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‘It is a wise man that knows his own child.’

The Merchant of Venice

14 October 1967: George Best at Bramall Lane

In 1967, George Best had it all. There is hardly anything that can be done with a football that Best could not do. He is part of an elite group that includes Pele, Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona, Stanley Matthews and Lionel Messi, players who have taken their place in the pantheon of the football gods.

Genius is a word bandied around far too often in football, but for George it was wholly appropriate. And he was, of course, unbelievably handsome. Teenage girls worshipped him, and women of all ages adored him. There are some people who look effortlessly stylish and elegant no matter what they wear – dress them in an old potato sack and they’ll still exude elan. George was such a person. It was this heady cocktail of football genius and dashing good looks (along with the fact that he was a really nice guy) that resulted in George being the first footballer to achieve fame outside the game. I remember, how, on a visit to France in the sixties, I saw George on the cover of Paris Match and thought, ‘This lad has really made it.’

It is for his genius as a footballer that I like to remember George. For me, his secret weapon was his acceleration. In all my years in the sport I have never seen a footballer move as fast as Best from a standing start – not Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, Robin Van Persie; no one. When it comes to leaving your marker for dead, the first three yards are the most important, and the first yard is in your head. Add in the skill, agility and dexterity that throws opponents off balance and George became uncatchable.

I have never come across a player, then or since, who did it all so easily and, apparently, instinctively. George was a superb exponent of the almost lost art of dribbling. He scribbled football history with his feet and it was nothing to see him leave four, even five men standing off-balance and bemused.

Countless words have been written and spoken about George’s genius as a footballer. All of them wholly deserved. One thing I have never heard mentioned, however, was how thick and effective his neck muscles were. The power he generated from the neck enabled him to head a ball as well as the most potent striker or towering centre-back, and he was strong enough to look after himself when the going got tough, as it often did for him.

What is also often overlooked about George’s game is that he was a terrific defender and tackler. It was part of his job to track back and defend, and he did so to tremendous effect. But it was for his audacious attacking flair that he was best known and loved, and it was this skill that left an indelible mark on the minds of all who were lucky enough to see him play.

When George burst onto the international scene as a teenager with Northern Ireland, the former Spurs and Northern Ireland captain Danny Blanchflower was approached outside Windsor Park by Daily Mirror football reporter Vince Wilson and asked for his opinion of the young George Best. Most players would have replied with a list of insipid superlatives. Not the astute, aesthetic and articulate Blanchflower, the Oscar Wilde of Windsor Park.

‘George makes a greater appeal to the senses than Stan Matthews or Tom Finney did,’ said Danny, in characteristic fashion. ‘His movements are quicker, lighter, more balletic. He offers grander surprises to the mind and eye. Though seemingly insouciant on the pitch, he has ice in his veins, warmth in his heart and hitherto unseen timing and balance in his feet.’

Vince Wilson looked up from his notebook, somewhat agitated.

‘Yes, yes, yes, Danny,’ said Vince, pen still poised, ‘but do you rate Best as a player?’

I played against George on numerous occasions and was lucky enough to observe at first hand his development from teenager of outstanding natural talent to a true football genius. In October 1967, following a game at Stoke, I chatted to Gordon Banks about Best, because Manchester United were Sheffield United’s next opponents.

‘United play to his speed,’ Gordon informed me. ‘When we played them, Charlton and Crerand played the ball through the channels between and behind our back four for George to run on to. He times his runs to perfection, so he doesn’t get offside. He’s like lightning. He leaves defenders in his wake. You’re left with a one-on-one with him. He’ll really test you because he’s ice cool, clever, unbelievably skilful and very, very quick.’

I always felt that one of the strongest aspects of my game was when faced one-on-one with an advancing forward. I had, over the years, spent countless hours on the training ground working to improve that ability. In the 1960s clubs did not have specialist goalkeeping coaches. I did the normal daily training with the rest of the first-team squad but felt I needed more. As there was no one at Sheffield United to help me in this, I did it myself, mostly in the afternoons. Keepers at other clubs were also developing their skills, making what, in essence, was a journey of self-discovery, among them Tony Waiters (Blackpool), Peter Bonetti (Chelsea), Alex Stepney (Manchester United), Jimmy Montgomery (Sunderland) and the young-bloods: Peter Shilton (Leicester City) and Pat Jennings (Tottenham Hotspur). They were all working hard to improve their game and, in so doing, the standard of goalkeeping in England.

Though working in isolation we each devised personal training schedules to improve positioning, angles, reflexes, distribution, collecting, punching, dead-ball kicks, dealing with corners and free-kicks, organising the defence and so on. At the time the greatest exponent and the man who can be credited with turning the art of goalkeeping into a science was Banks, widely accepted as the best goalkeeper there has ever been.

You will have heard the phrase, ‘the goalkeepers’ union’. There is, of course, no union as such; it is simply a phrase to explain the bond goalkeepers enjoy with one another. As a specialist position it demands specific skills and attributes, but it also applies pressures that no other position in the team carries. An outfield player can make mistakes and get away with them; he can make a wayward pass and teammates will, more often than not, rectify his error as play unfolds. Not so with a goalkeeper. Mistakes here invariably result in a goal for the opposition. It is the knowledge and pressure of this that invokes in goalkeepers a common bond, and even in the days before teams were requested to shake hands prior to a game, goalkeepers always shook hands when they passed one another after the ritual tossing of the coin before a match.

When the teams met for a drink after a game I always made a point of chatting to the opposing goalkeeper. Quite often he would reveal a little nugget about a player he had encountered and I would try and reciprocate, hence my chat to Banksy about George Best.

Indecision in a goalkeeper gives away more goals than any other flaw, so I always tried to let my defenders know exactly where I was and what I wanted them to do. Nowhere is indecision more catastrophic than in a one-on-one. Quite often a striker is through before the danger can be seen. Call it intuition or instinct, but a goalkeeper must see the opening before a forward and, without hesitation, sprint out to cut down the angle and force the forward wide. It is all about alertness, anticipation and the ability to read a game.

‘You know, as well as I do, what to do in a one-on-one,’ said Banksy, ‘but Best is so quick and skilful, you need a special strategy. Anticipation is the key. You have to be out there, your position and angle spot on when he sets off, because he’s so quick. He’ll weigh you up in an instant, and his ability to change pace and direction is phenomenal. So get out to him as quickly as you can. Stay on your feet and make sure you force him wide to his left. He’s good with both feet, but prefers his right, so get him so the ball is on his left. Jockey him. He’ll twist and turn, but stay on your feet. Just keep jockeying him across to his left, boss it. Eventually he’ll try and switch and give you a glimpse of the ball, and that’s when you go down to collect.’

I thanked Bansky for his advice. It was more or less what I had figured, but hearing it from him made me believe my strategy would be the right one.

Just over an hour into our game against Manchester United at Bramall Lane, Pat Crerand played the defence-splitting ball Banksy had warned me about. George was on it in a flash, but I had taken to my toes a split second before.

George bore down on me. I had taken a position in the left-hand channel of my area, halfway between the penalty spot and the edge of the penalty area, a very good position. I made a half-turn to my right, inviting George across my penalty area. He immediately swerved away to his left, the way I wanted him to go. Excellent. No sooner had he done this than, in more or less the same movement he veered back to his right. I instantly re-adjusted my position. Staying on my feet, I angled my body to force George back onto his left. Got him! I had him switching the ball back onto his left foot, George nudged the ball some nine inches away from his left boot – just what I wanted him to do. I seized my opportunity, went to ground and made a lunge for the ball. I grasped fresh air. In the split second it took for me to hit the deck George switched his right leg across, dragged the ball back with the sole of his right boot, then, with the toe of the same boot, flicked the ball away to his right and my left. Anxious to regain my feet and catch him, I over-balanced and fell backwards onto my backside. Instinctively I stuck out my left arm, but George was gone. I turned in time to see him behind me, in more space than Captain Kirk ever enjoyed. I watched helplessly as he side-footed the ball into the empty net courtesy of his favoured right foot.

