David Burnside after joining Cheltenham Town as football coordinator in 2003. Picture courtesy of Bristol Evening Post.

By David Instone

David Burnside would have been 70 in December and a video about his life and times was already being prepared as part of his surprise party. There was no shortage of material.

Forty-three competitive appearances and five goals for Wolverhampton Wanderers were only the start of it for a man who did things a little differently. So much so that he wanted to call the autobiography I was helping him write ‘Me And My Bad Attitude’.

By the time he arrived at Molineux in 1966, just in time to score against the Crystal Palace side he had left and in whose line-up he was named in the match programme, the youthful cockiness and defiance had departed.

But, having gone against the wishes of his parents by signing as a kid for Albion and then so infuriated one of his early Hawthorns coaches that he was reported to the club manager, he did retain some rebellious ways.

As a long-time coach with the FA, grooming the likes of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and Sol Campbell, he insisted he did things his way – not necessarily by the Lancaster Gate manual.

And he and John Holsgrove once very nearly added an unscheduled extra leg to an overnight stay at Portsmouth that would have earned them the wrath of manager Ronnie Allen.

“David and I were rooming together and having a stroll along the sea front with some time on our hands on the morning of the game,” the tall defender told me.

“We saw a sign for the Isle Of Wight ferry and thought about popping over and coming straight back.

“In the end, we didn’t and were glad we had decided against. The wind quickly got up towards lunchtime and we later heard that all crossings had been suspended, so we wouldn’t have made it back for the match.”

Burnside had contacts in high places. When I was first informed of the surprise party for him in a couple of months time, I was asked by the part-organisers, Les Wilson and his wife Lois, to try to lay on four tickets for the Manchester United v Wolves game on December 15 as part of his present.

The task was a simple one once it became clear to those in the Old Trafford offices how well known David was to Sir Bobby Charlton through FA circles as well as an opponent.

It wasn’t only with the father figure of English football, though, that Burnside was highly familiar at the Premier League champions and current leaders. More than anyone, it was the Bristolian who tried to make Ryan Giggs English.

No 6 John Holsgrove looks on as Burnside (facing camera) challenges in Wolves' win at Carlisle in 1966.

“We had Ryan in the English Schools set-up because he was educated in this country and we could recognise his ability,” he told me when we met several months ago in his native city for our first session on his book.

“We looked into his background to see whether there was a loophole by which he qualified for us but he didn’t. Although he lived in England, his parents were Welsh and he wanted to play for Wales. He says his mom would have given him a right telling-off if he had come to play for us.

“We had to accept it but were very disappointed. Imagine what he might have achieved in our national side over the years!”

Burnside, who was a promotion winner with Wolves in 1967 and the scorer of a hat-trick in the epic 6-5 final victory over Aberdeen in the United Soccer Association Championship that summer, had a mesmeric talent with the ball at his feet.

And, although he owned up to once hitting team-mate Peter Knowles as they argued while waiting in the penalty area for a Wolves set-piece to be taken, he bitterly regretted not staying longer at Molineux.

Derek Dougan berated him over his decision but the pull of the south-west was too strong and he headed for Plymouth, where his playing career disappeared down something of a cul-de-sac.

Not that his creativity deserted him. When he subsequently worked for the FA and coached an England youth side in a tournament in Australia, he took his own steps to eradicate this country’s penalty shoot-out phobia.

He insisted on telling the players which of them were taking kicks, rather than seeking volunteers. They won.

Restless but exuding great thought and self-control, Burnside didn’t consider his work done following his exit from the FA and then his departure from a youth development role at Bristol City several years later.

He still had so much to give and threw himself in recent months into his ambitions to achieve that rarest ‘transfer’ – from football to Westminster.

As a Palace player just before his Molineux move.

As recently as Friday, he had a meeting in London at which he was expected to be ratified by the UKIP as their man to fight for a seat in Bristol at the next General Election.

And he was excited that the tantalising prospect of a role in Parliament might just infringe on our book deadlines some time next year.

