CORINTHIANS ROUT THE BELGIANS!

It is 120 years since Corinthian sent Belgium packing with a 12-0 victory in Leyton. Dominic Bliss revisits a game we have a dozen reasons to be proud of…

It might be hard to believe, given the status Belgium have gone on to achieve in the international game, but there was a time when the British press were patronisingly congratulating them on their “pretty conception of passing” after they had been beaten 12-0 – that’s TWELVE-NIL – by the Corinthians.

Granted, this was January 1906, more than 60 years before professionalism was introduced in Belgium, and it was technically a Belgian Association XI, presumably because they were playing club opposition and not a fellow national team. However, the Red Devils fielded nine full internationals and still found themselves completely outmatched on a soggy east London pitch.
 
‘Corinthians rout the Belgians!’ crowed the newspaper headlines about the goal-fest at Leyton, erstwhile home of Essex CCC. It was clearly a lucky venue for our forebears when facing teams nicknamed the Red Devils, because two years earlier they also inflicted what remains Manchester United’s record defeat there, with an 11-3 victory.

The general consensus was that the result didn’t flatter the Londoners, and that the Belgians were “too mild” in the middle of the park. This was a common complaint about continental opponents at the time, as English amateurs were known to be particularly physical in their approach, having learned the game on public school playing fields, where anything went.

The match report in Lloyd’s Weekly (a now long-since defunct Sunday newspaper) gave a breathless description of Corinthian’s “dashing, lengthy limbed, go-ahead forwards”, asserting that their free-flowing attacking football was too high-octane for the Belgians.

“The way that Harris, Wright and Co. pedipulated the ball was an object lesson to our visitors which it is sincerely hoped will bear fruit,” the star-struck reporter added, sending this Corinthian-Casuals historian to the dictionary to look up the word ‘pedipulate’ 120 years later.

Meanwhile, the Morning Post focused on the Corinthians’ “long, swinging passes,” for which they were renowned at the time. These days we’d call it switching the play and back then it often bamboozled opposition defences, who were used to dealing with either head-down dribblers, or a short-passing combination game. On a slippery surface, the quick-thinking play of the Londoners had the Belgians sliding this way and that as the forwards “did what they liked with the ball”.

That Corinthian vintage also boasted some of the most lethal forwards in our club’s history, all known for striking the ball hard and true. The prolific S.S. Harris helped himself to four goals that day, while S.H. Day and C.W. Alexander registered a hat-trick each and G.C. Vassall bagged a brace. By all accounts it could have been more.

“Feye, the Belgian goalkeeper, had no chance whatever with the shots that scored,” the Lloyd’s report continued, “and it must be mentioned in fairness to that custodian that he kept out several warm shots.”
That day, it was agreed, Belgium had shown they had “the makings” of good players. They had only played their first official international two years earlier and only began to wear red shortly before they played the Corinthians.

In the decades to come the Red Devils would become one of Europe’s strongest international sides, regularly outperforming their relatively small population and even spending a remarkable 1,442 days as FIFA’s number one ranked team between 2015 and 2021. Looking back, it’s probably fair to say they learned the lessons they needed to that day in Leyton!
 
06.01.1906, Leyton
 
Corinthian 12
S.S. Harris 4, C.W. Alexander 3, S.H. Day 3, G.C. Vassall 2
 
Belgian Association 0
 
Corinthian: T.S. Rowlandson, C.C. Page, W.U. Timmis, K.R.G. Hunt, G.B. Canny, C.D. McIver, G.C. Vassall, S.H. Day, C.W. Alexander, S.S. Harris, E.G.D. Wright