George raised one arm in the air and smiled benignly as he walked slowly back towards his rejoicing teammates.

‘Bloody hell, George. You gave me spiral blood,’ I said as he passed me.

‘Ah, you had me going there, Hodgey,’ he replied. A smile as wide as a slice of melon broke across his face. ‘Had a bitta luck.’

Luck didn’t come into it. It was brilliant play on his part. No other player had ever turned me over in a one-on-one with such consummate ease as George did that day. What’s more, no player ever did again.

A couple of months later, I fell into conversation with Banksy after we had played Stoke City at Bramall Lane. During our chat I recalled my experience with George.

‘Did just as you said. To the letter,’ I informed Banksy. ‘Forced him across goal and onto his left foot. Stayed on my feet, forced him further to his left till he gave me a glimpse of the ball. He dumped me on my arse and tapped the ball in the net. Made me look a right Charlie.’

Bansky rubbed his chin with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

‘Yeah, thought he would,’ said Banksy, emitting a sigh, ‘he did exactly the same to me.’

* * *

George Best was a football genius and, sadly, there is no true genius without a tincture of madness. I have nothing but fond memories of George and, as I will also later recall, found him to be a very intelligent, immensely witty, amiable and caring guy who, for all his fame and exploits, was surprisingly shy.

I have now reached an age where I increasingly find myself recalling the great players, great games and even the not-so-great names and games that provided the essence to my sixty-year career in professional football. I am, if nothing else, a very lucky guy indeed. To have enjoyed – and I emphasise the word ‘enjoyed’ – sixty years as a player and coach in professional football, is a journey I could never, in my wildest dreams, have envisaged making when I first signed for Sheffield United back in the days when the only thing that came ready to serve were tennis balls, and it was girls that brought me out in a sweat and not tandoori chicken.

Football has been my life and it has blessed me with a treasure trove of memories. Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth and, as I am now discovering, delights one in the seasoned years. The true art of memory is the art of attention. During the course of their careers many players never take note or commit to memory the characters, games, unguarded asides, humour, friendships, golden moments and angst they experience – quintessentially what makes football so entertaining and the greatest team game on the planet. I had the presence of mind to document my career: I kept and logged every press report of every game I was ever involved in, from my salad days as a teenage amateur with Worksop Town via Sheffield United and England, to my role as a coach with myriad top clubs and both Scotland and England.

I also kept the match programmes of every game I was involved in. These and my personal collection of scrapbooks and notebooks have proved to be invaluable now that I have decided to commit my story to paper. I have never written a book before but, after sixty years of continuous employment in the game, I felt the time was right.

During the course of my career I have seen football change irrevocably, from a working man’s leisure pursuit to the multi-billion-pound industry that it is today. Self-appraisal is no guarantee of merit, I know, but rather than being one of those former players who believe football past was far better than football present, I would like to believe I have not only moved with the times but, in my field of goalkeeping, have always been an innovator. In recent years the ideas I introduced to my UEFA coaching sessions attended by the likes of José Mourinho, Harry Redknapp, Rafael Benitez and Felipe Scolari have, I would like to think, in some small way enhanced their expertise as coaches in the modern game. Football past was great, but so too is football present. That I have continued to contribute in a positive way to the game I love so much is a constant source of joy to me.

Though now in my eighth decade, I do not feel old. On the contrary, the fact I have continued to work in the game has kept me young of mind and heart. A friend once said to me, ‘How old would you put yourself at, if you didn’t know how old you were?’ It’s a good question. Thanks to my long career in football I would put myself at an age far younger than my actual years. That is just one of the great gifts and benefits football has given me and one of the reasons why I am so grateful to the game that has, and always will have, a special place in the best of all possible worlds.

* * *

I was born on 16 August 1936. Little over two weeks later King Edward VIII abdicated, Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland and civil war broke out in Spain. An unfortunate sequence of events, but I have it on good authority that none of these was due to me having entered the world.

I was born into a hard-working and principled working-class family. My dad, Len, was a loving father, though something of a stickler for discipline. He was also an enigma in our home town of Laughton Common, which is equidistant between Sheffield and Rotherham, being as he was a miner at Dinnington Colliery and also an accomplished concert pianist.

When it comes to playing the piano some people can carry a tune but appear to stagger under the load. Not so Dad. Those strong, gnarled hands that hewed coal for eight hours on a daily basis would suddenly be transformed into deftly gliding fingers that lovingly caressed the piano keys. So popular was he as a pianist that Dad often gave recitals at civic halls and theatres throughout South Yorkshire and, in the summer, entertained holidaymakers at Butlin’s holiday camps. I would listen to him play and be totally transfixed. He not only reproduced the piece perfectly but he seemed to capture its very essence and that of its composer.

Given his talent, I have often wondered whether if he had been born into a middle-class family in, say, the leafy suburbs of Betjeman’s London rather than a working-class family in the South Yorkshire coalfields, his musical destiny would have been different. Dad was born at the turn of the twentieth century, when working people accepted their lot. There was little, if any, recognition of a working person’s musical talent by the great and good of classical music. Dad would never have had the wherewithal nor was he offered the opportunity to develop his talent at a musical college or academy. A great pity, not least because a bill poster proclaiming, ‘The Conservatoire Collier plays Chopin’, would have had a wonderful alliterative ring to it.

Dad began working down the pit at the age of fourteen and continued to do so until he retired at the age of sixty-five. He hadn’t missed a day’s work and, what’s more, in fifty-one years as a miner Dad was never once late. On his retirement, the well-meaning folk at the colliery bought him a clock.

My mum was called Ivy. She was a very loving and attentive mother who, in keeping with most mothers of that era, worked impossibly long hours cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning, mending and shopping for her family. Long before the phrase was invented, women were ‘multi-taskers’, quite simply because their role of looking after the home and children and everything to do with domesticity was labour intensive.

I was fortunate in having a mother and father who took an interest in me, my brothers and sister. I felt Dad knew me and what made me tick. Most of the other dads I knew were also miners but they spent little time with their kids. In the 1940s, as now, a mother knew everything about her children – the scabs, nits, bad teeth, best friends, favourite foods, constipation, shoes that didn’t fit properly, romances, secret fears, hopes and dreams – but most fathers were only vaguely aware of the small people living in the house. Not so my dad.

Home was a two-up-two-down red-brick terraced house on Station Road in Laughton Common. People stayed in their jobs in those days and they stayed in their houses too. It was unheard of for couples to set up home before they were married. Once they had, the vast majority stayed put until the time came for their children to call the funeral director. There were no nursing homes, no managed flats for the elderly. A house was bought or rented and turned into a home by women like my mum. At various times it was also a nursery (though no one ever used the term ‘nursery’ in the 1940s), a hospital, classroom, party function room, music hall stage, a rest home and, in the vast majority of cases, in the end, a chapel of rest for those who had purchased the house in the first place.

Internally and externally, the houses took on the character of their occupants. From either end of Station Road the terraced houses all looked the same, but as a boy I soon learned the subtle individualities of each one. It was the small touches – invariably the mother’s – that gave them their identity. The highly polished brass letterbox on the front door of the Coopers’; the pristine gold-leaf house number on the fanlight over the front door of the Cartwrights’ (as a boy I had no idea why this number had survived intact when all the others had become mottled and flaked with age); the net curtains in the front window of the Thompsons’, gathered rather than hanging straight as in every other home; the red glass vase, no more than four inches high, that balanced precariously on the narrow window ledge in the Smiths’ front window.

Those surnames were all traditional, straightforward, dependable, no-nonsense names, most of which owed their origin to some trade or other. When I was a boy it was said Sheffield boasted more Smiths than anywhere else in England, until, as Dad once joked, the title was taken one weekend by a cheap hotel in Brighton.

