This film is part of Free

They Call It Football

Tottenham Hotspur takes on an assortment of music hall performers (and their horses) in this comic charity match.

Non-Fiction 1923 1 mins

Overview

Charity football games - where celebrities of varying degree get to put aside the daily grind of showbiz and live out childhood dreams of scoring the winning goal in a cup final. Or, in the case of this newsreel item about a match with Tottenham Hotspur - where a ragtag of music hall and variety acts are wheeled in to distract from the serious soccer trying to take place in other parts of the pitch.

The "cup defeat" that ages the Spurs players at the end of the film was a 1-0 quarter-final loss to Derby County a week earlier - a defeat which stopped them reaching the first infamous 'white horse' final at the new Wembley Stadium. Some of these players would remember better times - Spurs had won the competition two years earlier.