1924 FA Cup final
The 1924 FA Cup final was the deciding match of the 1923–24 FA Cup competition, contested by Newcastle United and Aston Villa. It was the second final to be held at the Empire Stadium, Wembley, and took place three days after the opening of the British Empire Exhibition. It was an all-ticket match in response to the severe crowd congestion the previous year. The Duke of York was in attendance as the guest of honour.
Newcastle reached the final after a prolonged Cup run that included three replays against Derby County and a win against the reigning League champions, Liverpool, while Aston Villa conceded just one goal in their run to the final, which included wins against previous competition winners West Bromwich Albion and Burnley.
The final was played on a heavy pitch as a consequence of torrential rain in the hours before the match. Newcastle won 2–0 in a match that many reporters considered to be an outstanding final, and that featured several international players in each team. The goals were scored in the last eight minutes by Neil Harris and Stan Seymour, after Newcastle's stand-in goalkeeper Bill Bradley had made several good saves. Aston Villa were affected by an injury during the match to their star inside-forward, Billy Walker.
This was the second time Newcastle had won the FA Cup, and they returned to win it again in 1932. Aston Villa had won the competition a record six times previously, but did not do so again until 1957.
Route to the Final
As First Division clubs, Newcastle United and Aston Villa entered the competition in the first round proper, in which 64 teams competed.Newcastle United
Newcastle's FA Cup run began with a 4–2 win away to Portsmouth of the Third Division South, when they recovered from falling two goals behind in the first half. They then required four matches to beat Second Division Derby County, with Neil Harris scoring a hat-trick in an eventual 5–3 win after the first three matches between the teams had all been drawn 2–2. After beating another Third Division South team, Watford, 1–0 at Vicarage Road, they faced the reigning First Division champions Liverpool at home. Fred Hopkin hit the post for Liverpool early in the match, but Tommy McDonald gave Newcastle the lead with a header after 18 minutes and their defenders contained Liverpool's forwards for the rest of the game.Newcastle played Manchester City in the semi-finals at St Andrew's. City's team included the 49-year-old forward Billy Meredith, who had scored the winning goal in the Cup final twenty years earlier and was playing the last game of his professional career. Newcastle won 2–0 with two further goals from Harris to reach the final.
Aston Villa
| Round | Opposition | Score | Venue |
| 1st | Ashington | 5–1 | Portland Park |
| 2nd | Swansea Town | 2–0 | Vetch Field |
| 3rd | Leeds United | 3–0 | Villa Park |
| Quarter-final | West Bromwich Albion | 2–0 | The Hawthorns |
| Semi-final | Burnley | 3–0 | Bramall Lane |
Aston Villa's route to the final was rather more straightforward than that of their Wembley opponents, as they scored 15 goals and conceded just one in five consecutive wins. They began with a comfortable 5–1 win against the Third Division North team Ashington, who were reduced to ten players by injury. Billy Walker scored twice and George Blackburn scored his first goal for Villa. They then beat Swansea Town 2–0 at Vetch Field, with Len Capewell continuing a strong goalscoring run with both goals. Capewell scored twice more when Villa survived an early onslaught from their opponents to beat Second Division Leeds United 3–0 in the third round. In the later rounds they defeated two previous Cup winners from the lower half of the First Division, West Bromwich Albion and Burnley. Albion had earlier ended the run of the non-League amateur side, the Corinthians, who had caused the sensation of that season's competition when they knocked out Blackburn Rovers in the first round, but they were well beaten by Villa at The Hawthorns thanks to first-half goals by Capewell and Arthur Dorrell. Villa's goals in the 3–0 semi-final win against Burnley came from Dicky York, who scored twice, and Billy Kirton. Capewell was Villa's top scorer during their cup run, with six goals, including at least one in each of the first four rounds.
Pre-match
At the time of the 1923–24 season, Aston Villa had already won the FA Cup six times under the management of George Ramsay, most recently against Huddersfield Town in 1920. The club was celebrating its golden jubilee in 1924. They had reached the first finals at both the Crystal Palace and Stamford Bridge, and were now appearing in the second final at the Empire Stadium. By contrast, Newcastle had only one previous success in the competition, in 1910, although they had been runners-up four times between 1905 and 1911. Their first Cup final, in 1905, had ended in a 2–0 defeat to Aston Villa, with Harry Hampton scoring both goals. Newcastle had failed to win any of their previous FA Cup final fixtures in London, with their previous finals all having been played at the Crystal Palace and their only victory coming in the 1910 replay against Barnsley at Goodison Park, Liverpool.On 12 April, the Empire Stadium hosted its first international match, when England played Scotland in the last match of that season's Home Championship. The result, a 1–1 draw, left England in last place in the competition. Newcastle's Charlie Spencer made his England debut, and faced his club team-mates Billy Cowan and Neil Harris, who were both making their first appearances for Scotland. Aston Villa's Tommy Smart, Frank Moss and Billy Walker were also in England's team, and George Blackburn was an unused squad member. Moss captained England, and Walker had the honour of scoring England's first goal at the new stadium.
