‘The Day Rangers Struck a Blow for League Football’

The Football League Review dated 1st April 1967, declared that our historic League Cup Final victory at Wembley was: ‘The day Rangers struck a blow for league football.’ The article goes on as follows:
‘Desmond Hackett summed it up in the Daily Express, “Queen’s Park Rangers would have beaten the greatest sides in England with the 45 minutes of super soccer that gave them a 3-2 League Cup Final win over First Division West Bromwich Albion”, he wrote. “This fact must be stated and repeated until the world of soccer is convinced that QPR are among the finest teams ever to win a Cup Final at Wembley.”

Why turn back the sports pages a couple of weeks? To emphasise that this magnificent win merely underlined what the real experts, the Football League club managers, have been telling you through the pages of this journal all season.
And the message is this: there are some fine sides playing great football in the Third and Fourth Divisions. And they have a prominent role to play in the future of the game.

True, as the Daily Mail’s Brian James pointed out: Rangers are an outstanding Third Division side this season. But the fact remains it is in the Third Division that they have been blooded and blended.

This Wembley triumph will long live in the memory of every lover of the league game as the day that Rangers justified the claim that there is no football league in the world containing such depth and such quality as the Football League.

Isn’t that something we can all get excited about?’
There is one other Rangers mention that appears in the letters page. On page 11, H.C. Allaway of South Ruislip wrote:

“A top manager inspires and breeds confidence in his players. Too many bulldoze players into their own ideas, which has led to many a good boy fading away. Nobody in the game has developed this natural flair in players more than Alec Stock of Queen’s Park Rangers. Name a better candidate for Manager of the Year”

Steve Russell