Walsall Dingle eleven

All About Walsall
1

Someone mentioned on a thread the other day that we had lots of ex-Dingles down the years, so I started wondering if I could pick a proper team in an actual formation, one to eleven, 442 more or less. I’ve only picked players who played for us AFTER (though not necessarily straight after) they had played for Wolves, so no places for Bert Williams, Johnny Hancocks, David Kelly and a few others.

!. Mick Kearns
2. Darren Bazeley
3. Bobby Thomson
4. Tom Bennett
5. Colin Brazier
6. Neil Emblen
7. Steve Corica
8. Carl Robinson
9. Don Goodman
10. Peter Eastoe
11. Paul Simpson

Some positions it would be possible to choose several alternatives I think.
Not a bad team, bit short of goals probably, but might be able to survive in the Championship? Good enough to get there surely.

2

With Corica, Bennett and Robinson, where are you playing Emblen? Centre Half? If so, don’t forget Pudo Polet

Also, I’d probably have Keith Andrews ahead of Corica …Andrews had a better career IMO

3

Emblen at centre half where he played most of the time for us. I picked Corica because he could play wide, when he could be bothered to put the effort in, so fits with 442.

5

No place for Steve Daley, the first million pound player.

6

Wasn’t Trevor Francis the 1st million pound transfer??

7

Yes sorry, Steve Daley’s move to just Manchester was a English transfer fee record of the time.

8

Didn’t tony Daley have a short spell with us as well or did I imagine that ?:thinking:

9

Yes he did

10

I presume the fullback should read Darren Bradley?

11

No, he played for West Brom, and Villa, and he wasn’t a full back. :smiley:

13

A few from more recent years are Simon Osborne, Matt Jarvis, Kevin Cooper, David Davis, John Ruddy

Not sure how many Wolves appearances these lot have between them, can’t be many though: Aaron McCarey, Connor Johnson, Ashley Hemmings, Will Randall, Connor Ronan, Anthony Forde, Zeli Ismail

14

Not sure some of that lot have many Walsall appearances between them either. :grin:

1 Like
15

Two full-backs from the sixties - John and Gerry Harris (no relation).

16

Yeah, loads to choose from, I just wanted to see if I could pick a coherent team, could have picked two, although I can’t think of another keeper who came to us after being at Wolves apart from Milk Churns.

17

Brian Clough claimed he paid £999,999 so as not to burden Francis with pressure of being the first £1 million footballer.

18

I thought that.
Also Bill Nicholson did similar paying £99,999 for someone called Jimmy Greaves.

19

I’m sure we had a decent striker on loan from Wolves in the 1990/91 season under Kenny Hibbitt. I think he played for Hereford too and had a name like McGoldrick or something similar. Scored 4 in 7 games and then went back, from memory. Can anyone help me out with his name?

20

Paul McLoughlin

21

Thank-you @longdogs :blush:

22

In his autobiography Brian Clough claimed that he only paid £999,999 for Trevor Francis (to stop him from getting big headed - oh the irony!) although Francis himself said Cloughy was being tongue in cheek.

If we accept it was £1M, most people then quote Andy Gray as being the 2nd (British) million pound player - but actually it was Steve Daley as Wolves had to offload him to Man City in order to have the cash to lure Gray from Villa.

When we played Man City in an FA cup tie in 1986, Daley had recently joined us and all the City fans were chanting “What a waste of money” at him.

Around that time my mom was working in a small cake bakery and she came home one day to say that 2 of her customers had told her that their son played for Walsall - someone called Dally or Daley or something like that? I told her " You mean Steve Daley - and next time you see them, tell them their son is a waste of money - and we had him on a free!"