David Gort Burnside was known far and wide and it will be standing room only for those who don’t arrive early for his funeral.

Bobby Thomson in January, 2009

By David Instone

There’s a numbness today among Wolves fans and players of a certain generation.

In Bobby Thomson, they saw a man who looked like he would live to be 100 but who has been taken away at the age of 65.

He was a tremendous athlete, quick, upright and poised, and described by Phil Parkes as a Peter Pan figure. “Never put on weight and barely had a grey hair,” the keeper said.

The disbelief among his contemporaries came from the fact that they envied him his good looks and the sky-high fitness levels that saw to it that he coached youngsters up to the last few weeks and even played once or twice in recent years.

What only a few of them knew was that ’Chippy’ had been suffering from prostate cancer. He won one battle against the disease in 2008 – the year in which he took several months off work following the fitting of a new left knee – but not the next one.

John Holsgrove has expressed his utter sorrow and exchanged emails across the Atlantic with Les Wilson, for whom this is another blow on top of the loss of his father several days ago.

“Only the pair of us left of the tea set now,” was one of the sentiments expressed, the two last having met at Derek Dougan’s funeral two summers ago.

Wherever Wolves travelled in the country or indeed across the world, Thomson, Doog, Holsgrove and Wilson achieved a certain status among their late 1960s team-mates by ordering tea for four within minutes of checking in at hotels and airports. Silver service, best china and debate was more their thing than playing cards.

“I was in it at the start as well but then started disappearing to health food shops instead,” said David Burnside. “It looks like I’m going to have to make a comeback now to get the numbers back up.

“I best remember the tea set from round the pool of our hotel in Los Angeles on the tour of 1967 but it could equally have been while we were waiting for a plane or train – and often there would be a visit up to a cafe in Wolverhampton town centre after training as well.

“I can’t believe this awful news. Bobby looked the fittest of us all when we last met. He hardly looked a day older than when he was playing.”

'Chippy' sweeps the ball away from Roger Hunt at Anfield in February, 1965.

I had an hour or so at the Thomsons in Sedgley in January and found him in fine form and apparently fine health.

He was proud of the fact that his grandchildren were regulars with him at Wolves home matches and pointed out that he often sat near Dave Wagstaffe and Willie Carr.

A couple of years prior to that, I had interviewed him for the Official History of Wolverhampton Wanderers dvd, on which he is shown with a smile on his face as he recalls how Stan Cullis once told him after a game at Arsenal that his wife could tackle harder than he could.

The self-deprecation typifies Wolves players of that era. Bobby Thomson was actually a masterful full-back and the ultimate team player.

It’s no accident that he played 300 first-team matches for a club who admittedly were in decline when he made his debut in 1962 but still possessed an abundance of internationals like Broadbent, Flowers, Hinton, Crawford, Bailey, Dougan, Munro, Wignall and Curran.

Nor is it any coincidence that he himself won eight England caps, the first an 8-3 win in 1963 as replacement for the injured Ray Wilson at home to Northern Ireland, Alf Ramsey telling him in good time that he was playing and politely requesting that he kept the information ‘under his hat.’

Bobby roomed with Ron Flowers on that occasion and once shook hands with him before an England v Young England match at Highbury in which the two were respective captains.

Sharing a joke during England training with fellow full-back Jimmy Armfield (left).

His other outings with the seniors included a 10-0 victory over the USA in New York and games against Portugal and Argentina in Brazil on the same tour of the Americas.

With Wolves, his pace making him one of the country’s first overlapping full-backs, he was rarely displaced once blooded against Albion in the FA Cup and Tottenham a week later in the First Division.

Injuries were largely for other players. In four of his six full seasons at Molineux, he played at least 40 out of 42 League games and was an ever-present in 1962-63 and 1963-64.

He was a lovely man and it’s hard to accept he has gone.

By David Instone

What worth is there now to the stroke of fortune Paul Birch enjoyed on the evening of his testimonial game in 1991?

