Middlesbrough and Millwall will both visit Sincil Bank next season, after they were defeated in their Championship play-off semi-finals this week.
Millwall were beaten by Hull City, while Southampton grabbed a late winner at St Mary’s against Boro last night. Surprisingly, the Millwall and Hull game was fairly uncontroversial, while Southampton face an EFL sanction for spying, accusations of someone being nasty to Luke Ayling and ballboys hanging on to balls. Good grief, in the 90s, that was stuff that was going on every week. Anyway….
It means two new faces at the Bank in terms of this season, and two new grounds for those who like to tick them off. Why? Because Boro and Millwall are not teams we’ve faced in a long time.
Millwall
We’ve only played Millwall 19 times in our history, the first meeting being the only time we’ve played them in the FA Cup. That was 1921, and Oscar Bretnall scored between two Thomas Rippon strikes to earn us a 3-0 win and a trip to Fulham in the third round.
It wasn’t a sign of things to come: we’ve since won four of our 18 meetings, but quite surprisingly, we won the last meeting, 2-0. That was February 1999, with Tony Battersby and Steve Holmes giving us three points in our futile battle for relegation. It even lifted us out of the bottom four.
Our last trip to the Den did not go well: a really strong-looking Lions’ side won 2-0, Paul Shaw and Lucas Neill with the goals. Neil Harris, Tim Cahill, Marc Bircham, and Stuart Nethercott all played for them.
In fact, for our last win in East London, you have to go back to May 1st, 1984. John Thomas and Gordon Hobson gave us a 2-0 win in front of just 2825 supporters. Grim times, back in the mid-eighties.
We did play Millwall in our first domestic final, the 1982/83 Football League Trophy. Having beaten them 3-1 at the Bank months before, we met in the final, before it was played at Wembley, and went down 3-2 with a brace from Marshall Burke.
Middlesbrough
We’ve had a little more success against Boro, but not a lot. We’ve played them more, and again, our first meetings came in the FA Cup, back in 1886 – we drew 1-1 in the first game, before they went down 2-0 at the Bank, William Gregson getting one of the goals. Interesting fact about Gregson: he only played FA Cup games for City, six in total, as we made the Fifth Round that season.
We were acquainted in the old Second Division, but didn’t have a lot of luck. We won 2-1 at Ayresome Park in 1959, Wright and McClelland netting for us. Both of their final visits to the Bank ended in a heavy defeat: we won 5-2 in 1960 and 1961. Roy Chapman got a hat-trick in the last meeting between the two clubs, but we were still relegated to the Third Division weeks after, not to return until 2026.
I do recall a pre-season friendly where we put five past them as a Premier League club, and they were relegated at the end of the season, but it didn’t mean a huge amount in terms of past meetings. That Second Division win was the last competitive meeting between the two, until next season.
Unless Southampton are thrown out of the play-offs for spying, and then we have a chance for revenge after a series of League Cup defeats!
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