During the 1923–24 First Division season, both Newcastle and Aston Villa occupied a position in the top half of the table, as they had each season since the end of the First World War. Newcastle beat Aston Villa 4–1 at St James' Park on New Year's Day, but when the teams met again at Villa Park on Easter Monday, just five days before the Cup final, Aston Villa won convincingly, 6–1, with Walker scoring a hat-trick. Walker had scored another hat-trick against Newcastle in a League match four years earlier. It was Villa's biggest League win of the season and the first time Newcastle had conceded six in a League match since 1909. Newcastle fielded a virtual reserve team for this match and received a fine as a consequence. Only Willie Gibson kept his place for the Cup final, but their Scottish goalkeeper Sandy Mutch suffered a serious knee injury that ruled him out of the final and prematurely ended his career. Mutch had played for Huddersfield Town in two previous finals, including the 1920 match against Aston Villa.
The match was hugely anticipated, with The Times recalling the clubs' previous meeting in 1905 as "the best that has been played since the Cup was first instituted" while also noting the tendency for more recent finals to produce "negative football" and that the two teams "do not approach the old standard of play". The Manchester Guardian stated that the finalists "represent all that is best and most clever in English football". Aston Villa were the favourites, and were described as having "a more skilful line of half-backs, and superior defence". Their defensive record was among the best in the First Division that season. Their captain, Moss, who played with shrapnel in his knee as a result of action at the Battle of Passchendaele, described their team as having "a rattling good defence, strong halves and a nippy front rank". Villa's team retained five players who had appeared in the club's previous final in 1920: Smart, Moss, Walker, the inside-right Billy Kirton, who had scored the only goal in extra-time in that final, and the outside-left Arthur Dorrell. Six of their team were England internationals, with Tommy Mort, Dicky York and the Newcastle-born Kirton having won international caps in addition to the three players who faced Scotland at Wembley in April 1924. They fielded just one Scotsman – Vic Milne, a qualified doctor – who had come into the side at centre-half in November after the murder of Tommy Ball. Since the transfer of Clem Stephenson to Huddersfield in 1920, the skilful Walker had become the leader of the attack: Smart, whose full-back partnership with Mort was nicknamed 'Death and Glory', referred to Villa's team of the period as consisting of "Billy Walker and ten others".
In contrast, the three players who had made their debuts in the recent England-Scotland fixture were the only internationals in Newcastle's line-up, which contained five Scotsmen. Scottish players dominated the forward line, led by the pacy and powerful centre-forward Harris, and the Englishman Stan Seymour, the outside-left, also had experience playing in Scottish football with Morton. Harris and Seymour had each scored more than twenty times in the 1923–24 season. Newcastle were the older team on average, and The Times highlighted their half-back line as a relative weakness, with their inexperienced centre-half Spencer having turned in a "sorry display" in the recent international match and their full-backs Frank Hudspeth and Billy Hampson having "arrived at an age when they are slowing down". Hampson was aged 39 but for many years was incorrectly named as the oldest known player to have appeared in the final, at 41. Hudspeth and his former full-back partner Bill McCracken, who had left the club in 1923, had taken advantage of the three-player offside law that was then in place to develop an offside trap known as the one-back system. Other clubs, including Aston Villa, had also adopted this defensive strategy, and the 1924 final was the penultimate Cup final to be played under the three-player offside law before it was abolished ahead of the 1925–26 season.
On Saint George's Day, three days before the final, King George V visited the Empire Stadium to open the British Empire Exhibition, which was being held in the adjoining Wembley Park, and delivered a speech that was broadcast by radio, the first such transmission by a reigning monarch. That evening, around 300 Newcastle supporters set sail for London on board the tramp steamer, SS Bernicia. Scores of special trains carried spectators to London on the morning of the match, not only from the north-east and the Midlands but also from other major cities across Britain: these included Cardiff, with many Cardiff City supporters reported as having booked advance tickets before their team was knocked out by Manchester City in a quarter-final replay. One of these trains, travelling from Coventry, was involved in a collision in which four people were killed and more than fifty were injured.