Sawyer Harry Catterick

The Untold Story of a Football Great
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909245-18-1
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 244 Seiten

As the manager of Sheffield Wednesday and Everton, Harry Catterick amassed more top flight points in the 1960s than all his rivals, finishing outside the top six on only one occasion. Yet, unfairly, he stands in the shadows of contemporaries such as Bill Shankly, Don Revie and Brian Clough in the public consciousness. Following extensive research, including being given unique access to the Catterick family's documents and photographs, Rob Sawyer has recounted the life of this football great for the very first time.

Rob Sawyer was born in 1970 with Everton the cusp of clinching the league title for a second time under Harry Catterick's guiding hand. Regaled from a young age with stories of Dean, Lawton, Creswell, Collins, Kendall, Harvey and Ball - becoming anything other than the 4th generation of Evertonian in the family was never an option. A columnist for the Toffeeweb independent Everton website, Rob is also a member of the EFC Heritage Society. He lives in Cheshire with his family, still making pilgrimages to Goodison Park and following the trials and tribulations of his local team Stockport County.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sawyer, Rob

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

SCHOLAR AT THE SCHOOL OF SCIENCE

THE REASON for Harry signing with a team 40 miles away, when there were suitors on his doorstep, lay in family connections. Charlie Gee was a Stockportborn centre-half who had been coached by Harry Senior as he came up through the County youth ranks in the late 1920s. Such was Gee’s impact upon breaking into the first team in 1929 that First Division suitors were immediately making frequent scouting visits to Edgeley Park. When the hard-up Hatters were obliged to cash in during the 1930 close season, Harry Senior encouraged Gee to choose Everton. Within a year Gee was a regular in the Goodison Park outfit’s first XI seeking promotion back to the top flight, and a year later he was a full England international. In 1937 the time came for Gee to return the favour to the Cattericks. Aware of young Harry’s promise, Gee recommended him to Everton’s secretary, Theo Kelly. According to Harry’s memoir, Gee ‘painted golden pictures of life at Goodison Park’ to the Catterick family. The sales pitch was successful and Gee was present as Harry and his parents signed the registration forms, with Kelly, at Edgeley Conservative Club.

Harry had initially joined the Merseysiders as an amateur on Liverpool Combination forms. Thrown into the A team (the club’s third team), he scored goals in the County Combination against B.I. Social and South Liverpool Reserves. Impressed, the club moved swiftly to secure his services on a professional basis. Everton offered Harry terms of £3 per week in the season and £2 during the summer break with a signing-on bonus of £5. The board also agreed to grant Cheadle Heath Sports Club £10 in lieu of a transfer fee; a further donation of £25 was made in 1946. The contract was on a part-time basis due to Harry’s ongoing five-year engineering apprenticeship with Mirrlees – Harry Senior remained resolute that his son should see through his studies and have a safety net should his football dreams be shattered.

Everton had been dubbed ‘The School of Science’ after the former Derby County player and journalist Steve Bloomer observed, ‘We owe a great deal to Everton. No matter where they play, and no matter whether they are well or badly placed in the table, they always manage to serve football of the highest scientific order. Everton always worship at the shrine of craft and science and never do they forget the standard of play they set out to achieve.’ The School of Science tag would sometimes be an albatross around the neck of the club in later, leaner times, but in 1937 they had won four league titles and two FA Cups, and were established as one of England’s leading clubs alongside the likes of Arsenal, Aston Villa, Sunderland and Liverpool.

First and foremost in the public’s consciousness was record-breaking scorer, and living football legend, William Ralph ‘Dixie’ Dean. Dean was, by the time of Harry’s arrival, in the twilight of his top-flight playing career as injuries, advancing age and disagreements with Everton secretary Theo Kelly took their toll. The goalscoring prodigy Tommy Lawton had been acquired from Burnley in 1936 as heir-apparent to Dixie, while Robert ‘Bunny’ Bell provided solid competition for the centre-forward position. The squad was also peppered with household names such as Joe Mercer, Cliff Britton, Ted Sagar and Billy Cook.