Fresh flowers were a rarity in the houses. In the summer, Mum would occasionally give me a threepenny bit (just over 1p) and send me across to the allotments which were, in the main, rented by miners. I would ask the allotment owner, ‘Have you any chrysanths you don’t want?’ Chrysanths – that was all the miners who ran the allotments seemed to grow in the way of flowers. With their football-like blooms (there was even a species called ‘Football Mums’) and tall stems, these flowers dominated the small living rooms of the houses they fleetingly graced.

Keen to make threepence and offload my surplus flowers, I would find myself skipping home with an enormous bunch of earwig-infested chrysanths. Mum would indeed marvel at them before cutting their stems and displaying them in two or often three vases around the house. I only realised their full name, chrysanthemums, when I was in my mid-teens. True, chrysanths runs off the tongue a lot easier but, looking back, there might have been another reason for the shortened name. Chrysanthemum sounds Latin, something only posh kids learned. In Sheffield and Rotherham in the forties such class distinction was as clearly drawn by the working class as it was by the middle and upper classes, and you wouldn’t want to be accused of getting above your station.

Mum organised the house and family life and we functioned to a tried-and-tested routine. We had no bathroom; we washed twice daily at the kitchen sink, usually with cold water. In keeping with every family I knew, Friday night was bath night. Dad would take down the tin bath from its hook in the backyard shed. It would be placed on newspaper in front of the living-room fire and laboriously filled by Dad with kettles of hot water. First to go was Dad, then my sister, followed by my two brothers, then me. Being the fifth user of the same bath water it’s a wonder I didn’t get out dirtier than when I got in.

It seems unbelievable now, but Friday night was the only time in the week when I changed my underpants and vest. Again, we were not unique in this, every family I knew changed underwear weekly. There were no modern labour-saving devices such as washing machines. Mum washed our clothes every Monday, in the kitchen, with a tub and dolly, after which she would hand-rinse everything then put all the washing through a hand-operated wringer before hanging it out to dry, or, in the event of rain, on wooden clothes horses which were dotted around the living room or placed in front of the ‘range’ fire. Come Tuesday they were dry. On Wednesday they were ironed and then put away in wooden drawers that smelled of lavender and mothballs, ready for us to wear again on Friday after our bath, and so the cycle was repeated. Mum’s life must have been as monotonous as mutton, as regular as the roll of an army drum. That my childhood was such a happy one, secure and filled with a warm heart is to her eternal credit.

Saturday was football day, but for the vast majority of Laughton Common women and, I would suggest, women everywhere, it was the day they had their hair done. It was the time of ‘Twink’ perms for women and an entirely different type of perm for the menfolk.

Come the weekend, the women of Laughton Common would buy a Twink perm in their quest to have glamorous hair, if only for a couple of days. I recall my mother and neighbouring women spending most of Saturday with myriad purple plastic grips in their hair which to me looked like small chicken bones. Around these purple ‘bones’ they wrapped strands of hair and tissue paper. I never knew the reason for the tissue paper and still don’t; it was minutiae from a mysterious female world that, for all it touched mine, was to remain beyond my ken.

The permed hair would be protected from the elements and sooty Sheffield air with a headscarf. Just about every woman in Laughton Common sported a headscarf on a Saturday, though the effect alluded more to ‘Old Mother Riley’ than Grace Kelly in an open-top sports car.

On a Saturday it was not only the women who talked of perms but the menfolk too, though the perms the men discussed were far removed from the Twink variety. For most working men the only way to escape their frugal lifestyle and the daily grind of work at the colliery would be to win the ‘Pools’. The Pools, or ‘coupon’ as they were also known, was the dream ticket out of a life of working drudgery.

I was three years old when war was declared, and nine when it ended. It would be an exaggeration to say the tranquillity of life was shattered; war in all its horror didn’t descend on Laughton Green, but it is equally true to say that life was never the same again. There were no dog fights in blue skies strewn with the spaghetti of vapour trails. No trains departing from Station Road with carriages full of husbands and sons waving to the tear-stained faces of loved ones. No wailing air-raid sirens. No need for us to take to the Anderson shelter every night. No houses or factories ablaze.

But if our village didn’t warrant the destructive attention of the Luftwaffe, Sheffield, the city built on steel manufacture, was an entirely different matter. On several occasions I can recall my family and me joining neighbours in a back garden to witness the city suffer a horrendous pounding four miles away. The sloe-coloured sky hummed to the drone of bombers from which there seemed no respite. Ack-ack guns thumped away in the dark distance. The sky flashed and flared. The sound of thunder beset Sheffield most nights. I remember one particular night when I was around seven years old, the thunderous sound was accompanied by a thin red line in the sky above Sheffield. Within half an hour it had billowed into a crimson aura that lit up the surrounding countryside for miles. Sheffield, the city where my football heroes dwelled, was ablaze. Only then did the ghostly droning sound in the darkness of the sky depart.

As a miner, Dad was considered essential to the war effort, which meant he could not be called up. The raw materials needed to help fight the war included leather. Even after the war, it remained scarce, so leather footballs were non-existent around Laughton Common. Even if the ‘sell everything’ shop on Station Road had stocked leather footballs, I doubt if the hard-pressed budgets of most parents could have run to buying one.

The father of one of my pals worked in the local butcher’s. The bladder of a pig is not too dissimilar to the rubber bladder that was inserted inside the leather ‘casey’ or caseball. From as early as I can remember, until I was around ten or eleven years of age, we boys played football on the local rec with a pig’s bladder.

Pigs’ bladders are surprisingly durable. Given that we mostly wore hobnailed boots, those pigs’ bladders came in for some hammer, but they could last a couple of games. That was some going as our football matches on the rec lasted for anything up to three hours between teams of up to fifteen players. A boy who wanted to join the game would have to wait for another boy to accompany him. The pair would then decide who was ‘chalk’ and who was ‘cheese’. As the game continued, the pair would then present themselves before the rival captains, one of whom would choose ‘chalk or cheese’. There were variations such as ‘beef or pudding’, ‘jam or tart’, all with foody connotations, like the ball we played with. I have since learned that many lads of my generation played football through the war years with a pig’s bladder. If you hit the bladder really hard, sometimes it would burst on impact, hence the term, ‘he really bladdered it’, when a player hits a really hard shot at goal.

When the pig’s bladder did eventually give up the ghost, you simply went to the local butcher’s to ask for another. Someone then blew it up and tied the bladder’s ‘tube’ into a knot, like a balloon. No one ever had any fear of catching a disease from it – we never considered such a thing possible. And, gruesome and unhygienic as it might sound to put a raw pig bladder in your mouth, I can’t recall a lad ever being taken ill from having done so.

Many of the lads who played football on the local rec were older than me. As a seven-year-old it is difficult when most of the boys are three or four years older because the physical difference is so pronounced. So I could feel I was fully participating in these games, I always opted to go in goal. There was always plenty for both goalkeepers to do in kick-about matches but, as time went by, I became conscious of the fact that I really enjoyed being a goalkeeper. What’s more, I began to display something of a talent for it.

I had a go at every sport at school and seemed to do okay at most. I represented my school and the district at football, cricket, badminton, basketball, table-tennis, swimming and athletics. I was, however, very keen on gymnastics and in time I became a good gymnast, good enough to represent the city and South Yorkshire. Gymnastics helped me achieve things other small lads could not, such as greater agility, flexibility, the ability to stretch, reach and dive to longer distances – all essential to good goalkeeping.

The recreation pitch we played on would not have been out of place in the foothills of the Himalayas. Any team playing up the slope was in need of Sherpas and oxygen masks to stand any chance of making progress. The pitch had been laid on what had once been a Victorian rubbish tip and, as the pounding of hobnailed boots took their toll on the topsoil, the rubbish tip beneath began to give up its treasures. Many a game was halted while one of my pals unearthed something peculiar. The most striking find was a cast-iron Victorian bicycle dug up from the sea of mud in the bottom goalmouth.

