Between the Sticks. Alan Hodgkinson
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.
Without saying ‘a star is born’ 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.