The good luck he had in timing his big night to coincide with the first hero’s return of David Platt to Aston Villa from a new life in Italy turned a healthy crowd in the Second City into a bumper one.

Platt’s golden touch at the previous summer’s World Cup had made him an international superstar, so here was an opportunity for Villa fans to not only pay tribute to a home-grown lad who was by now playing on the other side of the Black Country but also to say goodbye to the England hero who had joined Bari for £5.5m not long before.

Paul Birch, with distinctive locks, soon after his Molineux arrval in 1991.

The supporters and the lolly rolled in and Birchy seemed kindly blessed as he enthusiastically strutted his stuff for a Wolves side who beat his former club by the odd goal.

His bank manager would have been wearing a big smile, too, but such riches appear trifling almost two decades on when measured against the cruelty of ten-year-old Olivia Birch losing her Dad at the age of only 46.

It’s customary for platitudes – no pun intended - to be uttered on occasions such as Friday’s moving funeral at West Bromwich Crematorium. In this instance, the turn-out said everything.

There weren’t just the former Wolves team-mates who you would have put your gold and black shirt on being there, like Bully, Thommo, Psycho, Mutchy, Stowell, Dennison and Goodman.

Darren Simkin, Kevin Ashley and Jamie Smith also showed – lads who are no longer in the bosom of the Molineux family but whose lives were touched by the infectious personality of the friend they had lost.

They remembered the team-mate who grafted at their side on match-days – and that’s EVERY match-day - and traded barb for barb with them in the unforgiving environment that is a football dressing room.

At one time, Birchy had the alternative nickname of ‘Aussie Rules’ in recognition of how, even on the coldest mornings winter could deliver, he would roll up his sleeves and throw himself full-on into training, his limbs protruding from his tight kit.

In his five years at Molineux from 1991, he may have failed to repeat the promotion triumph he helped bring about in one year under Graham Taylor at Villa in 1987-88. But the 166 games he played bear testimony to his lengthy usefulness to the side and he certainly dug them out of a hole or two.

On the night Sir Jack Hayward famously stood on the South Bank as what we perceived to be the prelude to sacking Graham Turner, Birchy scored the late goal against Grimsby that salvaged three points from a bereft performance and earned his manager a reprieve.

He hit an absolute belter in the return fixture at Blundell Park a few weeks later to set up another vital victory and ended that troubled season of 1991-92 with ten goals.

When the storm-clouds descended again in the autumn of 1993 and Wolves hadn’t won in five games, he came up with another crucial goal in an awful first half at home to Notts County. It was a real pressure time for the manager but the 3-0 victory that eventually materialised proved a further turning point.

Birch’s fee of £400,000 reflected the fact he had previously played 219 matches for Villa and, in one of them, performed magnificently as a man-marker of Lothar Matthaus on the night Jozef Venglos’s side beat Inter Milan 2-0 in the West Midlands.

He was a good player; possessing of the busiest feet you ever saw, a cute football brain and a sense of industry that supporters warmed to. Off the field, not once do I recall him being anything other than cheerful and amiable.

His place in Molineux’s history books is underpinned by the fact that he is among the few sets of brothers to have played first-team football for the club, his elder sibling Alan having worn Wolves’ no 7 shirt 18 times in the early 1980s.

In action in the early 1990s.

More pertinently, his passing-away reminds us of our mortality. News of his terminal bone cancer broke last May on the very day that we learned of Mark Kendall’s death, prompting another of the duo’s Wolves colleagues to say: “With Rob Hindmarch going as well, that’s three of my team-mates who have died in their 40s.” When you consider that Derek Dougan, in 2007, became the first of the club’s 1974 League Cup winners to be taken away, that’s quite something to come to terms with. 

Paul Birch died on February 2, bizarrely 18 years to the day since he highlighted his Wolves debut by sidefooting in one of the goals in a 2-1 home victory over West Ham. The good fortune Birchy had with his testimonial may seem hollow now but he would have been proud on Friday of the second huge turn-out in his honour.

In action at Old Trafford.

