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Five Boxing Day battles for the ages: From Hull to Hallam FC and Manchester United

By on December 22, 2015

1. Manchester City 5-1 Hull City, 2008

Phil Brown’s halftime antics made an otherwise innocuous Boxing Day meeting between Manchester City and Hull City among the most memorable Premier League moments.  After Felipe Caicedo, Robinho and Shaun Wright-Phillips had shared four goals to down Hull in the first half and Brown decided to teach his team a lesson – quite literally – at halftime.  The Englishman dragged his team out towards the away supporters’ end at the Etihad, sat them down in a circle and gave them their halftime team-talk right then and there, complete with finger-waving and yelling.

“I thought it was nice and cold and I thought I would keep the boys alive, because they looked as if they were dead,” Brown later explained, per the BBC.

“Let’s not read too much into it, but I think 3,500-4,000 traveling fans deserved some kind of explanation for the first-half performance and it was difficult for me to do that from the confines of a changing room.”

Hull went on to lose that match 5-1.

The media tore through Brown’s antics, spurred on by captain George Boateng, who went out of his way to call out Brown for his antics.   Yet Hull healed the scars a year later when Jimmy Bullard instilled the moment in Premier League history with his mocking celebration in Hull’s very next trip to the Etihad.  Bullard says that the squad planned the celebration over dinner the night before and on Brown’s part, the gaffer seemed to take it the right way, telling the BBC: “I couldn’t deliver my post-match speech as I was laughing so much. The whole thing was timed to perfection.”

2. Burnley 6-1 Manchester United, 1963

Amidst the “big freeze,” Burnley defeated Manchester United 6-1 at home, scoring five unanswered goals at the end of the match, including four from Andy Lochhead.

Sir Matt Busby, so infuriated with his team, called up a seventeen-year-old youth-team lad by the name of George Best for the return leg just two days later. Best starred in an incredible 5-1 dose of revenge, scoring one of the first goals of his senior career.

The game was part of the most incredible round of Boxing Day fixtures ever, with sixty-six goals scoring across the ten First Division fixtures. Fulham beat Ipswich town 10-1 that day, still the Cottagers’ biggest win ever, and Blackburn Rovers mauled West Ham United 8-2. Seven men scored hat-tricks across the lead and another four were sent off.

3. Hallam FC 0-2 Sheffield FC, 1860

Sheffield FC’s match with cross-town rivals Hallam FC marked the beginning of football and Boxing Day’s beautiful marriage in 1860. Founded three years prior as an offshoot of a cricket club, Sheffield FC faced Hallam in the first ever inter-club football match, played under the old Sheffield rules.

The game was played at Hallam’s Sandygate Lane, the oldest football ground in the world.

An excerpt from ESPNFC tells a little story from the game: “The Sheffield Telegraph sent a reporter along to check out this new innovation, and it seems that the rules aren’t the only thing that have changed about football in the past 153 years. The correspondent noted that it would be “invidious to single out the play of any particular gentleman when all did well.” You can’t really see many reporters these days slipping that one into their match reports.”

These days, both Sheffield and Hallam currently play in non-professional leagues, but their rivalry is still thriving.

4. Derby County 4-4 United, 1970

A soft layer of snow could only go a small way to cover up the mud at Derby County’s Baseball Ground on Boxing Day 1970, as Manchester United visited in a back-and-forth First Division fixture. Some of United’s all-time greats got on the scoresheet in perhaps the most hectic opening quarter-hour in United history.

Derby scored two quick goals in the early moments of the match, but Denis Law leveled on ten minutes and George Best bagged a scrappy equalizer from a Bobby Charlton corner two minutes later. Law nodded in a third on fourteen minutes, the fifth goal of the match. Derby turned the tables again with two more goals on the other side of the half, but Brian Kidd equalized late on to tie the game at four all.

In front of a packed crowd, the match attained an old-school atmosphere that puts so much of today’s modernized, commercialized game into perspective.

5. Chelsea 4-4 Aston Villa, 2007

At the end of a Boxing Day thriller in 2007, Chelsea and Aston Villa ended level on four goals and ten men. Andriy Shevchenko bagged a brace to negate two first-half strikes from Villa and Alex put the reigning champions in the drivers’ seat soon afterward. Yet Martin Laursen nicked a late equalizer for Villa to put the match down in the history books.

Honorable mentions:

Middlesbrough 3-1 Manchester United, 2002;

Chelsea 4-4 Aston Villa, 2007;

Coventry City 3-2 Arsenal, 1999;

Aston Villa 2-2 Arsenal, 2008;

Sheffield Wednesday 4-0 Sheffield United, 1979;

Grimsby Town 7-3 Manchester United, 1933;

Charlton 4-2 Chelsea, 2003;

Hull City 2-3 Manchester United, 2013.

Here’s a warm happy holidays from the team at Football Every Day!

Homepage photo credit: David Dixon, via geograph.co.uk

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.