground features motifs of the trophy’s distinctive shape.
On the pitch, in the early 1960s West Auckland won back-to-back league titles and reached the FA Amateur Cup final. Their last victory in the Durham Challenge Cup came in 1964.
The divergent paths of West and Juventus were made cruelly clear in 2009. The teams met once again to mark the centenary of the first Thomas Lipton Trophy, but there was no glamour showdown with Del Piero and company. Instead, on a training pitch, Juve’s under-20s were sent out to better West’s historic win and batter the English club 7-1. A happier commemoration stands on the village green, where a sculpted miner emerges from below ground to greet a footballer.
Yet West Auckland are far from buried. Twice in recent seasons they’ve been to Wembley, losing in the FA Vase finals in 2012 and 2014. But, as club officials point out, those runs generated plenty of excitement and media coverage – but little cash. The mastermind behind those campaigns, Pete Dixon, quit as manager early in the 2014-15 season following ‘increased tension’ with the board. The team has struggled since.
This season, former Middlesbrough striker Andy Campbell has again showed his coaching calibre after getting lowly Norton & Stockton Ancients promoted in 2015. Campbell has eased his new club away from the drop zone and into a cup final.
But, this is West Auckland. Nothing is ever simple. The team’s march to the Durham Challenge Cup final has come, in part, through two opponents playing ineligible players. Four days after Darlington 1883 had been ruled out, semi-winners Whickham learned that they would be removed from the competition despite beating West 3-2.
Completely out of nowhere, West Auckland were granted passage to the final via a somewhat circuitous route. Not for the first time.
West Auckland v Newton Aycliffe, Durham Challenge Cup final. Friday March 26, noon. Eppleton Colliery Football Ground, Hetton-le-Hole, Tyne & Wear.