It was during the post-war years, in what has been termed ‘football’s golden age’ when Football League attendances hit a record high, that I first began to collect items of football memorabilia. The first item I treasured was a scrapbook made from sheets of brown paper filled with newspaper photographs and cuttings of my heroes, which I diligently affixed to the pages with a glue I made from mixing flour and water.

I realise as I look at them now, that most of my childhood heroes in those scrapbooks were goalkeepers. Ted Burgin of Sheffield United was an acrobatic goalkeeper with a thick mop of black hair who had written to United for a trial when with non-League Alford Town (Lincolnshire). The amazing thing about Ted was his height; he was only 5 foot 7 inches. You simply will not see a professional goalkeeper of that height in today’s game, where clubs are looking to develop goalkeepers of 6 foot 2 and more. Sam Bartram, a keeper who served Charlton Athletic for twenty-five years, was considered a giant of a man at the time at 5 foot 11. Frank Swift (Manchester City), the first goalkeeper to captain England, was a larger-than-life character and a fabulous goalkeeper. He had fingers like bananas and many a supporter of a certain age is willing to testify to having seen Frank’s ‘party piece’: catching and holding a thunderous shot with one hand.

When I was thirteen to fourteen years of age, my book of goalkeeper heroes expanded to include Jimmy Cowan (Morton and Sunderland). Jimmy had an outstanding game against England at Wembley in 1949 when his heroics helped the Scots to a famous 3–1 victory. I listened to the match on the radio and can well remember Raymond Glendenning’s rich and plummy commentary peppered with superlatives in praise of Cowan’s performance.

Bert Trautmann, the former German paratrooper and POW who stayed on in England after the war to carve a great career for himself with Manchester City, was another hero of mine. As was the dependable Ronnie Simpson of Newcastle United who, much later, at the age of 39, kept goal when Celtic became the first British club to win the European Cup in 1967.

Looking back, the press cuttings I collected tell of a game that is alien to the football of today. It wasn’t better or worse, just so very different. They also reveal that during the war, when football was regionalised, the game was also mighty different to that of the immediate post-war period. The Football League North Division of 1944, for example, comprised an eye-watering 54 clubs, albeit each club played only eighteen matches. Huddersfield Town were crowned champions and, as one glances down a league table that seems to go on forever, there, to the eternal delight of Liverpool fans, I am sure, is Manchester United, in the bottom half, two places behind Crewe Alexandra and Rochdale.

As a small boy I went to Laughton Council School, then to Dinnington Secondary Modern. Unbelievably now, the class I was in at Laughton Council School comprised forty-seven children, and what’s more our teacher had no assistance. It’s a wonder any of us learned anything at all – by the time she had taken the register it was nearly playtime! I was never an outstanding scholar, more fair to middling. At Dinnington Secondary Modern my favourite subjects were PE, of course, English (I love to read), music and history. Though something of a scamp, I was never a source of trouble at school.

I had a really happy childhood. My dad harboured the hope that I might one day become a concert pianist and paid for me to go to piano lessons. My piano teacher was a genteel old lady who did her best with me, but the lure of football was too great in the end. Although I never played truant from school, piano lessons increasingly got in the way of games of football on the rec. I would set out for my piano teacher’s house with good intentions only to then bump into a few mates who would say, ‘Fancy a game?’ Without exception, any inclination I had to play Schubert’s ‘The Trout’ would play second fiddle to me trying to be be Bert Trautmann.

I suppose there was more than an element of Dad wanting me to live out his dream of being a top-class concert pianist. To this day I still feel a tinge of sadness that I couldn’t do that, but I hope my long career in football in some way compensated him for me not being able to be the Victor Borge of Sheffield.

When I was around thirteen the family moved some three miles to Sawnmoor Avenue in Thurcroft. It was to be a house move that would have a fantastic and life-long effect on me for, when we moved into our new house, I caught sight of a young girl who lived opposite. Even at the tender age of thirteen, I realised there and then that I had seen the girl of my dreams.

Being a gregarious lad, I made friends quickly in my new neighbourhood. I started to go about with a group of young lads and girls, and to my excitement and delight one of the young girls was my neighbour from across the road who, I quickly learned, was called Brenda. Our group, surprisingly unisex considering we were all around thirteen years of age, liked to meet up on a Saturday night and go dancing at the village welfare hall in Thurcroft. When it came to dancing I made a beeline for Brenda and couldn’t believe my good fortune when it became apparent she appeared to like me as much as I liked her.

In the ensuing weeks we spent as much time as we could in one another’s company. What today people may refer to as ‘chemistry’ was perfect between us. I had never had a girlfriend to speak of, nor had Brenda had a boyfriend of any note; we were incredibly naive but I was aware that every moment I spent in her company was magical and special for me.

In time we graduated from the dances at the local village hall and broadened our horizons by travelling the four or so miles to the local swimming baths in Rotherham where, on a Saturday night, the swimming pool was covered with boards to form a dance floor. The attraction of the dances at Rotherham Baths was the music provided by a proper dance band, The Clifton Group, as opposed to a quintet at the village hall. The Saturday dance at the swimming baths was a great attraction for the young people of Rotherham, the place was invariably packed, full of atmosphere and the optimism and anticipation that one can only find at the edge of a dance floor. The type of dancing we did was ballroom dancing, the foxtrot, dashing white sergeant and, later in the night, when things got wild, we jitterbugged. From a lad’s point of view, the great advantage to ballroom dancing was it enabled you to hold the girl you were dancing with. Much modern dancing involves couples not touching at all; not so in those days. For many a lad, when a girl consented to dance and he placed his arm around her waist it was a great thrill, albeit, in many cases, this proved to be the extent of their sex life until he married her.

Brenda was widely considered to be one of the most fashionable girls who attended the dance. In the post-war years there was little to be had in the way of fashion as far as young working-class people were concerned, but when it came to clothes and her appearance, Brenda possessed the all-important attribute of imagination. I recall her once wearing a fulsome skirt in what was known as a ‘tulip cut’ with a netted skirt underneath. With her hair in a bubble cut courtesy of a Twink perm, I remember feeling very special with her on my arm as we walked about the dance hall and she attracted admiring looks from other lads, some even in their late teens. Like the majority of other lads, I dressed in a short-sleeved V-neck sweater of the Fair Isle variety, shirt, tie and baggy trousers purchased off the peg from the Co-op. I longed to own a suit, as did every lad, but family budgets didn’t go to suits for sons. Though I felt I never dressed as stylishly as Brenda, she didn’t seem to mind. She liked me for who I was, which, pardon the pun, suited me fine.

In addition to playing in goal for my school, the District team, Sheffield Boys and Hallamshire County, I also played on a Saturday afternoon for my local youth club before, at the age of fourteen, gaining my first taste of ‘open-age’ football when I signed for the Dinnington Colliery Welfare team.

The Colliery Welfare team played in a league consisting of other colliery welfare clubs and works teams in the South Yorkshire area. In addition to miners, the various local leagues comprised teams for steel-workers, smelters, cutlers, engineers, railway workers, tram and bus drivers, firemen, policemen, painters and decorators, even milkmen. There was, however, not one team from any of the professions. Football was considered the property of the working classes and the notion was that it should be played by them because they were the only people with the talent to play it.

