the newspapers were in praise of my efforts at St James’s Park. All agreed I had made a good debut, whilst both the Sunday Mirror and Sheffield Star went as far as to say I was ‘set for a promising career in the game’. Well, another game at least.
On the Monday following my debut, we entertained Manchester City, though to be more precise, City entertained a 29,000 Bramall Lane crowd as all the enterprising football came from them. We turned in a poor performance and without doubt Manchester City were full value for their 2–0 success. If there was a crumb of comfort to be had for yours truly, it was in the thought that I had again played okay. Needless to say, Reg Freeman was not happy with the result or the performance against City. Reg made three changes to the team for our next game, at home to West Bromwich Albion. It was a boost to my confidence that I was not one of them.
The predictions of some newspapers that Sheffield United were in for a ‘long hard season’ gained further credence when West Brom left Bramall Lane with smiles on their faces, a 2–1 win under their belts and consequently two points in the bag. Two successive home defeats on top of the home draw on the opening day of the season did not bode well. ‘The natives are restless,’ Joe Shaw reflected one morning during training. Little wonder, we were sitting just above the relegation places in Division One.
Our next trip was to Cardiff City, who were one place above us in the League table. Cardiff boasted in their ranks Trevor Ford, a true legend of Welsh football and one of the most prolific centre-forwards of the post-war era.
Trevor was an aggressive and bustling centre-forward, a noted charger of goalkeepers, especially young ones he sensed were averse to being rocketed through the back of the net with a meaty shoulder. He looked as if he should have been cast in bronze, a big man from the waist up with a chest in keeping. People trod carefully around Trevor, as if the road to his door was peppered with eggshells. Nothing distracted Trevor Ford from doing what he was was paid to do, which was to fill the net with footballs and, if necessary, the opposing goalkeeper too. As much as I respected Trevor, I was of the mind he wasn’t going to make chips out of me. Formidable as Trevor was, I relished the opportunity of playing against one of the true stars of fifties football. As a young rookie goalkeeper, I was aware that how I dealt with Trevor Ford would go some way to demonstrating my timbre as a keeper to my teammates.
In our dressing room before the game, Joe Shaw told me not to be intimidated by Ford. ‘Give as good as you get,’ he told me, ‘and don’t buckle.’ I announced to the dressing room that no one had any cause for concern and not to worry about me.
‘I’ll come out and give Ford what for, don’t you worry,’ I boldly announced.
I looked about the room and my teammates were giving me the sort of look that Captain Oates received when he said he was going for a walk.
The Daily Mirror described our game against Cardiff City as a ‘highly contested and very physical encounter’. Believe me, in an era when referees were far more lenient towards physical play, for a newspaper to mark out a game out as being ‘very physical’ placed it a little short of the Battle of Waterloo in terms of combativeness.
There was a cauldron simmering just beneath the surface from the kick-off as the match unfolded in vigour and excitement. Joe Shaw was having a titanic struggle with Ford, neither of them giving an inch. When Cardiff’s Derek Sullivan lofted balls into my penalty box, I never hesitated as I ran and jumped to punch clear. In doing so I invariably found myself colliding with what seemed like a fridge-freezer swung from the jib of a crane but was, in fact, Trevor Ford bent on earning every penny of his fifteen quid. It proved to be a match of gleaming steel, mostly of the broadsword which, I have to say, was used with impunity by both teams and allowed to be used by a referee whose vocabulary seemed confined to but two words – ‘Play on!’
Come the final whistle, with the score-line pegged at 1–1, all the aggression and volatility that had beset the match immediately appeared to evaporate into the ether. Players shook hands and invited one another to participate in a quick beer, before boots clattered down the tunnel to a hot bath to ease their aching limbs. As I walked off the pitch, Trevor Ford shook my hand heartily and told me how well I had done. He then asked me how many games I had ‘under my belt’. I told him, this was my third.
‘Third!’ exclaimed Trevor with some surprise. ‘You’ve got a heart as big as a bucket, boy. Learn from every game and you’ll do all right. Good luck, boy.’
Having had words of encouragement from Jackie Milburn and now Trevor Ford meant a lot to me. I felt I was growing in confidence with every game and I was convinced I had what it took to play regular First Division football. In football, however, as in life, when one door opens, another is liable to slam in your face. As I was to learn, it is how you react to such disappointment that is the mark of you.
United’s next game was a tall order, against Arsenal at Highbury. Arsenal were among the pacesetters at the top of Division One, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy and we were spot on in that assumption. On the morning of the game I looked out my hotel bedroom window and watched the rain pepper it, flatten out and slide down the pane in a thick wave like melted gelatine. It was mid-September, too early for that type of rain. Such wet conditions can make life perilous for a goalkeeper. The ball, when slippery and wet, is like a bar of soap, very difficult to get a good grip of when coming at speed, particularly off a greasy surface. Such conditions, of course, are the same for both goalkeepers. In Jack Kelsey, Arsenal had a goalkeeper with some three years’ experience of playing top-class football. Jack was making a name for himself in the game as a very fine goalkeeper, one who had recently established himself as the regular number one for Wales. Jack was indeed a very good goalkeeper, and I wondered if he had learned any special techniques for playing in extremely wet weather. Then the penny dropped: even if he had, he wouldn’t share them with me – well, not before the game anyway.
Arsenal was to English football what Middlesex believed themselves to be to English county cricket, namely a cut above the rest. It was the first time I had ever been to Highbury and to my teenage eyes it was vastly superior to any other ground I had ever visited in my fledgeling career. On arrival, rather than entering through a players’ entrance, we were ushered through a marble-floored ‘Entrance Hall’, the pièce de résistance of which was a Jacob Epstein bust in bronze of legendary Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman. The old boy doing the ushering was wearing a double-breasted dark serge uniform; on the shoulders of the jacket were mounted gold-frilled epaulettes that looked for all the world like hideous spiders set to pounce. The Commissionaire, as I later discovered was his job title, was a large man with a chin you could balance a piano on and one which looked as if someone had tried. Even when he gave us his best smile his eyes were as hard as the marble on the floor and, when he said ‘Good afternoon’, he somehow made it sound like, ‘Who let this rabble in?’
Behind the imposing entrance hall were five storeys containing offices, lounges for guests and players, the boardroom, a gym, and, uniquely for the 1950s, a four-star restaurant and heated dressing rooms. The players’ lounge was something to see. The pile on the carpet was so deep I just about managed to walk across without the aid of snow shoes. Dotted around the room were large comfortable easy chairs and sofas that looked like they cost little more than an entire Third Division team. On the far side of the room, underneath a large frosted window, was an equally large oak table that shone like a lake with the early morning sun on it. On this oak table was a silver salver containing a variety of sandwiches whose fillings didn’t appear to be of the ham and cheese variety; a silver condiment set, a silver vase of flowers, a silver ink-well, a silver writing set and a silver framed photograph of the Queen. For a football club with no current trophies, it seemed like a lot of silver.
When we went out to inspect the pitch I found myself marvelling at Highbury’s East Stand, with its clean straight lines and the two tiers of seating leading down to the paddock terracing. Highbury’s art deco
