Twenty Glorious Years
ON BRODSWORTH CINDER PITCHES TED SAGAR LEARNED TO MAKE HIS WONDER SAVESBy Ted Sagar
As Told To Allan Robinson
Ted Sagar, Everton’s long-serving international goalkeeper – he is in his 21st year with the club – begins today the romantic story of his football life, and tells of his early hopes and disappointments and of his first big transfer from one pit team to another, which put him on the route to Goodison Park and twenty years of football glory.
My age? –it’s no secret. I was born in February 1910, which makes me thirty-nine. Most top-class footballers hang up their boots before reaching that age, but I feel as fit as I did when I first started playing big-time football, and I intend to continue just as long as I can be of service to the best club in the country – my first and only love – Everton F.C. Maybe my fitness is not unassociated with my early work as a miner in collieries in the Doncaster district. We learned to live and play the hard way. Coal-mining is a tough occupation, but it keeps you fit and hardens you up. Many of our professional footballers have come via the coal-mines, and in the hurly-burly of modern football, have been thankful for the added powers of resistance to knocks acquired in the pits. I was born in the mining village of Brodsworth, near Doncaster, the eldest of a family of five. We were a humble but happy family, my father being a miner. He was killed during the First World War, when I was only six years old of age, and, left without a breadwinner, it was something of a struggle for my mother to bring up a family of five young children, myself my brother and three sisters. But Yorkshire women are made of the right stuff, and we will always be grateful to my mother, for the uncomplaining way she faced up to adversity.
Inspiration
I went to Highfields School, Brodsworth, and like most Yorkshire kids was football mad. We were certainly not lacking in inspiration, as such well-known professionals as Beresford of Aston Villa; Fred Gregory, of Doncaster and Manchester City; Sammy Cowan, Manchester City; and Ernie Hart, Leeds United, all hailed from our district. But even though they were our heroes, I never once thought I would follow in their footsteps in making football a profession. In fact, my start in schoolboy football was a very inauspicious one. At the age of eleven, I fancied myself as a budding Dimmock or Quantrill, and was selected for the school team at outside left in a cup-tie. Apparently I did not impress, as I was told in no uncertain language that I would never again be picked for the school in that position. Football was in my blood, and the only alternative was to try another position. Whether it was by accident or inspiration I cannot say, but I tried my hand in goal. And a goalkeeper I have been ever since.
Found Position
I must have shown some latent talents in that direction, as at twelve years of age, I was chosen to take part in a Yorkshire trial game, which included boys up to fourteen years of age. In the opposite goal, I remember, was Calvert, who was later to become a Leicester City star. Although that was the nearest I got to county recognition, I myself was at least satisfied with my display. I felt I had found my true position, and decided to persevere. And persevere I did, I was to be found anywhere there was a ball around. More often than not, coats or caps served as our goalposts. At other times we aspired to the luxury of goals – posts chalked out on a side wall. Thus were the mechanics of the game acquired. These cinder pitches were tough training grounds.
Many’s the time I limped home with cut knee. One’s sense of anticipation was certainly sharpened as the ball shot up or away at a tangent off a stray brick or clinker, and looking back I often wonder how much I owe today to that early training on Broadsworth’s makeshift clinder pitches. Even the billiard-table surfaces of the present-day First Division grounds are not without their pitfalls. The goalkeeper, like a player in any other position, has never finished learning. My advice to those coming up is “Never think you know it all. No matter how good you are you’ve always got something to learn. Football is the greatest leveller of all. The hero of one game can be the failure of the next.”
But to continue my story. I left school when I was thirteen and-a-half. My old headmaster, Mr. Meller, was confident that if I stayed on until I was fourteen I would be picked for the English Schoolboys’ XI. He tried to pursued me to stay on the extra six months, and although my mother, despite the struggle she was having, was willing. I felt it my duty, even at that immature ago, to take on the role of bread-winner and go down the pit. And so I became a coal-miner. For the next three years I earned 5s a day coupling tubs and driving ponies at Brodsworth Colliery. Thirty to thirty-five shillings a week was no fortune, but it certainly helped at home.
I kept on with my football after finishing shifts. We still played on pitches denuded of all signs of vegetation, against a mounting background of slag-heaps. I suppose in the vivid imagination of youth, those slag-heaps took on the form of double-decker stands housing thousands of roaring football fans, but more often than not such mental frothing were rudely dissipated by a hefty, if indecorous, shoulder charge from an opponent. Many of our games, of course were run on organized lines, and the players aspired to a full football kit, but if on the way home from the colliery there was a ball to be kicked, the urge usually proved too strong, and many a substantial Yorkshire supper became a burnt offering on football’s altar.
Incidentally, Ted has his own views on some of the “cotton-wools” footballers of today. He recalls that the colliers would play two or three matches a day, and then take their shift in the mines. Ted refused to be drawn on the outcry against the recent end-of-the-season glut of fixtures, as the result of which, a First Division team had to play three games in a week. His only comments was; “We used to play three a day.” One can draw ones own inference. Let Ted continue.
Even though my wage of five shillings a day at Brodsworth Colliery was a godsend to my mother I thought I could be earning more. My goalkeeping helped me to get it. Thorne Colliery were on the lookout for a goalkeeper, and approached me. I told them the poor wages I was on at Brodsworth. As I was only sixteen it was not possible to earn more in the mines. -
