Читать книгу Football Extreme - Rob Crossan - Страница 11
ОглавлениеHow the vainest of chairmen and the most desperate of managers got themselves into the record books
DID YOU KNOW?
In 1950/51, Leslie Compton became the oldest player to make his debut for England, aged 38 years and two months.
Not since the days of the Charlton brothers has it been a regular occurrence to see bald players on football pitches. Indeed, in an era where players often look like they would be more suited to a career on the athletics track than the football pitch, there is less and less room for the bald, the ailing and the slow to make their mark, despite the often sublime skills shown by the likes of Chris Waddle and Peter Beardsley in the last few years of their careers.
Stanley Matthews was an incredible 50 years of age when he made his last playing appearance but even he isn’t the record holder for the oldest player ever to appear on a British football pitch in a senior level game. For that we need to look firstly to the late Neil McBain, who takes the crown for an appearance in an English league match.
A prestigious playing career as a full-back took in stints at Everton, Liverpool and Manchester United as well as three caps for Scotland during the 1920s. McBain was known for his sublime ball skills and for possessing the ability to head a ball with extreme power – no mean feat in an age when footballs were often more like bowling balls than the light, responsive balls we see today.
Long after his playing days were behind him, and while working as manager of New Brighton FC in 1947, McBain was presented with a goalkeeping crisis. With absolutely nobody else available, it must have been with a fair degree of trepidation that, at the grand old age of 52 years and four months, McBain ended up playing between the sticks himself for a Third Division North game against Hartlepool in March 1947.
Perhaps inevitably, the performance itself was less than perfect. McBain picked the ball out of the net three times as Hartlepool strolled to victory. He then went on to manage Watford, Leyton Orient and even had a stint in Argentina as manager of Estudiantes de la Plata. He died in 1974.
DID YOU KNOW?
Goalkeeper John Burridge is the oldest player ever to have played in the Premier League, appearing for Manchester City in 1995 at the age of 43 years, four months and 26 days.
McBain may have played out of necessity, but the record holder for a senior level game played for reasons more to do with vanity than emergency.
While Doncaster Rovers endured a spell out of the league in 2003, a certain John Ryan was selected as a substitute for the Belle Vue side’s away match against Hereford United at Edgar Street on 26 April. He never played for Rovers again after that match and he was only on the pitch for three minutes. His identity would probably have been a mystery to many neutrals in the crowd. So the question is, why would manager Dave Penney select a man who was aged 52 years and eleven months to take part in a Nationwide Conference match? Easy. He was Doncaster Rovers’ chairman.
Making his fortune out of a chain of cosmetic surgery clinics, Ryan, a lifelong fan of the club who had always dreamed of playing for ‘Donny’, came on during injury time of his club’s 4-2 win. He told reporters afterwards: ‘I came on when the ref put his board up for an extra three minutes of injury time. I didn’t actually get a kick of the ball but I had a good run around.’
It must have been hard for Penney to refuse Ryan’s request. After all, if the boss wants to come and work on the shop floor for a while, it’s probably not in the best long-term career prospects of the gaffer to refuse. Penney stayed on at Doncaster, now back in the Football League, until 2006. Ryan is still chairman, though – perhaps wisely – has so far confined his ‘skills’ to the boardroom since that day.
