On This Day (30th Nov 1935): Leaders Looking Good On The Road!

Sunderland secured the 1935/1936 Football League title in style, winning 7-2 at Birmingham in the final weeks of the campaign. There had also been several good performances away from home prior to that, with a victory over Everton at the end of November proving that the Lads were already shaping up well in their pursuit of the championship.

Having hit top spot early in the month, this was a period that saw the team supercharge their push.

Convincing wins over Preston North End and Brentford were followed by a 2-1 success against Middlesbrough seven days before the Merseyside clash — and it wasn’t long into the Goodison Park fixture that Sunderland were once again showing their credentials.

Early morning rain had made the pitch soft but playable, with the visitors soon able to start spreading the ball around accurately and putting together some dangerous attacks.

One such move commenced when Tom Morrison passed forward to Len Duns, and from his centre, Sunderland took the lead after a quarter of an hour with Raich Carter running onto it on the edge of the penalty area and unleashing a shot that not only flew into the net but was so good that it drew generous applause from the terraces.

Intelligent defending from Morrison then averted the possibility of a sudden Everton equaliser and moments after that Jimmy Clark was forced to clear a threatening free kick.

The pressure was short-lived however, and having seen it through, Sunderland were able to tighten their stranglehold. Patsy Gallacher only just cleared the bar as he let fly from distance and when he then combined with Charlie Thomson on a set piece routine to feed Jimmy Connor, it was 2-0, with the Scot turning well in the box and firing in low across the ground.

The strike meant the Black Cats had reached a half century of goals despite only playing a little over a third of their scheduled games for the season, and although Everton continued to work hard thereafter, Johnny Cochrane’s men remained the sharper of the two sides.

Carter came close to a second before the break and Alex Hastings embarked on a mazy run that was only stopped when Jack Jones intervened at the last moment, and whilst the defender would in later years move to Wearside, his current side were now just about hanging on at best.

The hosts did have a rather desperate penalty claim turned away before hitting the post through Stan Bentham, yet these were isolated incidents.

Even Dixie Dean struggled to make an impact against Sunderland’s rearguard and as time wore on, the Lads racked up the near-misses, with goalkeeper Ted Sagar doing his best to keep things respectable. His counterpart Jimmy Thorpe did produce a wonderful save to deny Jimmy Cunliffe at the end of another rare counter attack, but whilst it took until the final seconds to eventually put the seal on things, there could be little debate when it came to who’d been the better side.

After seeing Connor and Gallacher switching positions due to the former sustaining a leg injury, some of the pace did desert Sunderland’s final charges, but they still had plenty of nous — Carter hooking the ball across for his old pal Bobby Gurney to twist his neck and head home. The goals continued to flow for the pair in subsequent matches too, and they famously ended the season with thirty one goals each, becoming joint top scorers of a team that was at times lethal.

November had been huge and December didn’t turn out too badly either, with a 7-2 victory over Bolton Wanderers kicking things off nicely.

That outing helped show that home form was even more impressive than the healthy points return secured on the road, and with a lot of the hard work completed before spring had arrived, when the scoreline was repeated in the second city in April, it was clear that Sunderland AFC were justifiably champions of England.

Saturday 30 November 1935

Goodison Park

Attendance: 39,366

Football League Division One

Everton 0

Sunderland 3 (Carter 15’, Connor 29’, Gurney 88’)

Sunderland: Thorpe, Morrison, Hall; Thomson, Clark, Hastings; Duns, Carter, Gurney; Gallacher, Connor