Given these times, I decided to serialise my third book, published in 2013 to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. I’ve reproduced each chapter with modest tweaks.
Recently, local football legend Mick “Screwy” Driver reached the grand old age of seventy. Here is an edited tribute to him and several others.
6 – BELDON SPORTS AFC
“The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.”
Phil Woosnam.
Just about everybody I know has had a season with one of the longest established Sunday morning football teams in Bradford, Beldon Sports AFC. Like most Sunday footballers, I was crap, as slow as a carthorse and just as heavy-footed. Football became a natural way to keep very fit, largely because I spent most of the game chasing the opposition.
Although perennial dead men of the Bradford Sunday Alliance League, Beldon had some decent players. My first season with them was notable for two things: the coldest of winters and the introduction of a new kit, which was as rare as successive wins.
The problem with the new kit was simply that it was supposed to accommodate an entire team on a one size fits all basis; that meant from the Shrek-like centre forward Ray Winterbourne to weedy little me.
It was clearly a job lot albeit a fancy brand – Le Coq Sportif. As for the “choice” of short sleeved shirts, fine in the south of France but not on shitty, wind-swept, mud-heaps in Bradford. The shirt simply hung off me and offered little protection against the rain or sleet that tended to accompany most Sunday mornings that winter.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Many times, I tried to avoid selection ignoring my teammate’s knocks on my parents’ door on Sunday mornings, followed by a torrent of pebbles raining on my bedroom window. I even awoke one morning to find him pulling my sheets off the bed; it was the winter of discontent.
Once we got to the game though it was impossible to not have our spirits lifted by a fantastically diverse range of characters that formed the core of the Beldon team for many years.
Most were early examples of Care in the Community. The unbridled joy of the prospect of a game of football, whatever the weather, could not have been bettered had we passed a few joints around.
Dear Old Joe Williamson
Our long serving and much missed Head Coach was Joe Williamson who was content to admit he had absolutely no tactical ambitions save to get to the pub without collapsing from frostbite. He must have worn the same ragged brown anorak for as long as Beldon had been in existence; I think they buried him in it.
Joe’s right hand man and the team’s talisman was Ray, our giant centre forward, a colossus of a man who was a prolific goal scorer. We played for many years on a pitch with a significant slope, the dreaded dogshit covered Idle “Rec”.
When Ray went off on a run, he would be almost irretrievable if we were playing downhill, like a jumbo jet trying to stop. One to one with the opposing goalkeeper he did not bother with any fancy dribbles and simply ran over them, taking man and ball with him into the net.
Psycho Stuart
Most football teams are judged by what is commonly known as their “spine” comprising the goalkeeper, centre halves, the central midfield pairing and the centre forward. Working backwards from Big Ray, in midfield we had a complementary duo in Stuart Wassell and Arthur Sutcliffe.
Stuart, in his opinion if nobody else’s, was a ball-winning fighter in the mould of those diminutive players over the years such as Nobby Stiles and Alan Ball; in other words he was a dirty, psychopathic, ticking time bomb who could rarely get through a game without provoking that Sunday morning ritual of the all-out brawl.
Arthur Sutcliffe’s Goal of the Season
Arthur was half-blind, bow-legged and slower than me, but convinced he was as good as the legendary Dutch international Johan Cruyff.
Weekly, he attempted forty yard passes out of the municipal mud heaps we played on and generally succeeded only in stubbing his toe in the mud and sending the ball bobbling to the opposition.
He did score the goal of the century though – at Grange Upper School – when an attempt at a cross field pass was sliced again and flew, tornado-assisted, into the top corner of the opposition net over an amazed goalkeeper.
Pansy Potter
Beldon’s spiritual leader and evidence of the eclectic nature of the team was Geoff “Pansy” Potter, a skilled central defender with a compulsion for the occasional lapse into outrageous camp behaviour, especially when changing next to young boys new to the team.
Pansy had played at a very good non-league standard with Thackley AFC and, although the prematurely steel grey hair suggested otherwise, he was exceptional on the ball with a sharp football brain.
In his twilight years by this time, if Pansy could not tackle, block or assault a rival forward he could always resort to mental disintegration; a concept stolen in later years by the Australian cricket captain, Steve Waugh.
When an opposing forward passed Pansy, he would chase them as best he could only to eventually talk them into tripping up, often through laughter. If they did not wilt at this then they still had to face the ultimate test in goalkeeper Mick “Screwy” Driver.
Screwy Driver
Screwy was so complex you could have written a dissertation on him; of all the madcap characters I played Sunday football with I have never met anybody funnier, sharper or quicker of tongue.
He was also a top-class non-league footballer, again playing at Thackley, allowed to play Sunday mornings on the condition he played in goals.
It was clear that Screwy just needed to be out and about as he probably bounced off walls if he ever tried to sit in one place long enough, so it was our good luck he chose us.
You barely had time to sit down in the changing room before some rapid-fire, acerbic and hugely funny barb would be winging its way towards you. I was easy prey simply because I was crap; these days they would call it child abuse but to us it was growing up.
He could make a ball talk and when he ran training sessions, they were marvellous for their variety, lunacy and for the lung busting sessions he devised – after all, ball skills were wasted on us – so we may as well be able to run like dogs. Joe always watched contentedly on whilst counting down the minutes till the pub opened.
If I ever thought I might get a prized midfield berth he would quickly remind me that, as I spent so much time on my backside each Sunday morning, Le Coq Sportif were “bringing out shorts with studs in their arse and you’ve been chosen to endorse them!”
The Best of Days
One morning saw Screwy at his finest. The opposition forward roared towards the goal and had only Screwy to beat. He looked up and suddenly, he saw Screwy waving his arms about, manically taunting the bewildered forward.
“Go on son, make yourself a hero. Are you going left, are you going right…maybe a shimmy through the legs?” he ranted. “What’s it going to be son? Make my day!”
You could see the lad visibly wilt; he just lost it, tried to blast the ball as hard as he could and missed the ball by a country mile.
As he fell on his arse, Screwy causally jogged up, did a few keepy-ups in a circle around the fallen opponent, like a triumphant Red Indian with scalp in possession and hoofed the ball back up the hill to big Ray – who ran over their keeper and scored another.
There was nobody like Screwy; it was like having a pre-match talk by Peter Kay, a whiff of a joint and then a few beers before tne experiencing the simple joys of a game of footy.
Wonderful days in the company of genius and madness mixed like never since.
David Meer says
Nice to read the story of early Beldon. I played for Beldon in the eighties and Ray Winterbourne played well into his fifties, Derek Wyness and Gary Orrell were the centre halves then. Joe was a legend and wore the anorak you mentioned and provided his flask of coffee with a nip of something in it. We won some and lost most, Joe was a great bloke never got angry and had a great demeanour, he deserved the respect given to him a lot of the time paying out of his own pocket. I wrote a short article in the nineties called Green & White heroes in the Park Avenue fanzine about the then Beldon Sports, fond memories, we played at a field near Thackley then, I forget the name of the field.
Dave Meer (Goal poacher).