Yesterday in 1961, Selhurst Park witnessed the highest attendance to a 4th Tier Football League match (Division 4) in England when Crystal Palace met Millwall at Selhurst Park The South London neighbours, attracted a 37,774 crowd, when they met in an end of season, Fourth Division promotion game, on Good Friday. Name the players? The attendance was a "world record" by the way, apparently.
The legendry Arthur Rowe, once of Spurs fame, brought his style of "push and run" to Palace and livened up their performance. Palace were second by 2 points to Peterborough United who took the division by storm with centre-forward Terry Bly scoring 52goals in the season.
Posh were a Southern League club, elected to the FL in 1960, with an enviable FA Cup history.
The Posh's record that season was: P46 league games: W28 D10 L8 F134 A65.
Millwall spoilt the Palace party by winning 0-2, but Palace eventually went on to win promotion, coming runners up behind Peterborough United (just been listening to their chairman talking on Talksport about the financial state of clubs like the Posh under present circumstances.).
In 1953-4 Palace were 22nd/24 in Third Division South, in 1954-5 20th. 1955-56, Palace were 23/24th in the division. In 1956-7 20th, 1957-8 14th; 1958-9 7th in the new Division 4, 1959-60 8th and then promotion!!
In Scotland, things were not going so well for Glasgow Rangers, who were demoted to the Fourth Tier, the bottom of the Scottish League in 2012-13 for "insolvency, and had to rebuild. All but one of their league games in that division were attended by 40,000+ at Ibrox and the best was saved for the giant clash, the final game in the season (May 4th) for Glasgow Rangers against the might of Berwick Rangers, 50,048 witnessed it! Berwick, of course an English town. Rangers won 3-0 (Glasgow that is).
Population of Glasgow: 595,000
Population of Berwick: 48,000: I know this has no bearing on the result but just to point out the "human" gap between the two settlements.
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