shop window in Birmingham while it was in their possession as holders in 1905. As all attempts to recover it or to trace those who stole it were futile, the only alternative for the Football Association was to provide a replica, which is the trophy (or which clubs compete and have competed for the last ten years. Though they did not get home in the first year of the new Cup, Aston Villa secured hold of it in 1897, and again in 1905. Of the winners in the middle ages of the cup, though comparisons are proverbially odious, the Preston North End team of 1889 stand out perhaps most conspicuously by reason of their all-round football. Like Aston Villa eight winters later, they won the League Championship, then just instituted, without losing a match, in 1889, and also the Football Association Cup without having a goal scored against them. Though latterly they have not been able to reproduce the brilliant form they showed under the watchful eye of their great supporter, Mr. Sudell, the memories of their consistently fine football two decades or so ago are still fresh. What a hold the Cup final has on the football public as a spectacle cannot be better illustrated than by a mere mention of the fact that no less than 110,802 persons visited the Crystal Palace in 1901 to see Tottenham Hotspurs, the ultimate winners, and Sheffield United play a drawn game.
Incidental reference to Preston North End's double first in 1889 recalls the formation of the Football League, the creation of a life long worker in Association football, Mr. W. McGregor, early that season. What an important part the League system has played in the economy of modern football can hardly be fully discussed in what is primarily a practical treatise on the game. It certainly came originally to supply a general and obvious want in the shape of a competition of continuous interest, and not like the F. A.
