Season by Season: 1925/26

These days it seems every week some official guardian of the beautiful game has a new idea to 'improve' the sport. Make goals the size of a house, they say, or blindfold the goalies.

Weekly phone-ins often carry the call from supporters to tool the ref up like Tring’s answer to RoboCop. So let’s go back to a simpler time for the game, where football was football, and – oh dear, even then they just wouldn’t let it lie...

In the summer of 1925, all levels of the national game in England adopted a new offside law. No longer did three opponents have to be between a player and the goal. Now it was down to two.

Faster, fewer stoppages, clearer decisions, more goals, they said. And, by Jove, they were right.

“Revolutionised football starts to-day in all parts of the country.” Daily Mirror, Aug 29 1925, on the new offside law

In what indicates an unusually practical pre-season training approach for secretary-manager David Calderhead and co., Chelsea not only instantly mastered the law-change’s effects on defending, but managed to exploit the new attacking options quicker than anyone else in the Second Division.

After 13 games the Pensioners were unbeaten, had scored 36 goals, conceded just eight (better than the next tightest defence, Derby’s, by five) and topped the table from Middlesbrough by a massively superior goal average.

That was in early November. Following a Christmas Day draw with Blackpool, though, Chelsea had slumped to third, out of the vital promotion slots as injury and loss of form began to bite. And there they would finish, with no end-of-season play-offs to keep hopes of a return to First Division alive.

Money was still relatively tight at the Bridge too. The season’s notable new arrivals had, by necessity, both been forwards.

Local lad Albert Thain would stick around till 1931 and notch a half century of strikes in that time. Bob Turnbull, a better-travelled Scots striker, would manage the excellent strike-rate of 58 from his 87 games in Chelsea blue, ending in 1928.

In nets, Scouser Peter McKenna made his mark, began vying with iconic amateur Ben Howard Baker (pictured in action during the 2-0 win over Bradford City) for pre-eminence. The first Chelsea player born in the 20th century, he had an excellent shot-stopping record but was perhaps a little too short, at 5’10”, to thrive at the upper levels of a game in which the aerial punt was an approved method of attack.

Simeon 'Sam' Millington who joined at the season’s close, would soon eclipse McKenna as the Pensioners’ new goalkeeping hero.

In 1925/26...

Facts & figures: Chelsea’s cup visit to Crystal Palace set a then stadium record of 41,000
Cup run: Fourth Round, losing to Crystal Palace
All the rage: 1,750,000 workers go on General Strike to stop employers reducing miners’ wages

Season by Season: 1921/22

Players come and go, managers move on, directors, and even the very bricks and mortar of a football club, change eventually. Less transient are the crowds that are the lifeblood of the place, and through them the folk memory is passed on down the years.

And it’s a club’s reputation, its character, that once established is the only real constant.

Chelsea Football Club epitomises this.

Even now, established as we are among the elite of the Premiership, we are constantly reminded of the club's enduring “inconsistency,” the perennial struggle to see of supposedly inferior opposition, the underachieving glamour, the, well, unusualness.

Such personality traits were already apparent after 15 years of football at Stamford Bridge. By this time Chelsea had been promoted twice and relegated once, and had recently finished 3rd and then 18th in consecutive First Division seasons.

The club the Mearses built had earned a reputation for failing to follow up well-earned victories with further wins.

A poor 1950s joke might equally have applied back then: Two men are looking at newspapers at King’s Cross Station. “I see Chelsea won yesterday,” says one. “They can’t have,” frowns his pal, “they won last week.”

So how sweet April 1922 must have been for supporters when the club enjoyed one of its best ever sequences, winning seven on the spin. All of them, except a 4-1 thrashing of Aston Villa in Birmingham, were against teams lower the First Division.

The team boasted the necessary glamour, too, in Great Dane Nils Middelboe, the dashing Jack Cock, trainee medic and able right-winger Dr John Bell and the colourful, unorthodox keeper Ben Howard Baker (pictured above, right), a former high-jump champion whose party trick was to kick light bulbs out of chandeliers.

Baker, known as ‘HB’, became (and remains) the only goalie to have scored for Chelsea, when he converted the last-minute winning penalty against Bradford City in November 1921.

Two months later, against Arsenal, another of his spot-kicks bounced back into play and he raced the length of the pitch in vain to stop them scoring. He never appeared on scoresheet again.

“Just to make the poor fellow taking the spot-kick a bit more nervous” Keeper Ben Howard Baker on the reason for his antics before facing a penalty taker

Much like Chelsea sticksman Petar Borota six decades later, HB seemed disdainful of the 18-yard box, often rushing out into midfield in pursuit of the ball. He would play basketball around the box, flicking the ball over an opponent, while the coach was barking through a loud hailer for him to "get in with it!" And, like a Bruce Grobbelaar or Fabien Barthez, he would spend ages joshing around before facing a penalty kick himself.

He was an absolute hero, the epitome of the old Chelsea, and stayed in contact with the club well into the 1980s. HB died in 1987, perhaps the club’s longest-lived player at 94.

Chelsea finished ninth in 1922, but what an entertaining place the Bridge must have been.

In 1921/22...
Facts & figures: HB conceded an average of just 1.082 goals in his 93 games
Cup run: First Round, losing to West Bromwich Albion
All the rage: the luxurious Orient Express now travels all the way to mystical Istanbul