Never make a categorical prediction in front of an audience. Football has been teaching this lesson for 88 years.
30 April 1938. The BBC was broadcasting an FA Cup Final live for the first time. Preston North End vs Huddersfield Town at Wembley. A rerun of the 1922 final.
90 minutes: 0-0.
Extra time, 119 minutes: still 0-0.
Commentator Thomas Woodrooffe — a Royal Navy lieutenant-commander turned broadcaster — into the microphone:
“If there’s a goal scored now, I’ll eat my hat.”
Seconds.
Just seconds.
Bill Shankly — yes, that Bill Shankly, then a 24-year-old Preston wing-half — played George Mutch through. Mutch was fouled by Alf Young. Penalty.
Mutch picked himself up — he had been hurt in the collision — and drove the ball so hard, the paint came off the bar and onto the ball as it crossed the line.
1-0. Cup. End of the match.
A few days later, Woodrooffe ate a hat. It was made of cake and marzipan, but unmistakably a hat. He kept his word. The newsreel exists.
The broadcaster’s curse was born.
Its most famous descendant came 57 years later, when Alan Hansen looked at a young Manchester United side that had just lost the opening day of the 1995-96 season and said, on television, “You can’t win anything with kids.” That United team won the league and the FA Cup that season.
Football listens. Football punishes.
And on the pitch that day at Wembley in 1938 was a future Liverpool manager nobody yet knew, winning his first major trophy at the stadium where, just two decades later, an entirely different football era would start belonging to him.
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Yesterday: 29 April 1971 — The Priest Who Silenced La Plata.
Such a great story. Read it for the first time last week. If only Private Eye had been around to capture it then.