I remember being very excited at the prospect of playing at enclosed grounds whose pitches boasted goals with nets and were bordered by a wooden railing, rather than on a park pitch situated among up to half-a-dozen other pitches. The colliery welfare teams contained the usual characters one will find in any football team at that level of the game. The cultured inside-forward, who wore his hair a little longer than everyone else and played with the air of a grammar school boy among elementary school pupils. The bull-in-a-china-shop centre-forward who was expected to run through a brick shit-house and expected to be roundly abused if he shirked it. The wingers: on one wing a tall, skinny flyer who was all bone and elbow whilst, on the other flank, as if to balance things out, a small and squat winger with bandy legs who, although lacking the pace of his counterpart, was full of trickery. The full-back who never spoke, went about his business in silent efficiency and showed such a lack of emotion you were left to wonder what, if any, enjoyment he got from football at all. The hard-man wing-half, with shin-pads like castle doors who never buttoned his shirt even on the coldest of days, his chest hair protruding from his shirt like stuffing from a burst sofa. The towering centre-half with a granite chin and a forehead hammered flat through contact with a thousand muddy footballs, whose muscular legs would protrude from his cotton shorts like bags of Portland cement. The niggler wing-half who, from the kick-off kept up an incessant verbal harassment of the referee – ‘Bloody hell, Ref, get a grip. Hey, Ref, hand-ball, you missed that. Ref, you’re having a bad one. Hey, Ref, handball. Bloody hell, Ref, he was late. Hey, Ref, he’s all over me. ’king hell, Ref, I never touched him. Hey, Ref, your linesman missed that. Come on, Ref, he’s having the shirt off me back. Bloody hell, Ref, you can’t give that. Hey, Ref, offside, a mile off! Thank you!’

Even at the age of fourteen I never felt overawed at the prospect of playing against men in their twenties and thirties. I think this had much to do with the fact since early childhood I had always played against boys who were older than me. I relished the challenge of pitting myself against what were very decent amateur players, some of whom enjoyed legendary status in local Sheffield football. It was a standard of football far removed from school and youth club football; it was far and away quicker, more physical, more aggressive. Players would swear loudly as they chased the ball across a Lowry landscape and, joy of joys, thumbnail reports of these matches would appear in the Sheffield Star. As a boy of fourteen, the first time I saw my name in print in the Sheffield Star I must have read the match report a hundred times, before cutting it from the sports page and carefully gluing it into a virginal exercise book, on the cover of which I had somewhat optimistically written,

‘Match Reports’.

On leaving school in 1951 at the age of fifteen, I got a job in the local Co-op store as a butcher’s assistant with a view to one day learning the trade. I was very half-hearted about the prospect of being a butcher, though I never dared tell Dad; I took the job because I finished work at noon on a Saturday, which meant I was then free to play football in the afternoon.

Saturday was a long day. I was up with the sparrows’ fart at a quarter past four, started work at the Co-op at five, where my first job would be to defrost the freezer then arrange the various cuts of meat, sausages, pork pies and what have you on the display counters. Before the store opened the manager would come and inspect my handiwork, and would indicate that everything was in order simply by a single nod of his head. I would then do a variety of jobs around the shop and help out behind the counter until noon, when I collected my wages: the princely sum of £1. 2/6d (£1.12½p). That done, I would head for home, pay Mum my board and lodging and have a bite to eat before setting off to play football. In the evening, I would collect Brenda and we would go off dancing with our friends.

In the event my time with the Colliery Welfare team was short-lived. After twenty or so games I was approached by non-League Worksop Town and, keen to try my hand at a higher level of football, signed for a club where, unbeknown to me, serendipity would shape my future career and life.

For working-class people there was no such thing as fashion in 1952, after all, what could you possibly wear during rationing? We relied on functional clothes, mostly woollen hand-me-downs, previously worn by parents, older siblings or, in many instances, both. In the early fifties a young person’s taste in fashion was dictated by what was least itchy.

If you were a lad in your mid-teens and wanted to appear grown-up and smart, the crowning ambition was to own a suit. They were worn only on special occasions: to church on Sundays, for weddings, funerals, christenings, hot dates and to celebrate a Sheffield United away win. (I’m joking about the latter, but only a little…)

Most adult men owned a suit and the vast majority had been given it by the government when they were ‘demobbed’ from the forces at the end of World War Two. Demob suits, as they were known, were of plain cloth in either dark blue or brown and came in only two sizes – too small or too big.

As was the case with every other lad too young to have served in the war, I didn’t enjoy this dubious distinction. As a lad of sixteen, however, I longed to have a suit of my own and not simply because I wanted to appear smart. It offered real kudos in Laughton Common and the same was true of Sheffield and Rotherham. If you were young and owned a suit, other lads were in awe of you and, more importantly, you found yourself very popular with the girls.

I was still working as a butcher’s assistant at the local Co-op store when I signed as an amateur for Worksop Town. Such was my desire to own a suit that I hit upon the plan to buy one by saving some money from my weekly wage, still just £1. 2/6d, from the Co-op. I reasoned that once I had paid my mum for my board, deducted necessary personal expenses such as train and bus fares to and from Worksop Town for training and matches, ceased going to the cinema once a week, stopped buying fish ’n’ chips on a Friday night, went dancing every third Saturday night and continued to wear an old pair of football boots handed down to me by an uncle rather than buying a new pair, I would have saved enough to buy a suit in five years. Obviously, another way had to be found.

Sheffield FC was formed in 1857 and is the oldest football club in the world, but Worksop Town were only four years behind them. Even when I joined Worksop in 1952, the club had a long history. It was also as broke as the Ten Commandments.

Worksop Town played in the Midland League but, because they ran six teams, were always pleading poverty. The word was, Worksop had been saddled with debt for over thirty years but had somehow managed to struggle on.

In the 1907–08 season, Worksop had reached the first round proper of the FA Cup, the equivalent today of the third round of the competition. The club was drawn away to Chelsea, and though hammered 9–1, it found some consolation in a bountiful share of the revenue from a bumper attendance of 70,184 at Stamford Bridge. The money from the Chelsea game sustained Worksop for nigh on a decade until, once again, the club fell upon hard times.

During 1920 and into 1921 they enjoyed another good run in the FA Cup which resulted in a plum tie away to Tottenham Hotspur. Worksop produced the shock of that season’s competition, a doughty performance earning them a goalless draw and unprecedented headlines in the sports pages of national newspapers. The town was suddenly galvanised. The thought of playing host to mighty Spurs before a record attendance at Central Avenue had even non-football fans excited.

The club directors, rather than keeping one eye on the future, focused exclusively on money. They made a highly controversial decision to concede home advantage and return to White Hart Lane for the replay. According to those around at the time, Worksop stood a chance of beating Spurs on a home pitch that in mid-winter resembled molasses. But there was more chance of hell freezing over than achieving another favourable result at White Hart Lane.

To a man, and woman, the town believed the club’s directors had sacrificed the chance of beating Spurs, thereby earning lasting fame for the town, by opting instead to line their own pockets.

The result of the replay was as emphatic as the fall-out from the decision proved catastrophic. Worksop lost 9–0 before a White Hart Lane crowd of just 12,000 which meant the club’s share of the gate revenue was far less than anticipated. Town councillors and the local press berated the directors for their decision, and the town’s population exacted their revenge by boycotting subsequent matches.

Attendances for matches at Central Avenue plummeted, and once people lost the habit of going along to watch their local team, they never again returned in the numbers they had prior to the Tottenham furore. Thirty-two years on, when I joined the club, Worksop Town were still struggling to make ends meet and were burdened by debt.

The Midland League was semi-professional and its members included the reserve teams of, amongst others, Nottingham Forest, Notts County, Hull City, Rotherham United, Scunthorpe United, Bradford City and Doncaster Rovers as well as crack non-League clubs such as Peterborough United, Corby Town, Boston United, Scarborough and Grantham.

I was a month short of my sixteenth birthday when I joined Worksop in the summer of 1952. I began the 1952–53 season playing in goal for the club’s youth and reserve teams but my performances were such that I soon made the first team. That season we finished six places above bottom club Wisbech Town but won the Sheffield Senior Cup, the club’s first trophy of any significance since winning the same competition way back in 1924.

Every summit marks the brink of an abyss, and two days after the club’s Sheffield Senior Cup success, the club announced an annual loss of £145. It may not appear much by today’s standards, but in 1952 that sum would have covered my wages behind the butcher’s counter at the Co-op for the best part of three years.