By David Instone

Had Jimmy Murray now been in his prime, Wolverhampton Wanderers would not have been standing three points clear at the top of the Championship.

They would not have hit 23 goals in eight League matches to set their sights once more on winning promotion and they would not have been clutching an eight-point advantage over third-placed Reading.

They wouldn’t have been sitting so proudly in this position because, with Murray in full swing, they would have escaped this level in the spring.

Mick McCarthy admits it and the statistics bear him out: if Wolves had possessed a proven goalscorer last season before the mid-January arrival of Sylvan Ebanks-Blake, they would have been in the play-offs and quite probably up, up and away.

And the excellence of the man who died over the weekend aged 72 would have made all the difference.

The Kent-born centre-forward had a record that would stand up to any examination in any generation; 299 League and Cup matches for Wolves, 166 goals.

Not only were those figures compiled entirely in the top flight, they were actually one of the main planks on which Stan Cullis’ Wanderers built their successive title triumphs of 1957-58 and 1958-59.

Johnny Hancocks is the only player to have hit more (old) First Division goals for the club (157 against 155), so we’re talking here about a serial scorer, even if Murray would have been embarrassed by such talk.

Roy Swinbourne was such a difficult act to follow in the Iron Manager’s attack that you could forgive the younger pretender the insecurity he felt after leaving behind his Kent home and a possible working life down a coal mine.

Hard at work on the training ground.

As an insurance against him not making it professionally, Murray was initially found extra work at Don Everall’s as a mechanic. And, remarkably, his main concern when Wolves prepared for the visit of Moscow Dynamo in November, 1955, was to get a ticket for a so-called friendly that attracted over 55,000. He needn’t have worried. The subject of a news billboard that he saw bearing the message ‘Unknown To Lead Wolves’ turned out to be none other than himself.

The 20-year-old didn’t score in Wolves’ 2-1 win but made one goal, struck the woodwork and prompted Phil Morgan to write in the Express & Star: “He played his part well. He led the attack with imagination and verve in the first half and, in slowing the pace a little in the second, came near to a goal with a slick header that beat Yashin and flashed back off the crossbar.”  

Murray, from the same street in Elvington as Peter Broadbent, found his feet in what remained of that 1955-56 campaign with a double-figure goal haul and kicked on a year later with 17 in a side whose sixth-place finish was their lowest for five seasons.

In an appetiser for what was to follow, he then hit all five in Wolves’ victory over Southern Transvaal in the first game of the 1957 summer tour of South Africa.

Back on home soil, Murray found the net 16 times up to Christmas before hat-tricks against Birmingham and Nottingham Forest (he hit another against Darlington in the FA Cup) meant he ended 1957-58 with a haul of 32 as well as a title winner’s medal.

Two under-23 caps are all he had to show by way of an international career that many thought should have included senior recognition, the likes of Derek Kevan (later a Manchester City team-mate), Brian Clough, Bobby Charlton and Nat Lofthouse being preferred.

Murray expended any frustration on First Division defences. He rattled in 21 more goals in Wolves’ successful 1958-59 Championship defence, including one in each of their last seven games.

It was the second of three successive seasons in which he finished as the club’s leading League scorer – a feat he would repeat in 1961-62 – and he netted 32 times in a 1959-60 campaign in which he played in a winning FA Cup final side at Wembley and in which Wolves were pipped by Burnley to the title and so denied the first double of the 20th century.

Firing goalwards against Vorwaerts.

Murray, who later served Walsall and Telford as well as City, was more Ian Rush than Steve Bull or Michael Owen; a brilliant finisher, a great scorer of goals rather than a scorer of great goals, and decent in the air considering his relatively lean 5ft 10in frame.

By coincidence, I was in Malcolm Finlayson’s office a few years ago when Murray returned a call from his Lichfield home to decline my invitation for an interview.

“That’s Jimmy,” Malcolm said today. “He was the most unassuming person and a hell of a nice bloke. If someone praised him, he would look away and wonder what they were talking about.

