The play-off system each league had originally devised was scrapped

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There were eight clubs in the Eastern League, but it soon fifa 15 xbox coins became apparent that Bethlehem, the Giants and the Hakoah All-Stars were in a class of their own. In the hope of sustaining fan interest, player loans were hastily arranged. Bethlehem gave away virtually its entire reserve team and New York Hispano, a former state league team, were suddenly graced with the decidedly un-Hispanic presence of ‘Wee Willie’ Crilley, a veteran ASL forward who had come to the US not long after scoring 49 goals for Alloa Athletic in 1921-22, a club record which still stands.

As the autumn half of the season lurched to an awkward end, both factions stridently predicted victory and blamed each other for the conf lict everyone agreed was ruining the game. In truth, neither league was prospering. T he New York Celtics, a latecomer to the Eastern League, survived only a few weeks of the spring half before folding. In the ASL, Jersey City disbanded after playing only seven matches and the long-serving Coats team disappeared in March before reforming as Pawtucket Rangers. Rumours, claims and counter-claims abounded as the season wore on: Nat Agar had asked his players to take a 50 per cent drop in wages; Fall River fans had demanded that Sam Mark bring Bethlehem Steel back to New England; an Eastern League match in New York attracted a paid attendance of 39. Accusations that the two leagues were trying to poach each other’s clubs (including, bizarrely, Stoneham’s Nationals) also took wing – and as the season drew to a close New Bedford’s ASL franchise actually did jump to the Eastern League. But the Whalers played only eight times there. Reportedly unimpressed by the standard of play and pining for derbies with Fall River, they jumped back.

The play-off system each league had originally devised was scrapped, largely because the winners of both halves were the same: Fall River in the ASL, Bethlehem in the Eastern League. A cash-strapped USFA turned the Challenge Cup final into a best-of-three series. The Hakoah All-Stars won the first leg against a St Louis entity known as the Madison Kennel Club – the image of a bounding dog sewn onto their shirts – in front of a healthy 18,000 in Missouri. For the second game Brooklyn’s Dexter Park, a modest baseball facility, overf lowed with eastern fans desperate for top-class action. The New York World reported:

There were 21,583 persons in the enclosure, officially, and it is a safe estimate that approximately 150 of them, mostly policemen, saw all the game. The remaining customers had a look at the first ten minutes of the first half, if they were lucky, but very little after that. No soccer game ever played in the national championships in this country had drawn such a crowd before yesterday’s performance. The sprawling green stands of the Dexter Park arena were packed with tugging and cussing humanity while the hills roundabout were black, white or indifferent, as the case may be, with canny neighbors who saw their soccer without the painful necessity of giving up a dollar. Probably those perched on the terraced reaches of Cypress Hills Cemetery saw more of the game than those in the box seats in the grandstand. Certainly they saw no less.