In July 1953, as part of Worksop’s pre-season programme, the club organised a friendly at Central Avenue for the youth team against Sheffield United’s youth side. Although I was now Worksop’s recognised first-team goalkeeper, I was still not yet seventeen, so I was delighted when manager Fred Morris selected me to play in goal.

The fact it was the youth team didn’t matter at all. As far as I was concerned, I was playing against Sheffield United, and all their players were heroes to me. United had won the Second Division title the previous season and were preparing for life in the First Division (Premiership equivalent), so to play in this match was a tremendous thrill.

One-way traffic had yet to be introduced to Britain’s road systems, but those present at Worksop Town that night witnessed its football equivalent. I can’t recall much about the game itself but for the fact I was very busy indeed. Apart from having kicked off, I don’t think Worksop managed to venture into Sheffield’s half of the field for the majority of the first half. But, minutes before half-time and against the run of play, we broke out of defence and scored.

The second half mirrored the first. It was like the Alamo as wave after wave of red-and-white striped shirts laid siege to my goal. I had to pull off save after save to preserve our lead. Eventually, we broke away and, to my utter joy, scored again. This served only to annoy the United players even more. Their retribution was a constant pressure on my goal. United did pull a goal back but, after a period of desperate defending, we managed to snatch a third goal a minute from time.

The dressing room after the game was joyous. The final score in no way reflected the balance of play, but that’s football. I’d lost count of how many saves I’d had to make but, as far as I was concerned, that was my job, even if I wasn’t being paid.

Two days later, when I reported for evening training, I was asked to call in to Fred Morris’s office. ‘Office’ was too grand a word for the cubby-hole under the main stand where Fred conducted his business of part-time football management. Forming the underneath of the tiered floor of the grandstand, the ceiling sloped at such an acute angle that anyone coming into the room could only take two paces before having to lower their head and shoulders. Fred’s response was always to nod his head in recognition of what he perceived to be deference.

I knew something was up the moment I entered Fred’s snuggery and bowed my head. He was seated at his desk, flanked on either side by a crouching club director. Not one to stand on ceremony, or upright in that cubby-hole, Fred told me straight off that Sheffield United had been so impressed by my performance against them they wanted to sign me.

I was flabbergasted. I loved playing football but never, at any time, had I ever thought about trying to make a career in the professional game. I simply didn’t think I was good enough.

I was told by one director that the club would be more than happy for me to stay should I want to, but subsequent phrases such as ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’, ‘a golden chance to make something of yourself’ and ‘you’d be a fool to turn this offer down’ suggested they couldn’t wait for me to put pen to paper.

With my mind still whirling, I told Fred I would go home and discuss the matter with my parents and let him know my decision.

‘That’s the sensible thing to do, take as much time as you want. There’s no rush,’ said Fred, ‘I’ll call round your house at six tomorrow morning.’

Neither of my parents were great followers of football. I had two brothers and a sister and none of them was into it either. Having discussed the opportunity with Mum and Dad, they both said the decision should be entirely mine, but that they would support me in whatever I decided.

I slept on it and, when I awoke the next morning, felt the same as I had the night before.

I just didn’t think I had the talent to make a go of it in the professional game. I thought about going to Sheffield United to play alongside junior players who had represented the county and England at schoolboy and, in some cases, Under-18 level, and felt I would be way out of my depth.

Fred dutifully arrived at our house on his way to work. When I informed him of my decision his chin fell to his chest. Undaunted, he left saying he would give me more time to ‘think it over’. When Fred had left our house, I spoke to my dad.

‘The decision is entirely yours, son,’ he told me, ‘but I know you, and by that token I know whichever decision you come to, it will prove to be the right one.’

Later that day I bumped into a teammate and it was from my conversations with him I discovered why the club were so keen for me to go to Bramall Lane. I was an amateur player but, according to my pal, Sheffield United had offered Worksop a fee of £250 for me. That was a huge amount of money, enough to erase the recent annual loss with enough left over to put a welcome hundred quid into the club’s coffers.

When I reported for evening training I was again summoned to Fred’s anticlinal office, where once again I informed him and the two stooping directors that I felt I wasn’t good enough for professional football at any level, let alone with a First Division club.

‘They think you are,’ said Fred, ‘and the fact that a club the stature of Sheffield United think you are good enough, should be good enough for you.’

I hadn’t thought of that. It got me thinking.

The conversation continued and I began to hover. Sensing I was having second thoughts, Fred then played his ace.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘You know that United have offered £250 for you. You’re an amateur so we can’t make a payment to you, but, if you sign for them, as a sort of signing-on fee from us, Worksop will buy you a brand new suit out of the fee we receive.’

‘A suit?’ I repeated, feeling my heart flutter and my eyes widen as I said the words.

‘A brand new suit, from a proper tailor?’

‘None of that demob stuff,’ said Fred, ‘one that’ll fit you like bark on a tree.’

This time I was aware of his eyes widening.

I started to reason that if Sheffield United felt I had the kind of talent as a goalkeeper they could possibly develop, the least I could do was to respect their view and let them try. I saw for the first time this was indeed a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ and, should things not work out for me, I could always get a job on a building site. Sheffield had been heavily bombed during the war and the city had implemented a massive re-building programme. Jobs in the building trade were plentiful. Should United release me, I was still young enough to learn a trade and, of course, I could always return to non-League football.

All these thoughts ran through my mind as I stooped in contemplation in Fred’s office, but it was the promise of the suit that swung it.

As my hand hovered over the signing-on form, I re-affirmed with Fred that Worksop would buy me the suit I craved.

‘Made to measure, from a bespoke tailor,’ confirmed Fred. ‘The best that money can buy, well, from round here at any rate.’

That was good enough for me. I put pen to paper and signed for Sheffield United.

Fred reached into a drawer of his desk and threw a cloth tape measure to one of the directors.

‘Arms out,’ said the director.

With my face beaming I thrust out both arms and the director ran the tape along one of them.

‘We’ll send all your measurements to the tailor. It’ll be a suit fit for a king,’ Fred boasted, his face now a mixture of relief and joy.

That is how my career in professional football began

Sixty years on, I’m still waiting for the suit.

* * *

I wasn’t quite done with the butchery business, though, because I began my career at Sheffield United as an amateur. I trained at Bramall Lane twice a week, on a Tuesday and Thursday night, in the company of some fourteen other amateur players and a few semi-professionals. I had, of course, been to Bramall Lane before but only as a spectator, not only for football, but also to watch cricket, as the ground hosted both Sheffield and Yorkshire County Championship games. The first evening I turned up for training my body was wracked with a mixture of awe, excitement and nerves.

It was still the summer. In 1953 the steel and building industries and their affiliated businesses were working around the clock to rebuild not only the city but the nation, so there was as much work going on in the evening as there was during the day. As I walked from the bus station to Bramall Lane, tramcars clattered along cobbled streets and hissed like ganders as they stopped to pick up passengers. The ugly fingers of soot-blackened chimneys forever pointing at the sky belched great fugs of yellowy-brown smoke into the atmosphere. Though evening, there was the bustle of a city whose industry lived cheek by jowl with the homes of its work-force. Not far off I could hear the sound of a thousand hammers echoing in cavernous corrugated-iron-roofed factories. The fiendish chatter of electric riveters. The sudden squeal of tortured metal. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse inside a partly open door and see a shower of sparks followed by great plumes of grey smoke. In the air an acrid mix of fired coal, sulphur-tainted steam and human sweat fought for ascendency with the yeasty odour of the nearby Wards’ brewery. Amidst all this stood Bramall Lane, where many of the folk who sweated for little reward would escape to on a Saturday afternoon in the hope of inhabiting, for ninety minutes at least, a better world.

