THE recent row over the state of Chelsea's pitch, provoking losers Charlton to demand a replay of their match at Stamford Bridge earlier this month, prompted reader Ken Roberts to dig out a picture of Ewood Park looking almost like a lake 51 years ago.

Ken, of Roe Lee, Blackburn, took the picture from the Riverside terraces some 45 minutes before the kick-off on February 2, 1952, of Rovers fourth-round FA Cup match against Hull City.

The pitch had been declared playable two just hours before by the referee. But less than 24 hours earlier, it had been had been covered by a blanket of snow and ice. "There was little about the appearance of the ground this morning to suggest that a football match would be played there tomorrow. The whole surface was covered with a layer of ice," reported the Northern Daily Telegraph day before the tie.

But that afternoon an army of more than 50 men began scraping the snow and ice into heaps that were removed in wheel-barrows, handcarts and small wagons and dumped on the track bordering the pitch.

On the morning of the game, as the referee postponed his inspection until noon, a tractor hauled a heavily-weighted harrow over the surface to break up what the NDT described as a thin covering of ice and then the pitch was heavily sanded.

The go-ahead saved a wasted journey for the 3,000 Hull fans who had snapped up all their club's allocation of tickets and the thousands of others who travelled without any, but hoped to gain admission through the 1s 6d (7p) turnstiles to the ground.

Detailing the work done on the pitch, the NDT's Last Sports edition, observed: "Even so, water gradually came to the surface and when play began there were extensive pools chiefly in the middle."

Ken remembers the game for how Ewood legend Ronnie Clayton, then just 17, tied up Hull's veteran international inside-forward Raich Carter -- who had been playing for England before the Rovers' left-half had been born.

But of the state of the pitch, he recalls: "During the week, it had snowed, then thawed and then it froze and there was ice under all that water on the surface."

Its condition was such that the match was the first-ever at Ewood when a white ball was used from the start. The NDT said: "Adapting themselves to the muddy state of the pitch, the Rovers went for the ball first time and within the limits allowed by the innumerable pools used it accurately."

But occasionally the pools came to Hull's aid, for the match report also told how Rovers' flyer Jackie Wharton twice lost the ball in pools of water as he sped down the wing.

Rovers, then fourteenth in the old Second Division, triumphed 2-0 over bottom-of-the table Hull before a crowd of 45,100 and went on that year to reach the semi-final of the Cup, losing 1-2 in a replay at Leeds to the trophy's eventual winners, Newcastle United.

It was another good Cup run in 1960 -- when Rovers reached the final only to crash 0-3 to Wolves -- that provided the revenue to put a roof on the old Blackburn End at Ewood Park, seen open to the elements in Ken's picture. Behind the terraces the now-vanished Kidder Street Methodist Chapel stands while the Albion Mills of George Whiteley and Co. Ltd, now home to a leisure and fitness centre, is pictured in the background.