For anyone who wants to relive it here it is. Note the number of games we played in the build up to that match as our success in all com[etions led to a real mess on the fixture list. We played 8 games in March and 11 in April. 


The greatest Challenge Cup Final of all time? But scant consolation when you lose.
Saturday 4^th May 1985                                    Hull 24-Wigan 28
 
So we were at Wembley again for a showdown with the mighty Wigan, but few would have thought that the Hull FC team could have been anything but exhausted. The game followed an amazing ‘fixture pile up’ that had seen us play10 games in 18 days, including three on consecutive days and a period of 5 matches in 7 days. The week before the final we had played Wigan at Central Park in a Premiership play-off semi final game and not surprisingly lost 46-12, in fact previously in that amazing month as the fixtures piled up, we had lost to them again, this time by 40-4 and therefore few outside West Hull gave us a ‘prayer’ of winning the Final. 


    All around the City shop windows were decorated and the Hull players were becoming real celebrities, opening events and ‘kissing babies’. When the big day came I travelled down by train just as I had with Mum for my first Final, all those years before in 1960. For the first year in six,  I expect I had a few cans on the train, but remember thinking that the final was possibly the longest I had ever seen, no doubt down to the fact that I was reasonably sober when I watched it.


     The old Stadium looked wonderful graced as it was by an amazing 99,801 fans, as years before Hillsboro, the capacity was increased and the segregation abandoned following an unprecedented demand for tickets. The Final also featured, a then record, 10 foreign players with six starting for Hull FC. All the match reports after the game praised both teams and billed the game “The Best Cup Final Ever Seen”. It might have been, and I am sure many pundits who were around back then will tell me that it was, but there is simply nothing to compensate for getting beaten at Wembley, and a few statistics are not going to change the fact that for me and thousands of other Hull FC fans it was an unmitigated disaster. There is no greater day in the Rugby League calendar than the Challenge Cup Final at our National Stadium, unless of course you lose.....again! The history, the occasion, the pomp and the circumstance, the colour and the noise were all there in abundance at that 50^th final at Wembley, but it was still nothing if you hadn’t won. 


     It was absolutely packed in the North East Corner of the ground and I couldn't move as team included Garry Kemble back for the first time since his injury in the Semi Final but he was strangely quiet that afternoon and looked to still not be fully fit. We pinned a lot of our hopes that day on Peter Sterling and John Muggleton who had both been in scintillating form of late, and the “Sterling Silver” and “Arthur Bunting’s Black and White Army” banners were all around Wembley that day.
      We started so well too. Despite our previous five Finals being hampered by slow starts we were straight out of the blocks, taking play immediately into the Wigan half. Crooks stroked over a 2^nd minute penalty and then after 9 minutes we went further ahead. Sterling handled the ball twice in a flowing move before Kemble’s deft inside pass found Kevin James who triumphantly planted the ball down near the corner flag, but as we sang “We’re the Barmy FC Army” Crooks was wide with the conversion. Back came Wigan who started to make an impression on our defence and soon they were level with a try by Ferguson, who had been flown back from Australia by the Lancashire Club, for the game. He skipped round O’Hara to touch down, for Henderson Gill to convert. 


     The opposition were now starting to dominate and after 27 minutes Kenny just seemed to be cantering as Mick Ford put him away near half way. He then accelerated past Kemble, to give Wigan a lead they were destined not to lose. By Half Time it was 16-8 after a brilliant try by Henderson Gill had the Wigan fans dancing on their seats and us ‘FC Faithful’ crying in our beer. 


      Half time was a sombre affair, and unlike many times in the past I was even finding it hard to find any solace in the bottom of a plastic pint glass. Subdued and depressed I stood with the other Hull fans around me and faced some considerable taunting from the ‘Pies’ supporters who were already celebrating. I had in my mind that first Cup Final defeat against Wigan, the one I watched with Mum in the little front room at 23 Aylesford Street all those years previously in 1959 when we had been thrashed 30-13.  Three minutes into the second half and things got worse. Brett Kenny twisted his way round Sterling and released Shaun Edwards who had a clear 25 yard run to the posts and at 22-8 the game certainly looked be up for Hull FC. Then straight from the restart Sterling broke free and went on a dodging run downfield which saw him get within ten yards of the line, as the cover came in he sent out a looping pass to Steve Evans who crossed the whitewash in the corner but Crooks missed again with the conversion. 


