page_title: 1876 FA Cup Final
section_title: Summary
hierarchical_section_title: 1876 FA Cup Final / Match / Summary
caption_attribution_description: Men of the Day No.314: Caricature of The Hon Alfred Lyttelton keeping wicket in I Zingari colours. Caption reads: "English cricket"
context_page_description: The 1876 FA Cup Final was a football match between Wanderers and Old Etonians on 11 March 1876 at Kennington Oval in London. It was the fifth final of the world's oldest football competition, the Football Association Challenge Cup. Wanderers had won the Cup on two previous occasions. The Etonians were playing in their second consecutive final, having lost in the 1875 final. Both teams had conceded only one goal in the four rounds prior to the final. In the semi-finals Wanderers defeated Swifts and the Etonians beat the 1874 FA Cup winners Oxford University.
  The match finished in a 1–1 draw, the second time an FA Cup Final had finished all-square. John Hawley Edwards scored for Wanderers, but the Etonians equalised with a goal credited in modern publications to Alexander Bonsor, although contemporary newspaper reports do not identify him as the scorer. A week later, the replay took place at the same venue. The Etonians were forced to make a number of changes due to players being unavailable, and the revised team was no match for the Wanderers, who won 3–0.
context_section_description: Three sets of brothers played in the match.  Francis and Hubert Heron lined up for the Wanderers, while the Etonians' team included Hon. Edward Lyttelton and his brother Hon. Alfred Lyttelton and Albert Meysey-Thompson and his brother Charles.  The latter pair's surname had been simply Thompson until it was changed in 1874, and for the final Albert played under the name Thompson and Charles under the name Meysey. This is the only occasion that two or more pairs of brothers have played in the same FA Cup Final. Later that year, Francis Birley married Margaret, sister of his teammate Jarvis Kenrick.  The Etonian team also included Julian Sturgis, who had been born in the U.S. and was the first foreign-born player to appear in the Cup Final (discounting those born to British parents in the British Empire), as well as Arthur Kinnaird, who had captained Wanderers to victory in the 1873 FA Cup Final.  Wanderers began the match with two full-backs, two half-backs and six forwards, while the Etonians opted for one full-back, two half-backs and seven forwards.
  Wanderers won the coin toss and chose to start the game defending the Harleyford Road end of The Oval.  The crowd was estimated at 3,500, the largest for an FA Cup Final up to that point.  The match was played in a strong wind, to the extent that when Frederick Maddison took a corner kick for Wanderers, the gale blew the ball back out of play.  The Wanderers dominated the early stages of the game, but the Etonians kept them at bay for around 35 minutes until Charles Wollaston eluded Thompson and passed the ball to John Hawley Edwards, who kicked it narrowly under the crossbar of the Etonians' goal to give Wanderers the lead.  In the second half the Old Etonians had the wind in their favour and had the better of the play.  Around five minutes after the interval, a corner kick to the Etonians led to a "scrimmage" (a term in common use at the time to describe a group of players struggling to gain possession of the ball) in front of their opponents' goal, which resulted in the ball and a number of players being forced over the goal-line, uprooting the goalposts in the process.  Modern sources credit the goal to Alexander Bonsor, but contemporary newspaper reports in The Sporting Life and Bell's Life in London do not mention his name, merely noting that the goal was scored "from a scrimmage".  Neither team could manage to score another goal, and the game finished with the scores level, meaning that for the second successive season a replay would be needed to determine the winners of the competition.
caption: Etonian player Alfred Lyttelton also played first-class cricket, as depicted in this caricature published in Vanity Fair in 1884
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