A Chelsea Cup-Tie

Charles Ernest Cundall 1890 - 1971

Summary

A football game, seen from the top of the terraces at one end of the stadium at Chelsea, looking down onto the pitch. The crowd and commentators are in darkness in the foreground. London is just visible in the distance behind the stadium.

Display Label

A Chelsea Cup-Tie 1923 Cundall had this picture reviewed in the Manchester Guardian: ‘a remarkable picture of an almost untouched subject… seen from the top of the highest stand, with the bare little green space closed in by the human sierras and in the immediate foreground three or four figures straining over a partition.’ The journalist has that irresistable urge to think of a crowd as a force of nature. Crowd metaphors I have encountered include: flood, tide, forest and fire, but never ‘sierra’. This is the uniquely mountainous stadium crowd.