Burnden legend reveals dressing room talk of the 50s

THROUGHOUT the 1950s Bolton Wanderers earned a reputation as one of the most respected football teams in England.

Never fashionable but always feared, they held their own in the most esteemed company.

They never managed to win the Football League title but claimed their place in history by winning the FA Cup in 1958, five years after suffering the heartbreak of losing one of the most famous games in the history of Wembley Stadium.

That team of 58, which Nat Lofthouse captained to victory over Munich-ravaged Manchester United had been assembled for the princely sum of just £110 - every player recruited for the nominal £10 signing-on fee.

But how did they do it?

The manager, Bill Ridding, is best remembered for organising travel and hotel arrangements rather than for his tactical awareness while his coach George Taylor - regarded as "the football brains at the club" and the man most responsible for assembling and grooming those Wembley heroes - rarely saw the first team play because he was the main talent spotter and spent most Saturdays on scouting missions!

And the directors ... well, it is putting it mildly to say they were despised by the players they treated like chattels.

Len Shackleton, the legendary Clown Prince of Football, once summed up his contempt for football club directors in his autobiography by leaving a page completely blank. Not surprisingly, the famously outspoken Tommy Banks, has never been quite so reticent or so subtle.

In a new book "Bolton Wanderers - The Glory Years Remembered" Banks offers characteristically forthright views on the way players were treated in those halcyon days: how they were tied to clubs with no control over their destiny or earning potential; made to wear the same dirty training shirts from Monday to Friday and, on end-of-season foreign tours were given an allowance of £2 a day while 26 directors and wives were each on £5 a day!

He relates how one board member (directors had a big say in team selection in those days) who sent a note to the dressing room at half-time congratulating the lads for their performance at Deepdale - not realising that the team in white, which led 3-0, was Preston and that the 'Reds' had been given the runaround by a certain Tom Finney!

Banks adds: "Ridding was all right but he wasn't a football man. The directors were the mad part. They weren't football men either. They were in business. Yet they were getting involved in the team and things they knew nothing about. I used to get into shouting matches over it!"

You can picture the scene ... as you can picture various others portrayed by journalist Mike Prestage in this informative, entertaining and enthralling publication in the Heroes of Winter series - Blackpool, Preston and Burnley have been given the same treatment.

Drawing on the personal testimony of the stars of the era - Lofthouse and Banks, of course, along with Malcolm Barrass, Eddie Hopkinson, Roy Hartle, Gordon Taylor and Ian Greaves who, as a former Manchester United player and Wanderers manager, makes an authoritative contribution - the reader is taken on a journey through the post-war years. From the 1946 Burnden Park tragedy, offering fresh insights into the 53 and 58 Finals and through to the decline that led to relegation in 1964 after 29 years in the top flight.

Stalwart fans Bert Gregory, Tom Hodgkinson, Florence Brandwood and Fred and Florence Guest provide a rich account of life in those down-to-earth days when the players travelled to and from the matches on the same bus as the supporters!

There was clearly a special relationship between the fans and the team and, importantly, a spirit among the players that turned a bunch of players rather harshly described as "workmanlike" into an all-for-one, one-for-all team of Wembley winners.

That's how they did it! The players who wore the white shirt with grace and pride in the Fifties - the hard men and the talented internationals alike - triumphed against the odds.

In the closing chapter, 'The Legacy and the Future', the teams of today are acknowledged, as their forebears were, of being capable of performances that "get the old mill town buzzing". But with the tribute comes the thought-provoking rider that the results these days are being achieved "by players more likely to come from Scandinavia than Farnworth".

Bolton Wanderers - The Glory Years Remembered (Breedon Books, priced £12.99).