“He probably didn’t realise what a good centre-forward he was; quick over the first ten yards, two good feet and a good head. He wasn’t physical but his running off the ball was so good that he often left defenders ball-watching.”

Flags are flying at half-mast at Molineux and a minute’s silence will be held before tonight’s home game against Reading.

*www.wolvesheroes.com acknowledges the kind contributions of Steve Gordos and Mick Tranter to this tribute.

Bill Shorthouse - as he will be best remembered.

By David Instone

Behind the sort of genius that occasionally lights up the world of football, any number of class back-up acts are required to make it all work.

Put in a slightly crass way, there are those who can play the piano and those needed to carry it on stage.

Bill Shorthouse isn’t often mentioned in the very top echelons of Wolverhampton Wanderers greats because he wasn’t hugely gifted, nor possessing of the charisma of some around him. He was a defender who did, quite brilliantly as it happens, what he was paid to do.

The Molineux legend, who has died at the age of 86, was one of the rocks on which the more sublime talents of team-mates like Broadbent, Mullen and even Wright could be built – and you won’t hear a bad word against him from any of those with whom he played.

Stan Cullis didn’t want to see frills from his centre-half or full-backs – the two departments in which Shorthouse was equally adept – and thought so highly of this tough, robust individual that he continued to have him working at his side for many years when time finally caught up with him at the age of 34. The Iron Manager knew it when he had found a player and man he could depend on.

A look at the Legends area of this site will confirm this particular personal niche in Wolves history. Not bad figures, are they, for a lad from Bradley in Bilston! What the stats don’t show is that he was never dropped at Molineux or that he was frequently made captain when Billy Wright was away with England.

Cullis wasted no time in naming Shorthouse as his first-choice no 5 and putting him in the side he inherited in 1948. He would select him a further 342 times to be exact, increasingly so at right-back or left-back as the years rolled by. The final appearance tally was actually 376 in League and cups alone – there was no League Cup or even European knock-out competition back then – but Ted Vizard was in charge for the first 33 of them, in 1947-48.

No 5 Shorthouse watches Bert Williams gather safely in Wolves' game at Albion in the spring of 1954 - the victory that set them up for their first League Championship success.

It was a wonderful journey, illuminated by the winning of the FA Cup in 1949, trail-blazing end-of-season tours across the world, breathless, prestige nights under Molineux’s magical floodlights and the lifting of the League Championship in 1954 for the first time in the club’s history.

In nine years from October, 1947 to his farewell outing, Shorthouse missed games at the rate of only around four a season. And there was a very heavy case ball to be headed in those days – and no substitutes.

The man who was known to his colleagues as ‘The Baron’ after a stage character spotted during a squad visit to the theatre, was utterly consistent, efficient and respected; quite proud, too, of the goal he scored against this weekend’s opponents, Charlton, on November 12, 1955. It was the only one he ever managed for the club in competitive games.

It was during the following autumn that wear-and-tear problems with his ankle convinced him his playing career was drawing towards a close, sadly shortly before Wolves’ back-to-back title triumphs.

Another regret was his continued overlooking by England. Many at Molineux believed him more than worthy of such a step-up but the national selectors clearly disagreed and, even when selected in the Football League squad to face the Irish League, Shorthouse was ultimately left out of the X1.

Slightly plumper of girth....leading an Old Wolves side out for a showbiz game.

He did nevertheless serve his country with rare distinction – stepping off one of the first boats in the Normandy Landings. A bullet struck him in the horrific aftermath but fortunately had a softish landing of its own, going through his buttock and travelling with less force by the time it reached his arm.

A football career which kicked off when he joined Wolves as an amateur in 1941 was saved, even if he didn’t know at the time that he would live long enough to resume it.

Bill Shorthouse, who later worked for the England youth set-up as well as Aston Villa and Birmingham, is another of that Molineux breed who gave absolutely magnificent service but nevertheless had no fortune and therefore no choice other than to lead a normal life at his home just outside Wolverhampton until the final whistle beckoned.

