Introduction

Since 1887, footballers playing for teams within the Lord Jersey League (now amalgamated into the Banbury District & Lord Jersey League Football Association) have competed to win the honour of raising the Jersey Cup.

Twenty eight clubs have entered for the season 2003/04 proving that the interest and high regard for the competition is as strong today as it was over a century ago.

You will find match reports for every final, photographs of teams and memorabilia, which not only give superb accounts of the finals but also offer fascinating insight into the times which the cup has passed through and the social history of the game itself. 

Football is classed as a working mans game, but when you look through the reports you'll see that teams included footballers from every walk of life, from the aristocracy, clerics and pivotal members of communities played with as much vigour as any of the other social classes 

You will also see family names pop up again and again through the years and it is not uncommon to see three sometimes four brothers all playing for the same team.

Humorous in many places (you'll see that pitch invasions are not a recent aspect of the game), these accounts make great reading whether interested in football or not.

It is also interesting to see how both the First and Second World Wars affected the competition and how the the competition viewed the wars. For the First World War, the competition was postponed after the final of 1914 until 1920. Bletchingdon who were in both of these finals fielded very different teams and you cannot help but think about how many of the original team went to war never to return.

For the Second World War, it was business as usual until the final of 1941, resuming in 1947. Over 1200 spectators went to watch the final of '47 showing the enthusiasm of the whole community to a return to normality.

The information on this site has been collected over many, many months of painstaking research by Peter Dempsey, Competition Secretary for the BADLJL, and he has also personally funded the development of this website. He would love to hear from anyone who has any additional information regarding any of the finals - players views, photographs, programmes, team sheets, in fact anything that adds to the information already collected. Please use the contact page to see how to get in touch.