Liverpool v Small Heath (1901)

Liverpool
1901-09-28
Silent
1m

Early league football, with the team who will become Birmingham City losing at Anfield in a relegation year.

Footage of this First Division football game serves as a brief appetiser for shots of enthusiastically waving crowds and an unusually prolonged group portrait shot of a handsome-looking fire brigade. The reason for their feature role is lost, but they beautifully illustrate the power of moving image to bring history to life when they drop their static poses and relax in front of the camera.

The game ended with a 3-1home win to Liverpool, the previous season's champions, over newly-promoted Small Heath. This game came less than a month after the two teams saw out a 0-0 draw in Birmingham on the opening day of the season. Liverpool fielded seven Scottish players, at a time when Scotland dominated the British Home Championship, revealing that the club's strong links north of the border longprecede Shankly, Dalglish, Souness and Hansen. Small Heath, who changed their name to Birmingham in 1905 before settling on Birmingham City in 1943, finished the season 17th out of 18th in the table, and returned to the Second Division. Liverpool finished 11th.

Edwardian Football

The beautiful game, Edwardian style, in some of the earliest ever film of League, international and amateur football

For Blackburn-based filmmakers Mitchell & Kenyon, the attraction of football was at least as much the swelling crowds - who they hoped to lure to paid screenings - as the game itself. With only a few hundred feet of film on hand and far less mobile cameras than today's, their cameramen could only hope to sample the action on the pitch; catching a goal was a rare bonus.

The crowds' passion and energy are almost spectacle enough, but these films also survive as priceless football history - preserving, among other trophies, the earliest known footage of Manchester Utd and probably the first 'international' games captured on film.