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