With such talent in depth it was clear that Harry, still rough around the edges, would continue to learn his trade away from the first team. At A-team level he made an immediate impact, scoring 23 goals in his first full season including two hat-tricks and a five-goal haul against Haydock Athletic. His goalscoring form led to a breakthrough into the reserves – scoring twice on his Central League debut at Manchester United in November 1937. Fittingly, Charlie Gee was also in the team that day and laid on one of the goals. The reserves, who won the Central League that season, contained a mix of promising youngsters and star names such as Albert Geldard, ‘Jock’ Thomson, Alex Stevenson, Stan Bentham, Jimmy ‘Nat’ Cunliffe and Torry Gillick. Harry would play a handful of non-competitive games with, and train alongside, Lawton and Dean. This gave him the opportunity to observe and learn from them at close quarters; speaking to the author and journalist John Roberts in 1977 he compared the two forwards:

I had watched Billy Dean playing in the Lancashire area since I was about twelve years of age. There was no doubt in terms of heading a ball I have seen no-one like him. He always had time. Tom Lawton was a truly great header of the ball but in that particular skill he did not match up to Billy; with Deany it was only a flick of the head and it was in the back of the net. Tom Lawton was in a tighter era, the game had tightened up defensively so it was more difficult. As an overall player he may have been a bit better but when it came to heading – Deany was the best.

The 1938/39 season saw Everton win their fifth league title, with Lawton’s 34 league goals firing the team to glory. A bright future for the Toffees seemed to beckon but, as was the case when the club won the title in 1914/15, war would stymie the momentum and have a catastrophic impact on the careers of many of the footballers.

Pre-season preparations for the following season were overshadowed by the looming conflict in Europe – neighbours Liverpool had joined the Territorial Army en-masse in anticipation of war being declared. Nonetheless the season kicked off at Goodison on 26 August – a 1–1 draw with Brentford. After a mid-week victory over Aston Villa, the following Saturday’s match at Ewood Park, in which Lawton scored in a third consecutive fixture, was to be the last Football League match for seven years. By then Nazi Germany had invaded Poland, obliging Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to declare war on the Axis powers on Sunday 3 September. An emergency meeting of the League Management Committee, chaired by Everton’s Will Cuff, led to the indefinite suspension of domestic competitive football.

Looking back with John Roberts, Harry believed the tumultuous world events broke up a team that would have gone on to collect further honours: ‘They always played, to my mind, a very good style of football. I think the team that won the 1939 championship would have gone on to win two or three more had it not been for the war. There were so many good players.’

Everton’s players were fortunate that, uniquely, their club paid up their contracts – elsewhere contracts were summarily terminated with no payment. Players would be obliged to join the forces or seek alternative employment until such time as peace was restored. Everton’s T.G. Jones, doyen of defenders and known as ‘The Prince of Centre-Halves’, went to work in an aircraft factory while Charlie Gee became a demolition worker with the Air Raid Precautions organisation before training as a schoolteacher.

The clamour for the return of football came from supporters, clubs and businesses. Future Everton chairman E. Holland Hughes, secretary of the Pools Promoters Association, lobbied hard for a resumption of football fixtures – as an interim measure the pools coupons were featuring Irish matches. Soon friendlies and exhibition matches were being arranged in areas deemed to be safe from bombing. One such fixture was a 4–1 Everton victory in a Merseyside derby at Goodison. Fundraising games were arranged, including one in aid of the Red Cross hosted by Everton between a Football League XI and an ‘All-British’ team. By October the Wartime League had been established consisting of ten regional divisions; Everton were placed in the ‘West’ section alongside the likes of Stockport County, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, New Brighton, Tranmere Rovers, Stoke City and Chester. A Football League War Cup was established in lieu of the FA Cup, with regional sections feeding into a national final. A year later the ten leagues were consolidated into two: the Northern Regional League and the Southern Regional League. A ‘League West’ was added in 1943.

Wartime league football was austere, with neglected stadiums, cabbage-patch pitches and poor attendances as so many young men were working flat-out in factories and pits or serving in the armed forces. That said, the sport played a significant role in boosting morale; in some respects wartime was English football’s ‘finest hour’. At Everton Theo Kelly, Harry Cooke, Gordon Watson and others played a heroic role in keeping the club functioning – even creating a night-watch rota to ensure that Goodison did not succumb to incendiary bombs. In 1940 Cooke and E. Storey were praised by the Everton board for having dealt with 59 incendiary devices in the environs of Goodison Park; Goodison was damaged by an explosive bomb just once, getting off lightly in comparison to the likes of Old Trafford.

Due to the difficulties of travel and players serving in the forces or other occupations, clubs would struggle to field their regular line-ups. ‘Guesting’ became commonplace; players billeted in an area would be asked by nearby clubs to make up the numbers. Intended to assist clubs in dire straits, the system would be abused, with clubs bidding for the services of available star names to boost gate receipts. Everton were lucky in that their depth of resources meant they rarely required guests, indeed...