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(1) Charlie Buchan, A Lifetime in Football (1955)

It looked as if neither side was going to score. Then seventeen minutes before the end, Dan Lewis, Arsenal goalkeeper, made the tragic slip that sent the Cup to Wales.

Hugh Ferguson, Cardiff centre-forward, received the ball about twenty yards from goal. He shot, a low ball that went, at no great pace, straight towards the goalkeeper. Lewis went down on one knee for safety. He gathered the ball in his arms. As he rose, his knee hit the ball and sent it out of his grasp. In trying to retrieve it, Lewis only knocked it further towards the goal.

The ball, with Len Davies following up, trickled slowly but inexorably over the goal-line with hardly enough strength to reach the net. It was a bitter set-back.

Even after that, Arsenal had a chance of pulling the game out of the fire. Outside-left Sid Hoar sent across a long, high centre. Tom Farquharson, Cardiff goalkeeper, rushed out to meet the danger. The ball dropped just beside the penalty spot and bounced high above his outstretched fingers.Jimmy Brain and I rushed forward together to head the ball into the empty goal. At the last moment Jimmy left it to me. I unfortunately left it to him. Between us, we missed the golden opportunity of the game.

 

(2) Tom English, Scotland on Sunday (8th January, 2006)

Arsenal hosted Cardiff in the FA Cup yesterday, and all during the week in parts of the principality that are forever Bluebird they have been reminiscing about a previous meeting between those two teams. With good reason, too. In April of 1927, Cardiff beat Arsenal in what was then known as the English FA Cup final at Wembley, the 'English' being dropped in the wake of Wales's first and only victory in the competition.

So they were getting nostalgic for the boys of 1927 last week, and once again reliving the heroics of a particular Scotsman, Hughie Ferguson.

The little striker has been standing in the annals of Cardiff's history through the decades. In that same season of 1926-27, Ferguson scored 32 goals, a mark that stood for more than 70 years until Robert Earnshaw surpassed it in 2003. At Wembley, Ferguson scored the only goal of the game, a shot that was fumbled into the back of the net by Dan Lewis, the Arsenal goalkeeper.

Lewis, a Welshman, was said to be haunted by the error for the rest of his days. Arsenal supporters at the time didn't ease his pain much either. They accused him of deliberately allowing the shot to slip from his grasp in order to give his countrymen their greatest day. Ferguson, however, was a hero forever more.

When he scored, Lloyd George, sitting in the stand alongside Winston Churchill, whipped off his hat and waved it in the air. Later, the Scot was congratulated personally by King George V.

A quarter of a million people cheered the team through the streets of Cardiff the following day. On a high, then, Ferguson's life would have a deeply tragic end. In 1929 he returned home to Scotland to play for Dundee, but lack of form brought on by persistent injury made for an unhappy time there. The supporters expected huge things from him, and barracked him relentlessly when he could not deliver. He was dropped from the team and sank into a depression.

On January 9, 1930 - 76 years ago tomorrow - Hughie Ferguson committed suicide, gassing himself to death after a training session at Dens Park. None of the pieces that ran in the Welsh papers last week made mention of his tragic demise. Aged 32, he left a wife and two children.

 

(3) Tom English, Scotland on Sunday (22nd January, 2006)

Two weeks back we mentioned the bitter-sweet story of Hughie Ferguson, the Scot who got the winning goal for Cardiff against Arsenal in the FA Cup final of 1927 - the first, and only, time the old silver pot has been taken out of England. Hughie, who remains something of a folk hero in Cardiff today, came home to Scotland two years after the cup final and signed for Dundee, but after losing form and getting pilloried by the supporters, he tragically took his own life in January 1930.

We said in our piece that Hughie, 32, left a wife and two children. His grandson, Hugh, has been in touch to give us more details. "His wife - my grandmother - was actually pregnant at the time he died," said Hugh, from his home in Edinburgh, "so he had three kids. It just makes it all the sadder. Apparently my grandfather was suffering from an imbalance of his inner-ear by the time he came up to play for Dundee. The family reckon it was a tumour that was never diagnosed.

"Anyway, the result was that he kept falling over on the park, which didn't go down well with the fans. He was also an insomniac, so you can imagine how difficult things must have been for him."

Hugh cherishes his grandfather's medal and his cup-final jersey. He has the match programme and some photographs of him with King George V, who was there that day with Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. Hughie's story, his glory and his sudden demise, will be told as part of a BBC television documentary due to be aired in springtime.