       Back came Wigan as Ferguson broke away from a tackle by Divorty and Schofield and careered downfield for a spectacular 60 yard touch-down. Then, the impossible happened; well at least it almost happened. On the 51 minute mark with Wigan leading 28-12, we produced three great sets of attacking rugby as James Leuluai started what was to be an historic fight-back. A big thrust into the line by Paul Rose saw our second rower release a great short ball which Leuluai grabbed out of the air to score what had looked like an unlikely try but Crooks missed again. Next up it was the turn of Sterling as ten minutes later he fed a superb delayed short pass to Divorty who scored again, but despite it being nearer the posts, this time Schofield missed the conversion. Then two minutes later as the flagging Wigan defence gave James Leuluai too much room in the centre of the field, he skipped through a gap, ghosted past two players and ran off to score one of the tries of the season to put us within 4 points of the opposition but again Schofield missed the goal. The hooter went and all the Wigan fans who had been dancing at half time breathed a massive sigh of relief as dejectedly we sunk to our knees.


      We had come so close to the greatest come back the game had ever seen and had we kicked our goals we would forever have been known as the ‘Comeback Kids’. Sadly it was not to be and I travelled home on the train in a deep depression but at least on the long journey home I was able to do what I have always done best in those situations and grieved on my own. It’s somehow so much easier to take when you don’t have to listen to other like minded passionate souls trying to explain it all away and make you feel better. 


       I wondered if I would ever get over it but at least I wasn’t Lee Crooks the local lad who I had seen at the end of the game in amazing isolation sat crying inconsolably on the pitch. He said years later in his excellent autobiography ‘From Hull to Hell and Back’ “I was the Captain and I was on goal kicking duties. I missed four goals and yet if I had kicked three of them we would have won. Blaming myself for my team losing a Cup Final is the hardest thing I had ever had to deal with”. The man destined to never be the youngest captain ever to lift the Challenge Cup was castigating himself, he was distraught, desolate and crestfallen and that afternoon around 45,000 Hull FC supporters knew exactly how he felt. It was going to take a long time for Lee Crooks and I to get over it! Wembley eh? It’s a wonderful place to play and support your team, but a shocking, shocking place when you lose.
 
 

Wilf touched on this earlier but it had been a crazy couple of months for games.

In March 1985 we played eight games and in the April we played eleven. Nineteen games in eight weeks including a run of ten in eighteen days. Utter madness.

In April we played on 6th, 8th, 10th, 12th, 14th, 17th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 23rd and 28th. This included the Cup semi and the replay. We won five, drew two and lost four of these eleven games.

Not surprisingly we used 43 players that season.

Was that the period when we tried to play 2 games in the same day and the rfl blocked it?

Yes, I think we requested that. As you say, the authorities rejected the idea.

Great post, brilliant information there. It's simply mind-boggling how many games the club had to cram in over such a short period. It seemed to happen to one club every year around that time (usually either Widnes, rovers or ourselves) if they reached both the JP and Challenge cup finals, along with the normal backlog of weather affected postponements. Our situation in '85 wasn't helped, of course, by having replays for both quarter and semi-final ties, what were the odds of that happening within a month!


Let's not forget also that the majority of players would have had day jobs to fit in as well, with the Rugby still a part-time sport back then. Add to that all of the travelling around and preparation I suspect the players didn't know whether they were coming or going at times in April '85! Think it's nothing short of a minor miracle that they only lost four out those eleven games that month.


Clearly times have changed and, as a now full-time sport, that situation is never going to arise again. However I do feel the game has undoubtedly lost something of its soul over the intervening four decades. Obviously no one wants to see a return to nineteen games in eight weeks, that would be ludicrous, but I do feel there is far less of a connectedness between club, players and fans than what there used to be back then. Maybe it's just wistful nostalgia on my part and maybe my younger self was viewing life differently back then, but it seemed to be more 'real' in those days than it does today.


Would also like to echo what a few other posters have said about the weekend forty years ago. No matter how great a game it was, my overriding emotion is still the fact that we lost. I was gutted then and I'm still gutted about it today. I've often thought about those five missed conversions and what could have been! One thing's for sure, none of us would have guessed that afternoon that another twenty years would pass before the next cup final would roll around.   

It's a game I never tire of watching even been on the wrong end of the score. Two cracking teams that oozed class delivered one of the best games I've ever seen.