The Alumni on Saturday - how far back do you go?

NZ a bit of a trip for a free meal and a shirt. But I agree..... Was certainly a player for us during our best ever period.

 

Alan Hill was an excellent keeper, whose career was dogged by repeated injuries. If I remember rightly, he kept breaking a collarbone. I think we had Alan Ogley at the same time. Two local lads as our keepers.

 

Yes he was prone to shoulder injuries and I was at one match when he had to go off to get his arm strapped up but then came back on and played out the match on the left wing. No substitutes in those days and I can’t remember who went in goal.

 

I wonder what Scott Wiseman is going to do with his?

 

Mine too.

 

Jimmy was our insurance man after his retirement. Walked with a pronounced limp going door to door collecting insurance premiums. Hard to imagine a player as good as Jimmy having to do that now. Even if such a job still existed!!

 

My first visit was in November 1951. I was 6 months old and don't remember anything about it. Mum told me we were on the Spoin Cop. My whose family use to go and meet up with my Uncles family who lived at Hemingfield. My cousins Grandchildren are massive fans of the Reds as are my 2 sons.

 

First game at Oakwell was Everton cup tie, 15th January 1963, after multiple postponements due to the snow and ice. The team was: Alan Hill; Allan (og) Hopper, Eric Brookes; Bob Nicol (capt), Eric Winstanley, Billy Houghton; Jim Hosie, George Kerr, Tony Leighton, Ken Oliver, Eddie O'Hara. I probably reckon that the player I saw who went farthest back in time for the Reds was Bobby Wood, who for ages was our record signing from Hibernian for £4,000. Boy did we screw every last penny out of Bobby. 373 games and 44 goals, he played from 1951 to 1964 before retiring aged 34. He was in line to be sold to Mansfield in the early 1960s, but failed his medical. I think that he had a knee injury, but it didn't seem to stop us wringing the last ounces of the £4k out of him. Of the Everton game, I recall that Ken Oliver hit the bar with a header in the second half and that Everton's goals all came in the last fifteen minutes, up to which point we had held them well. Bob Nicol had been recruited as captain from Hibernian, but only stayed a season and Jim Hosie was from Aberdeen, but also lasted only a season. The Everton manager Harry Catterick reckoned that the game should never have been played and he was probably right, but the weather was extreme that winter and they had to find extreme ways to progress the schedule of matches, so the snow was rolled into a flat playing surface which would take a stud and the lines were painted orange (I think??). The game was played with an orange ball. It was all very Christmassy apart from the result. Oh! And an Everton fan nicked the station-master's hat as the train pulled out of the railway station. I presume that he got a new one and that the Everton fan still has the hat a memorabilia from another winning away day.

 

It was a proper star-studded Everton team. No question of playing the reserve team in those days. Alex Young, Brian Labone, Jimmy Melia, Gordon West were some of the international players on show. Over 30,000 turned up for a bit of a farcical match given the depth of snow rolled flat on the pitch. I can’t remember how many postponements preceded it but they had to get the games played somehow. Different times.

 

I remember that game very well. There were 30,000 in Oakwell that night. The players wore sneakers on the snow. We played well until the latter stages against an Everton side which became Division One champions that year. The following year, 1964, we lost 4-0 at home in the 5th round to a Man United side which included Best, Law and Charlton. There was a sell-out crowd of 38000.