Crusaders F.C.
Crusaders Football Club is a semi-professional Northern Irish football club playing in the NIFL Premiership. The club, founded in 1898, is based in north Belfast and plays its home matches at Seaview.
Crusaders originally played as a junior level team until 1931. They then played intermediate level football until 1949, and during that time they were one of the top non-senior teams in the country, winning the Irish Intermediate League nine times and the Steel & Sons Cup on seven occasions. After the withdrawal of Belfast Celtic, Crusaders were elected to the top level in their place, in time for the start of the 1949–50 season. Since then, the club has won 32 senior trophies; seven league titles, six Irish Cups, two League Cups, eight County Antrim Shields, one Setanta Sports Cup, two Charity Shields, two Gold Cups, three Ulster Cups and one Carlsberg Cup.
The club's traditional kit colours are red and black, and the current manager is Declan Caddell. The club's closest rivals are Cliftonville, with whom they contest the North Belfast derby. Rivalries also exist with other Belfast sides such as Linfield and Glentoran.
History
Junior years (1898–1921)
Crusaders Football Club was formed in the year 1898, although the exact date is unknown. The first meeting of the club is believed to have been held at 182 North Queen Street, Belfast, the home of Thomas Palmer who, along with James McEldowney, John Hume and Thomas Wade, was a member of the original club committee.Various names were suggested for the club, including 'Rowan Star', 'Cultra United', 'Mervue Wanderers', 'Moyola', and others such as 'Queen's Rovers', and the 'Lilliputians'. Thomas Palmer felt a name of more international significance should be adopted and he suggested "Crusaders", after the medieval Christian knights. The team is informally known as the Crues.
Initially, the club was only able to undertake friendly fixtures until it was formally admitted to one of the local junior leagues. Players were compelled to pay a match fee of two pence before they could take the field; a strict "no pay, no play" club policy was enforced. The very first competitive game of which there is any existing written record was on 10 December 1898. It came in the North Belfast Alliance against opponents named Bedford at Alexandra Park and the report states that, "after a splendid game Crusaders won by 5 to 2."
Crusaders went on to compete in the Dunville Alliance, Ormeau Junior Alliance, Alexandra Alliance, Woodvale Alliance and Irish Football Alliance until their election to the Irish Intermediate League in 1921.
Intermediate years (1921–1949)
Crusaders rapidly became one of the top intermediate sides in the country, and won an impressive collection of trophies, including the Intermediate League championship six times in ten years from 1923 to 1933. In addition, the side were very successful in the top junior cup competition, the Steel & Sons Cup, winning the competition on seven occasions as a junior side.The side also reached the Irish Cup semi finals three times in the 1920s. The first came in the 1923–24 season, where they were defeated by that season's Irish League champions Queen's Island in a replay at Pirrie Park. In the 1924–25 season the Crues knocked out senior sides Larne and Belfast Celtic before being halted by Glentoran at The Oval in the semi-finals. They reached the semi-finals once again in 1927, losing 2–4 at home to derby rivals Cliftonville. The Crues also reached the final of the Belfast Charities Cup in 1923, also an impressive achievement as the competition was open to all senior clubs in Belfast and the surrounding area.
Despite these feats, repeated applications for entry to the senior Irish League were turned down. The frustration at the club was such that serious consideration was given to making membership applications either to the Scottish Football League or to the League of Ireland. However, the Second World War intervened and no football at all was played by the Crues between April 1941 and September 1945. Crusaders began competing once more in the Intermediate League after the war, beginning with the 1945–46 season.
Early Irish League years (1949–1960)
Crusaders won the 1948–49 Intermediate League with a record number of points, and coupled with the vacancy created by the dramatic withdrawal of Belfast Celtic from the senior ranks in 1949, Crusaders were finally elected to the senior Irish League in time for the start of the 1949–50 season. Their first competitive game as a senior club was on 20 August 1949 and resulted in a 1–0 City Cup win at Portadown – ex-Belfast Celtic striker Vincent Morrison, signed during that summer, had the honour of scoring the club's first ever goal as a senior club. Morrison was the club's top scorer of their first senior season with 11 goals in all competitions. The Crues' first league match took place on 26 November, a 1–4 defeat to Linfield at Windsor Park, and their first victory came on 10 December away to Ballymena United by 3–1, but the side would have to wait until 1 April 1950 for the first league win at Seaview, with a 4–1 victory over Glenavon. The season was tough going for the 'Hatchetmen', as they were also known, and they had to apply for re-election after finishing in 11th place out of 12 clubs.As has always been the case, however, Crusaders never lacked determination. On 17 May 1952 they participated in their first senior final, the Festival of Britain Cup final, which they lost 0–3 to Ballymena United. Under the player-managership of Jackie Vernon they recovered to win their first senior trophy in the 1953–54 season by defeating Linfield 2–1 in the final of the Ulster Cup. The 1950s were not easy in spite of the presence in the side of some excellent individuals and the end of the 1957–58 season saw another application for re-election. The decade also saw the emergence of Curry Mulholland, who represented the club from 1951 until 1960, setting a goalscoring record of 149 which would not be beaten until the 1990s.
