If Blackpool’s ice-bound pitch or Goodison frozen pipes meant you were sat at home on Boxing Day, twiddling your thumbs and forced to watch West Ham win at Fulham, just take time out to think about what your dad or granddad went through. This winter has been the most challenging in modern memory.
But 48 years ago things were worse. Much, much worse.
Known as the Big Freeze, the winter of 1962/63 saw the country covered in snow on Boxing Day with no thaw in sight until March.
Between December 22nd 1962 and February 12th 1963 neither Everton nor Liverpool played a single league match – the only action of any kind played by either side being a couple of FA Cup ties.
And they were lucky.
While Liverpool won at Wrexham in round three and Everton overcame Barnsley, the third round of the competition actually took 66 days to complete and involved a total of two hundred and sixty-one postponements.
The FA Cup final between Manchester United and Leicester City was eventually played on the 25th of May, with the two-legged final of the League Cup between Birmingham City and Aston Villa being played either side of it.
The country was battered by blizzards, freezing fog and icy temperatures as low as -22C.
It was so cold that many lakes and rivers froze over. In January temperatures plunged so sharply that a one mile stretch of sea was covered in ice.
In February more snow came and winds reached Force Eight. A 36-hour blizzard caused heavy drifting snow in most parts of the country. Drifts reached 20 feet (6.1m).
Gale force winds howled with wind speeds reaching up to 81mph (130km/h). On the Isle of Man, wind speeds were recorded at 119mph (191km/h).
It wasn’t until the morning of March 6 1963 that Britain woke up to a frost free morning.
Goodison Park had become the first English ground to fit under-soil heating in 1958 (although Arsenal had experimented, unsuccessfully, with it beforehand), but the severity of the weather meant that even warm pipes couldn’t help.
It was the coldest winter in Britain since 1740.
Faced with the onerous job of having to keep their players fit with only occasional match practice clubs had to think laterally.
Many trained indoors, while Coventry City flew to Ireland (which had escaped the worst of the weather) for friendly matches at the behest of manager Jimmy Hill, including a match against Manchester United in Dublin that was played in front of a crowd of 20,000 and ended in a 2-2 draw. Several clubs managed to defrost their pitches only for them to freeze again straight away, leaving them in an even worse state than before.
Norwich City used military flame-throwers on the Carrow Road pitch and flooded it, while at Blackpool similar flooding led to then England internationals Jimmy Armfield and Tony Waiters being photographed ice skating on the pitch at Bloomfield Road.
Halifax Town saw this through to its natural conclusion, turning the pitch at The Shay into a public ice rink and charging to use it.
The football pools companies, horrified at the losses that they were running up with the mass cancellations, took action and the pools panel came into being. The first panel was made of of the extravagently-moustached Consiverative MP Gerald Nabarro, former players George Young, Ted Drake and Tommy Lawton and former referee Arthur Ellis, who would go on to find national fame on the television show "It’s A Knockout."
They first sat on the 26th of January 1963, giving their verdict on what they felt would happen in matches that had been called off, and they still sit today.
When things started to get back to normal, Everton were the team to react to all of the disruption and won the Football League championship by six points (under three points for a win, they would have won it by eleven points), with Tottenham Hotspur finishing in second place, Burnley finishing third and Leicester City in fourth place.
One club that didn’t react well to the distraction was Manchester United, who finished the season just three points and two places above the relegation positions. United did, however, finish the season on a high, beating Leicester City in the FA Cup final and their supporters may also have taken heart from the surprise relegation of local rivals Manchester City, who went down with Leyton Orient, who were playing their only season of top division football in their history.
They were replaced by Stoke City (who featured a by then 48-year old Stanley Matthews) and Chelsea.
Almost half a century on, lessons have been learnt from that particularly long and harsh winter as well as others that have followed it. Advances in technology and more sophisticated groundskeeping means that under-soil heating isn’t even always required to keep matches going in cold weather.
And frustrating though this weekend has been, forecasters insist that winters as severe as those in 1962/3 are becoming less frequent.
Speaking during last winter’s cold snap, Peter Stott, climate scientist at the Met Office, said: "Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future.
"The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850."
But don’t worry, by 2962 football will be played in indoor stadium with central heating and sliding roofs.
Even at Blackpool!
