managers of this era were concerned. I remember once having a conversation with Jack Charlton about his debut for Leeds United against Doncaster Rovers in the very same season I made my Football League debut. The Leeds manager was the great Raich Carter of Sunderland, Derby County and England fame. According to Jack, Raich had never spoken to him at any point from him joining Leeds in 1952. Minutes before taking to the pitch, Jack was in a quandary as to what exactly his manager wanted him to do at centre-half. As the Leeds players left the dressing room, Jack turned to Raich. ‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ asked Jack. ‘I want you to see how fast their centre-forward can limp,’ replied Raich.
A sonorous noise from 52,000 Geordies assailed my ears as I ran down the tunnel and out into the Tyneside sunshine. I had never played in front of such a large crowd before, but rather than being overawed I felt good about it. Of course I had butterflies in my stomach but the worst part had been the twenty minutes or so prior to taking to the pitch. Now I was out there, fielding shots from my teammates in the pre-match kick-in, although I was many miles from home and in front of 50,000 partisan Geordies, I felt strangely at home. I felt I was in my rightful place in life – keeping goal and for Sheffield United.
Newcastle had a formidable side. Their team included one of my boyhood heroes, the great Ronnie Simpson, in goal. Casting my mind back to my debut, who would have thought, thirteen years later and coming up to thirty-eight years of age, Ronnie would be keeping goal for Celtic when they defeated Inter Milan to become the first British team to win the European Cup? What’s more, in the first fifteen minutes of that final, Ronnie’s heroics in goal kept Celtic in the game. I can’t recall if Joe Shaw won the toss but I do remember having to change ends before the game got underway. When this happens, goalkeepers always shake hands and wish one another good luck as they pass each other. As I reached the centre circle on my way to the Gallowgate End of the ground, Ronnie shook my hand firmly.
‘Know it’s your debut. Good luck, son, give it your all and don’t let your mind wander to the crowd. Always concentrate on the game and you’ll be fine,’ Ronnie said.
I thanked him, wished him luck and carried on my way. As a young debutant, Ronnie’s kind words meant much to me and were typical of the man. In addition to Ronnie, the Newcastle team also included Bobby Cowell, Alf McMichael, Bob Stokoe, Vic Keeble, George Hannah and the aptly named Jimmy Scoular, without doubt the hardest player I ever encountered in my entire career in the game. Jimmy served in the submarines during the war and was to football what Brian Close was to cricket: a dedicated, determined, combative and talented player who never knew the meaning of fear. Jimmy was as hard as teak. When the going got tough he would remain as unmoved as a rock in a raging sea. With his balding head, a neck that could dent an axe and a mouth like a pair of pants whose elastic had perished, he cut an imposing and frightening figure on a pitch.
The star of the Newcastle team was Jackie Milburn, affectionately referred to by Magpie fans as ‘Wor Jackie’ and, when his fame spread globally, ‘World Wor One’. Jackie’s beginnings with Newcastle could have come straight from the pages of a Boy’s Own story. In 1943 he wrote to the club for a trial. He turned up with borrowed boots and his lunch of a pie and bottle of pop in a brown paper bag. The trial match took the form of Stripes v Blues. Jackie sat out the first half. Come half-time the Stripes were losing 3–0. In the second half Jackie played centre-forward for the Stripes and scored six goals, Newcastle manager, Stan Seymour, signed him straight away. Days later, Seymour played him in a wartime Northern League match at Hull City in which Jackie scored five. After the game a delighted and astounded Seymour said to Jackie, ‘You’re some goal-scorer, eleven goals in two games!’ ‘One and a half,’ Jackie reminded him. It is the stuff of legend.
Jackie was, and still is, a Tyneside legend whose goals and rampages in opposing penalty boxes contributed in no small way to Newcastle’s three post-war FA Cup victories (1951, 1952 and 1955). In 1951 he scored in every round of the FA Cup, including both goals in the Final against Blackpool. He was a spectacular centre-forward who used his exceptional speed, powerful shot and thundering heading of the ball to great effect, scoring 200 goals in his eleven seasons with Newcastle, making him Newcastle’s all-time greatest goal-scorer in League and Cup matches (Alan Shearer scored seven more should you include European games).
It is unthinkable now but following a Newcastle win, when the players received their wages and win bonus, the club always gave them an extra bonus of a packet of twenty cigarettes. The majority of Newcastle players didn’t smoke, but Jackie did, so they gave their cigarettes to him. Off the pitch Jackie always seemed to have a fag on the go, and sadly this may well have contributed to his death from lung cancer at the relatively young age of 64.
As great a goal-scorer as he was, Jackie Milburn didn’t score against me on my debut, though Bobby Mitchell did. A hard low drive on the turn which came through a thicket of legs and I didn’t see it until the last moment. That equalled matters, for a fine effort from Jimmy Hagan had put us in the lead. In the second half we gave as good as we got and with some fifteen minutes remaining, Jack Cross met a cross, and steered the ball past Simpson. It was a lead we were to preserve, though I was kept a tad busy in those last ten minutes as Newcastle threw everything at us bar the proverbial sink. In the final minutes, I managed to make a point-blank save from George Hannah and, diving to my right, finger-tipped a bullet header from ‘Wor Jackie’ around the post. When the final whistle blew I was so happy I nearly jumped over the main grandstand.
I left the pitch to hearty back-slapping and congratulations from my teammates. I think I shook hands with every Newcastle player and twice with the referee, whilst both Ronnie Simpson and Jackie Milburn made a point of saying how well I had done. With adrenalin coursing through my body I tried to spot Dad and Brenda in the crowd but among some 52,000 souls it was, of course, hopeless. I knew they would be as excited and delighted as I was, though. I nearly didn’t make it down the tunnel – it wasn’t built for people ten feet tall.
When a team plays away, the journey home is always a more hectic affair than the journey to your destination, particularly in the 1950s when teams invariably travelled by train. The dressing room was buoyant but we had no time to relax and savour our first victory of the season. It was a mad rush to change, bath, put on our suits, eat some sandwiches, run upstairs for a quick drink with the Newcastle lads before boarding the coach that would take us the half mile to Central station.
In those days players heard results from other games on the wireless that was in the dressing room, or, failing that, by word of mouth from the backroom staff or directors. Naturally we only heard a few results; the way we players obtained the full classified results and football news of the day was to buy a football paper at a station on our way home. We were at York when we bought a local evening football paper. The paper boys who operated at the stations knew which trains were due and located themselves on the platform, knowing that they could sell anything up to fifty papers at one go when a train came in. That night at York our party must have bought nigh on twenty football papers from the paper lad. That done, we all sat back to digest every detail during the final leg of our homeward journey. In the middle pages of the paper was a small report, probably from a press agency, of our game at Newcastle. I didn’t get a mention until the final paragraph when it said, ‘As the home side went in search of an equaliser, Sheffield United owed much to debutant keeper Hodgkinson who first denied Hannah, then Milburn, to ensure the Blades enjoyed their first win of the season’. That was one for the scrapbook.
With today’s saturation coverage of football by television and radio, the internet, mobile phones with apps and what have you, one area of the game which has all but died is the Saturday evening football paper. In the past twenty years up and down the country ‘Green ’Uns’,‘Pinks’ and ‘Buffs’ have disappeared from the shelves of newsagents, the victims of an ever expanding and more personalised media. In the fifties Britain boasted nigh on a hundred Saturday evening football papers. Now there are less than twenty in existence, and some of those such as ‘The Pink’ (Manchester) have moved from a Saturday night to a Sunday in the hope of enjoying a longer shelf life.