Sheffield United and, yes, Sheffield Wednesday too, provided the workers of the city with conflict and art. On the terraces, the smelter or foundry man was turned into a critic. Happy in his judgement of the finer points of what Tony Waddington would later refer to as ‘the working man’s ballet’. Ready to analyse a defensive formation; to estimate the worth of a slide-rule cross-field pass; a mesmerising dribble down the touchline, a bullet header or a crunching tackle. I knew how these supporters felt because I was one of them. On the terraces at Bramall Lane we turned into partisans, drawing breath when a shot from the opposition whistled past our goal; elated, exultant and ecstatic when a thunderous shot from one of our forwards turned the opposition net into a gumboil. Just as with every supporter the length and breadth of the land, smiling, scowling, laughing, longing, delirious, downcast, rabid, rapturous, vitriolic and victorious by turns at the fortunes of our team, as the players and a leather ball shaped Iliads and Odysseys before our very eyes, created our memories and myths and sprinkled stardust on harsh working lives.

Reg Wright looked after the amateurs and semi-pros at Sheffield United; Reg was an old pro who had stayed on at the club upon his retirement as a player to fulfil myriad roles. Reg took the training on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and he was also in charge of the ‘A’ team which played on a Saturday morning. Today, an academy team can have half a dozen backroom staff and more; Reg was their manager, coach, trainer, masseur, doctor and kit-man; and, just in case anyone felt he wasn’t putting in a good shift at the club, during the week he also acted as physio to the full-time pros and helped out in the training of the first team.

I warmed to Reg Wright immediately. He was a hard taskmaster, but fair. His philosophy did not embrace the molly coddling of young players; you either did what he asked of you or you were out on your ear. Through his whole narrative ran a steel cable of tenacious durability, you had to be hard because football was hard, and football was hard because life was hard. With his Brylcreemed hair parted down the centre and topped by a flat cap worn at a jaunty angle, a baggy roll-neck sports jumper that looked every inch like the one you see the garrulous trainer’s second wearing in one of those Laurel and Hardy shorts when Olly has persuaded Stan to get into a boxing ring to fight a frightening hulk, there was more than a little of the anachronistic about Reg Wright, even in 1953.

Reg exemplified the notion that football is a simple game and he embraced a simplistic evaluation of young talent. According to Reg, young players came in only three categories: ‘Quick burn, slow burn, never to burn’. I can only assume Reg assessed me as being worthy of the former category for, after only a handful of games in goal for the ‘A’ team, I graduated to the youth team and, again, after only half a dozen or so matches, found myself promoted to the reserves.

I couldn’t believe how quickly my life had changed. In little over a year I had progressed from the local Colliery Welfare team via the various teams at Worksop Town to Sheffield United reserves team via their ‘A’ and youth teams. I wasn’t going to qualify with any team for a long-service award, that much I knew.

Sheffield United reserves played in the Central League, which was a massive step up from Youth and ‘A’ team football as it boasted the reserve teams of Wolverhampton Wanderers, both Manchester clubs, Liverpool, Everton, Newcastle United, Bolton Wanderers, Sheffield Wednesday, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa, to name but a few.

In those days the manager picked twelve players for the first team on a Saturday, the eleven who would play plus a standby reserve – there being no substitutes, of course. The remaining first-team squad players turned out for the reserves along with any regular first-teamers playing their way back following injuries, young hopefuls such as myself and, a category of player you just don’t have nowadays, the ‘loyal foot soldier’ who had years of service at the club but few, if any, first-team appearances to his name.

It was not uncommon in the fifties to find these loyal foot soldiers at most clubs. One of the most notable examples was Arthur Perry, who signed for Hull City in 1947 and left the club a few months short of ten years later without ever making a first-team appearance. Arthur spent his entire Hull career playing for the reserves before being transferred to Bradford in 1956. It’s interesting to note that, under the rules of the time, should Arthur have completed the ten years he would have qualified for a Testimonial. Poor Arthur missed out, by a matter of months, on what for him would have been a big pay-out. That said, should Arthur have qualified for a Testimonial match, the mind boggles at Hull supporters turning up to honour a player many of them had never seen play.

Playing in the Central League it was not uncommon that I found myself playing against internationals coming back from injury and players out of favour in the first team but with League appearances under their belt that stretched into three figures. My debut for United reserves took place at Goodison Park and it was something of an ignominious debut as far as I was concerned – we lost 5–2 to Everton. For all I had conceded five goals I was told, however, I had acquitted myself well and, to my delight, kept my place in the reserves the following Saturday when I felt a whole lot better about life as we beat Manchester City’s second string 1–0.

For me, every reserve team match, particularly those away from home, was exciting and an adventure. I hadn’t travelled out of the Sheffield area much in my life, bar the occasional holiday to Skegness. For me, journeys to the likes of Manchester United, Preston or Aston Villa filled me with awe and wonder. I had only read about these clubs and their grounds, and never visited let alone seen them in these pre-television days. On arriving at such places I would accompany reserve team stalwarts of the day such as Graham Shaw and Willie Toner for the ritual inspection of the pitch, only I would not be staring down at the grass. My eyes would pan around the ground itself, taking in the detail of grandstands and alp-like terracing. I’d find myself saying something like, ‘So this is Old Trafford? Where Johnny Carey and Stan Pearson play.’ It was totally magical to me. I know you may feel I am conveying a romantic and idealised view of these reserve team matches, but they were romantic and idealised to me. I was not yet seventeen years of age and I was in awe and wonder of everyone I met and everywhere I visited.

When I reached my seventeenth birthday, the United manager, Reg Freeman, called me into his office. It was the first time I had ever been in the manager’s office and probably only the third time he had spoken to me directly. Reg Freeman said he had ‘news’ for me and his news was music to my ears. He told me that, such had been my progress, the club were going to sign me as a full-time professional. This time, I had no hesitation in accepting. When he told me, I didn’t hear his follow-up words for the sound of angels singing. My immediate thought was I would have to tender my resignation from my job as a butcher’s assistant at the Co-op. It never occurred to me to ask what sort of wage I would be on, but when Reg got around to talking money, my legs did a fine impersonation of a cocktail shaker held aloft by a barman who takes real pride in his work. With my jaw almost resting on my middle shirt buttons, I listened as Reg told me I was to receive a £50 signing-on fee and a weekly wage of £7 during the season and £5 in the close-season. It was more money than I had ever seen in my life. A few days later, when the secretary paid me my signing-on fee, he did so with white fivers and I dutifully took the money straight home to Mum and Dad. As I carefully laid each fiver out on the kitchen table, Mum and Dad stood staring at the money in mute silence, their faces exuding the sort of wonder Columbus must have felt on realising he hadn’t sailed over the end of the Earth.

I spent 1953 and 1954 as the regular reserve team goalkeeper and got to know well the unique culture of reserve team matches. Today Premiership teams have squads; players not in the starting eleven or on the bench watch from the stands, as if it is beneath them to be asked to play for the reserves. Not that there is such a thing as a Premiership reserve team nowadays. The very term ‘reserves’ is considered to have negative overtones. They call them ‘Development’ squads now and no doubt someone was paid handsomely for coming up with that term. In a sense, I suppose, Development squad is more apposite, seeing as their ranks are filled with players under the age of 21.

With the passing of reserve teams, a small and lesser-spotted ritual of football disappeared. In terms of support, reserve team matches were the preserve of the die-hard supporter and children. In the fifties and well into the sixties, many a child’s first visit to their local football ground was to a reserve team game. Parents or older brothers would take along little Johnny to their first football match, a reserve team game, as the crowd would not be intimidating and the child was guaranteed a good, unobstructed view of proceedings. It was also a good way for a boy to get to know the local ground as, quite often, supporters could change ends at half-time or, should it be raining, forgo the terraces and take shelter in the paddock of grandstands that overlooked the flanks.

In comparison to a first-team match, a reserve team game often seemed to take place in an eerie canyon. Even if there were 2–3,000 present, which often there were in grounds such as Goodison Park and Old Trafford, or even Bramall Lane, such a number appeared lost on the cold, grey slabs of terracing. They would hang from crash barriers munching monkey nuts and howling their grievances. Some preferred to take up the normal place in the ground they would inhabit for match days, and such lone fans would lean against the barriers high up at the very back of the terracing like guillemots perched on cliff faces. Whichever ground you visited there was always a raucous knot of seasoned supporters on either side of the ground overlooking the halfway line. Whilst behind the goal, a row of boys would cling to the perimeter fencing and try to make conversation with me when play was concentrated down the other end of the field.

