First FA Cup giantkillers Darwen may have been underdogs, but also opened the door to professionalism The first match between these two contrasting sides is worthy of a novel in its own right: trailing 5-2 with 15 minutes to play, Darwen rallied and levelled the score. A man from Swinton, near Manchester, who happened to be in London for the day and had popped along to the match was so excited that he not only sprained his ankle but smashed his umbrella as well. But then the dream turned sour. The snooty Etonians refused to go up to Darwen for the replay and the bedraggled working-man's team was forced once more to make the journey to London, raising funds for the trip through subscription concerts. They forced another draw, but in the final replay, also played on Southern turf, they lost 6-2, possibly due to the fact that the majority of them were holding down jobs in the cotton mills at the time, and had travelled some 1,230 miles in total to meet the rested and relaxed Etonians. It is a brilliant story, and Dewhurst, famous as a TV playwright and dramatist, tells it with forensic detail. To be truthful, his total immersion in the detail of life in the Lancashire town leads to so much social history that it rather slows down his story-telling, but the book is full of fascinating facts and some wonderful anecdotes as he traces the early development of football into a mass sport as the aspiring sons of the industrial classes went to public schools and brought the game back home with them. Through riots, poverty and hunger, "football mania" as it was called, took hold in Darwen. But it wasn't quite football as we know it: not only were the rules different, and the matches full of scrimmages (the Etonians, three inches taller and a stone heavier per man than their opponents were very keen on these) but the entire attitude to the game was rather more laid-back. I am particularly fond of the story of the centre forward, Dr James Gledhill - "a large, bearded, somewhat abstracted, eccentric figure" - who missed a cup tie at Bromley Cross because he got off the train at the wrong station. It is hard too to resist Dewhurst's account of the team's first foray into London, where as they waited for a train on the underground, one young man asked for a cup of tea, and the waitress in the refreshment bar could not understand his accent, and thought that he was French. Though Dewhurst goes on to suggest that perhaps he was putting it on a bit, simply to flirt and raise a laugh. The main moral of the tale remains the one drawn at the time: "Fancy! A lot of working chaps beating a lot of gentlemen," said one of the Darwen supporters on the touchline. But Dewhurst, who has a wonderful memoir of Matt Busby to his credit, is too honest a writer to leave it at that. For in fact the Darwen's team success - the reason for their sudden rise to prominence - was that they had in their midst two Scotsmen called Jimmy Love and Fergus Suter. These two men, football historians now agree, were the game's first professionals, and as such were outlawed by the nascent FA who feared that professionalism would ruin football as they knew it. So it was the romantic outsiders who really represented the face of the modern game, not the amateur Old Etonians, whose goalkeeper was already 41 years old at the time of the epic FA Cup encounter. Looked at this way, it was raggedy Darwen FC, playing in cut down trousers and on a pitch that sloped so badly it was waterlogged which was the forbear of a game dominated by spoilt multi-millionaires and commercialism. The distance between then and now seems so vast, yet it just took a talented Scotsman who realised he could earn more on the pitch than off it. Fascinating stuff.