It is not the sort of occasion you would expect these days – a first-team friendly game bang in the middle of a league season – but things were different back in 1965, when Carlisle United and Dundee United last met.
The game was arranged for November 2 that year, three months into the Blues’ first ever campaign in England’s second tier.
As the game approached it shaped up to be, for Alan Ashman’s side, a degree of respite from a challenging start to Second Division life. It also brought considerable intrigue in the make-up of the visitors.
Dundee United were an up-and-coming force in Scottish football, with a reputation for attractive football and recruitment that gave them a forward line in particular that caught the eye.
It included a Norwegian, a Dane and two Swedes. The former was Finn Seeman, who joined the Terrors not long before the Carlisle friendly; as well as being a Norwegian international, was also an expert skier, skater and ice-hockey player.
He joined Danish centre-forward Finn Dossing and Swedish international duo Orjan Persson and Lennart Wing in their ranks.
This put Dundee United at the vanguard of such Scandinavian recruitment, Morton having also broken into this market in the earlier 1960s, taking advantage of the fact that Denmark, for instance, did not yet have a professional top-flight, meaning opportunities to make a living were best made abroad for that nation's top talent.
Carlisle’s own talent was considerable, after consecutive promotions, but their difficult start to 1965/66 brought criticism to their door. In the pages of the Cumberland Evening News a lurid and sarcastic cartoon was published, captioned: “The ideal player to satisfy Blues’ critics”.
This hybrid, Frankenstein figure had an actual rocket for a left foot, wheels on his right boot, built-in wing-mirrors, a head shaped by various straight lines, enormous arms, shoulders and hands, a “menacing grin to frighten opposition”, “hypnotic eyes for persuading opponents to pass him the ball” and “shoulders big enough for carrying responsibility in event of team’s decline..."
Such a specimen did not thankfully exist – he’d have frightened off his own team-mates, never mind the opposition – so Ashman instead went into the orthodox market for new players. This brought in Exeter City’s Northern Irish right winger Eric Welsh, who swiftly became a crowd favourite and was part of a deal which took Jimmy Blain to Exeter, and Nottingham Forest forward David Wilson.
These players bolstered a squad Ashman had backed in public soon before the Dundee United friendly. “What I really want to see is the present staff play up to their capabilities,” Ashman told an open forum at the Morton Youth And Community Centre, adding that United were “not financially embarrassed” and could afford more new signings if necessary.
They arrived at their mid-season friendly after five defeats and a draw, putting them fourth bottom in Division Two, while their Scottish visitors were riding high in their top division.
In the event there was no appearance at Brunton Park for their Swedish duo Wing and Persson, who were on World Cup qualification duty in Cyprus, but Norwegian Seeman and Dane Dossing did make it.
The game, with a 7.30pm Tuesday evening kick-off, offered Main Stand tickets at ten shillings in the centre of the stand, eight shillings at the south and north centres, and six shillings at the wing. It attracted some 5,404 to Carlisle’s ground and a great many left suitably entertained, if not able to celebrate a United victory.
It was their visitors who earned the most plaudits for their attractive football, “using the ball with skill and good purpose” in the words of our reporter Bob Wood.
Dossing and Seeman were prominent in Dundee United’s play, while the hard-working inside forward exploits of 20-year-old Ian Mitchell were also notable, not least to the managers from clubs in the north east and Lancashire who visited Brunton Park to take a look.
Carlisle took the lead in the ninth minute, Chris Balderstone heading home a Ron Simpson corner, but Dundee United equalised midway through the half when Mitchell beat keeper Joe Dean to a cross and cracked the ball home.
The visitors then came on strongly after a number of second half changes. After Dean denied Dossing, they led in the 71st minute when that rarest of things, a stray Balderstone pass, allowed Benny Rooney through to score.
A minute later, Seeman set up Mitchell to make it 3-1, and by then the Blues were given cause to curse their earlier misses, Wilson having been denied his first goal for the club by a goalline clearance.
Carlisle did fight their way back to a degree, Johnny Evans and Stan Harland going close before Evans turned in a Welsh drive. It ended, though, in a 3-2 win for Jerry Kerr’s men.
For United, it was an interlude in a season which got better. Two games after the Dundee United visit they picked up a long overdue win over Birmingham City – Welsh the goal hero – and from December onwards they got into the victory habit enough to allay those early-season fears and rise to a 14th-placed finish.
Dundee United finished fifth in the Scottish First Division, and that was enough for them to break historic ground. It meant qualification for European football in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, which brought victory over no less than Barcelona in the second round before Juventus claimed their scalp.
A period of regular European football unfolded for them a few years later – while for Carlisle, things were taking a different shape in off-field respects. That autumn of 1965 saw a new “shelter” installed at the hitherto uncovered Warwick Road End, Brunton Park witnessing the sight of 40ft-long steel girders being erected by a huge crane: the ground starting to take what is now familiar shape, in a period of landmark United progress.
United: Dean, McConnell, Caldwell, Heslop, Passmoor, Harland, Welsh, Balderstone, Wilson, Evans, Simpson.
Dundee United: McKay, Millar, Briggs, Munro, Smith, Neilson, Rooney (Seeman), Gillespie (Rooney), Dossing, Mitchell, Seeman (Stuart).
Crowd: 5,404.
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