Irish Cup wins and European forays (1960–1970)
The 1960s brought much more success. On 17 May 1960 they won the County Antrim Shield for the first time, repeating the feat in 1965 with a 6–0 victory over Larne. With Jimmy Murdough as coach they also picked up another Ulster Cup final win on 1 October 1963, with a reply victory of 1–0 over Glenavon. These successes were overshadowed by two unexpected victories in the Irish Cup finals of 1967 and 1968 against the might of Glentoran and Linfield respectively. This led to Crusaders' first sojourn into European competition, against Valencia CF in August 1967. Also in 1968, they narrowly missed out on winning the Blaxnit Cup and becoming champions of all of Ireland, losing 3–4 on aggregate to Shamrock Rovers. The 1960s also saw the emergence of some of the greatest players in Crusaders' history, such as Albert Campbell,, Danny Trainor, Joe Meldrum, Walter McFarland and Danny Hale, who scored an incredible 143 goals in just four seasons, including a club record of 55 goals in the 1965–66 season, which still stands to this day.Billy Johnston era (1971–1979)
Jimmy Todd had won the second of those Irish Cups with the side in 1968, however by the early 1970s the Crues had declined slightly as the side of the 1960s broke up. Todd was replaced with Billy Johnston in early 1971, and he set about restructuring the squad. Under Johnston unprecedented success was to follow, with the Irish League championship trophy finding a home at Seaview in 1972–73, with the attacking duo of Tommy Finney and Jackie Fullerton scoring 47 goals between them. The club also set a record of going through the whole league campaign unbeaten at home, a feat which was repeated 40 years later in the 2012–13 season. This led to the club's first ever participation in the European Cup, in which they faced Dinamo Bucharest and had the misfortune of setting the record for a defeat in that competition, losing 0–11 in the away leg on 3 October 1973.In the 1975–76 season the Crues won the league for the second time, largely aided by the goalscoring of Ronnie McAteer who scored 20 league goals in 22 games. Sandwiched in between these successes was a County Antrim Shield and Carlsberg Cup success in 1973–74.
The second championship triumph resulted in the never-to-be-forgotten European Cup-tie with Liverpool which saw the brave Cruemen fall to the might of Kevin Keegan and John Toshack among others at Anfield by just 0–2 through a Phil Neal penalty and a Toshack strike. The home leg which followed was played before a crowd hanging from the rafters that would undoubtedly give the current health and safety legislators a heart attack. The Crues put up a dogged performance – Keegan scored in the 34th minute, and the Crues battled until the final ten minutes, when Liverpool's superior fitness told with four goals coming in the final ten minutes through David Johnson, Terry McDermott, and Steve Heighway.
However the 1970s also saw The Troubles begin to affect Irish League football, with two incidents in particular affecting the football club. On 21 August 1979 there were more than 1,900 police officers on duty for a match between Crusaders and Cliftonville, more than has ever been recorded at a football match in the United Kingdom. Another black day shadowed the club on 12 January 1980, when RUC constable David Purse was shot dead by an IRA gunman during a match with Portadown – the only murder at a football ground during the Troubles.
The Eighties (1980–1989)
Johnston had left the club in 1977, and after a two-year spell of management by ex-player Norman Pavis, Ian Russell took charge of the club in 1979. While there was great promise shown initially during Russell's spell, with the club reaching both the County Antrim Shield and Irish Cup final in 1980, they did not build on this and Russell left in 1983.Although performances on the pitch in the 1980s were steady, they certainly were not spectacular and the club paid the penalty for not building on earlier successes. Tommy Jackson took over in 1983, and led the Crues to their sole cup triumph during the decade, with the club winning the Gold Cup for the first time in the 1985–86 season.
Jackson left in 1986 and new manager Jackie Hutton had no money with which to buy players but he did the club a great service when he somehow completed the deal which brought Roy Walker, initially as a player, to Seaview in 1988.