Though my concentration was total during games, there was the odd occasion when I would acknowledge a question from one of the boys behind my goal. I did so in the hope he would be as thrilled as I would have been as a boy, should a footballer ever have spoken to me. Amongst his collection of personal memorabilia, Gordon Banks has a photograph taken of him on the occasion of his debut for Leicester City reserves against Swansea. The black-and-white snapshot shows a young, smiling Banksy, hands on hips, standing in between his posts. The photograph was taken by a boy who simply left his place on the perimeter fence behind the goal, walked onto the pitch during the pre-match kick-in and asked Banksy to pose, which he duly did. The lad later posted a copy of the print to Banksy care of the club and it serves as a happy reminder of his very first appearance in Leicester City colours. As Banksy says, ‘It would never have occurred to me to say “No”, even with a minute or so to go to kick-off.’ Young supporters could do that kind of thing at reserve team games then; sadly, not so nowadays.

At the end of the 1953–54 season, Sheffield United reserves finished in exactly the same position in the Central League as they had in the previous season – fourth from bottom – not that it mattered. In all competitions, however, the reserves conceded twenty-seven fewer goals. I never gave this a thought at the time, but my performances in goal in what was my first season with Sheffield United must have indicated to Reg Freeman that I was developing along pleasing lines because, during the first week of April, I received a message to report to his office for what would be the fourth occasion he had spoken to me.

When it came to being a manager, Reg Freeman was one of the old school. We players never saw him at training; that was taken by Eric Jackson aided by Reg Wright, who was fast becoming the Swiss Army knife of the club. Reg Freeman seemed to spend most of his week in his office, emerging late on Thursday afternoon or early Friday morning to pin up the various team sheets for the forthcoming matches on the Saturday.

There were five League matches of the season remaining. Sheffield United had just about consolidated in our return to the First Division and were lying fourth from bottom, a place above Sheffield Wednesday, with Middlesbrough and Liverpool looking like favourites for relegation. For all that there was a buzz around Bramall Lane for the simple reason the club was due to unveil their floodlights. Floodlights were nothing new. Many top continental grounds boasted lights, but in 1954 very few English clubs had floodlights, even Wembley and Hampden Park didn’t have them, so Sheffield United was considered one of the most forward thinking and go-ahead clubs in British football, and the unveiling of their floodlights was an auspicious occasion that would afford the club national publicity. (An experimental game under lights had taken place at Bramall Lane once before, way back in 1878, with lamps erected on wooden towers powered by Siemens dynamos, but thereafter the notion of playing matches under lights had literally receded into the shadows.)

To celebrate this new addition to the pitch, the club had arranged a floodlit friendly against Clyde. Today a Premiership club would never arrange a friendly against Clyde because it would not be a money spinner and also, with all due respect, because Clyde would not be a big attraction to Premiership supporters. Clyde are, after all, a club whose record club transfer paid dates back over forty years to 1966 to the £14,000 paid to Sunderland for Harry Hood.

In 1954 it was different. Clyde was a top-four team in Scotland. They boasted current Scottish internationals and one of the most memorably named of all footballers: Harry Haddock.

In the days of fledgeling television, fans could only read about teams such as Clyde, so they held a certain mystique for English supporters. Anglo-Scottish rivalry was still intense, with both the respective Football Associations misguidedly believing British football was still the best in the world. As such, a meeting of teams from either side of the border was a very attractive fixture, one sure to draw in a good crowd, especially on a novelty occasion such as an inaugural floodlit game.

To my delight and astonishment, Reg Freeman informed me that my form had been such for the reserves he was going to give me an outing with the first team, in the game against Clyde. I was both excited and elated. Friendly it might be, but I was determined to grasp this opportunity to show everyone I was capable of playing in the first team.

When I returned home I couldn’t wait to tell my parents and Brenda my good news. My dad, as I have said, was never a keen follower of football. I reckon he had only attended but two football matches in his life, but when he heard I was to play for the first team against Clyde told me he ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world’. What’s more, until he passed away, Dad would attend just about every future game I would play for United – and England.

The date was 6 April 1954. Bramall Lane was packed to the rafters for the visit of Clyde. Half an hour before kick-off, in a ceremony performed by local dignitaries and United chairman, Blakeo Yates, the massed ranks of United supporters cooed and ah’d as if watching a grand display of fireworks as our brand new floodlights flickered into full illumination.

Even in 1954, Bramall Lane had rich history to it. In 1883 it was the venue for England’s first home international match outside London (versus Scotland), albeit Sheffield United as a club was not formed until six years later. The main grandstand was the work of the renowned architect Archibald Leach, its main feature being, on the roof of the John Street stand, a mock-Tudor gable which contained the press box. Ten bombs had hit Bramall Lane during the Second World War which destroyed most of the John Street stand, the Kop, and left a forty-foot deep crater in the centre of the pitch. It was to take several years for the club to make good the damage. A new double roof had been erected over the Kop in 1948 and the inaugural floodlit game against Clyde also marked the opening of the new John Street stand with, alas, the old gable stripped down to a flat-roofed press box. Bramall Lane, however, was still a three-sided ground, with the cricket pavilion on the far side separated from the football pitch by the cricket wicket and outfield. Rather than relishing the unusual layout of their home ground, the majority of United supporters disliked the open fourth side to the ground, which I could understand: even on such an auspicious occasion with a capacity crowd present, the open far side seemed to be a drain on the fervent atmosphere.

I wasn’t overawed by the crowd, in fact, I was later to realise the bigger the occasion the better I liked it. As I changed next to my teammates I was riddled with nerves but, once I crossed that white line, my concentration was total and my nervousness dissipated. For a friendly it was a keenly contested game. There was, after all, Anglo-Scottish pride at stake. The game ended 1–1 and I readily recall the Clyde goal being scored by their international winger, Tommy Ring. Little did I know then, Tommy was to come back and haunt me, albeit for a short time, on the occasion of another auspicious debut in my football career.

I felt pleased with my performance, though I was more relieved than anything at the fact I had not made any telling errors. Reg Freeman appeared pleased too, though in keeping with the man, he didn’t say as much. When I entered the home team changing room at the end of the game, he simply patted me on the back.

Sheffield United’s star player was Jimmy Hagan, an immensely talented inside-forward of considerable artistry whose talent deserved far more than the meagre reward of one official cap for England. Jimmy, like so many of his generation, had had his football career sacrificed to the war. He was the inspirational leader of the team, a man who always thought deeply about the game. Knowing Reg Freeman was not one to offer praise to players, never mind lavish it, Jimmy came up to me and complimented me on my performance. Such a compliment from a player of Jimmy’s stature made me feel ten feet tall.

‘You did well, Alan, son,’ Jimmy informed me. ‘The boss thinks so too, but you’ll find out what he is like. Getting words of praise out of him is like knitting with sawdust.’

In light of Jimmy’s kind words I couldn’t wait for the following Friday when Reg Freeman pinned up the various teams for the games on Saturday. When he did so, my heart flopped. Ted Burgin, the regular first-team goalkeeper, was reinstated for the game at home to Preston North End. I was back with the reserves at Newcastle United.

I saw out the remaining five matches of the season with the reserves, but wasn’t too disheartened. In my first season at Sheffield United I had established myself as the regular reserve team goalkeeper and had enjoyed a brief flirtation with the first team, albeit for a friendly.

I couldn’t believe that my whole attitude to my football had changed so much and so irrevocably in a little over a year. From not thinking I was good enough to sign for Sheffield United, I now believed my development, application and attitude were such that I was good enough to claim the number one jersey. I could see light at the end of the tunnel and I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it wasn’t a train coming.