Wolves are still striving to regain the top-flight place he knew throughout his playing career but it was fitting that they were at least heading the table when he joined that great Wanderers team in the sky.

* In extending our condolences to the family and friends of Bill Shorthouse, we also apologise to www.wolvesheroes.com readers for the short delay in posting a fitting tribute on this site.

While club football went through its early-season two-week gap in fixtures, we, too, were on a mini international break.

Always able to raise a smile.

January 24, 1987 wasn’t just significant as the date on which Wayne Hennessey took his first gulp of air outside the womb. On the very same day, another Welshman was making his sizeable mark in Wolverhampton Wanderers’ goal.

By a further quirk, Wolves were playing in Wales that afternoon – and Mark Kendall used the 2-0 victory over Cardiff City to convince manager Graham Turner and the club’s directors that he was the real deal.

Kendall had been on loan from Newport County since the end of December in that, the club’s first ever season in the Fourth Division. But he showed with his safe handling and calmness at Ninian Park that it wasn’t so much a question of whether hard-up Wolves could afford to sign him as whether they could afford to let him go.

Wolves, at the time, were in the middle of the table and Steve Bull was still wearing his Molineux ‘L’ plates. And while goals started to rain in at the right end, clean sheets began to come at the other – six in a row, in fact, towards the end of the season and eight in ten games.

Although sixth-placed Aldershot, of all teams, would deny fourth-placed Wolves in that May’s two-leg play-off final, Kendall had already seen to it that the revolving door of Wolves goalkeepers could stop spinning.

Tim Flowers, Scott Barrett, Vince Bartram and Eric Nixon had all been used in the previous 23 League games but the 28-year-old former Tottenham Hotspur and Wales under-21 man played 127 of the first 128 games after his arrival and, in the Fourth Division/Sherpa Van Trophy double-winning season of 1987-88, overtook 1920s star Noel George by keeping a club record 28 clean sheets in League and cups. Mark loved it all. He was usually to be found in the middle of what at that time seemed to be regular dressing-room celebrations and, unlike Hennessey, he was loud, very loud. Often he’d welcome you with a booming greeting from one end of the Waterloo Road Stand’s narrow corridor to the other and had a reputation as a prankster.

Showing on the training ground, with Tom Bennett in opposition, that he could play outfield, too.

In the days when Molineux’s North Bank was closed for safety reasons, he would amuse the handful of bystanders allowed around that terrace by crouching behind the wall out of the referee’s sight, while retrieving wayward shots and headers, to kill a few seconds if Wolves were leading.

After saving a penalty in a win at Turf Moor, his spirits were higher still, his mickey-taking of the home fans landing him in a spot of bother with the local constabulary and making it ironic that he later briefly played for Burnley and joined the police.

Another title winner’s medal came Kendall’s way at the end of 1988-89, this time in the Third Division, and he was within seven games of ever-present status again in the 1989-90 Division Two campaign after seeing off the rival claims of Tony Lange to his jersey.

With Mike Stowell’s signing imminent, Kendall was given a free transfer in May, 1990, and spent two years back in South Wales with Swansea before calling it a day, although sport remained a big part of his life.

His son Lee also became a League keeper, in his case with Crystal Palace, and he faced Wolves’ reserves in a 2008 pre-season friendly with non-League Rhyl. He had plenty to feel proud about. Mark was named national police trainer of the year in 2007, the grandfather-of-two also receiving two police commendations – one for an off-duty arrest when he witnessed an assault by four men and one for bravery when he was confronted by a man wielding a chainsaw.

A brilliant tip-over during the second half of Wolves' 1-0 win over promotion-bound Leeds in March, 1990.

His Wolves’ contemporaries were stunned by his death, at 49, at his home back in Blackwood. It says much about his popularity in both walks of his working life that St Theodore’s Church in the village of Ynysddu was packed for his funeral on May 13, inside and out. There were some 500 mourners, among them Kendall’s former Wolves team-mates Alistair Robertson, Nigel Vaughan, Andy Thompson, Jon Purdie, Phil Robinson and Robbie Dennison, as well as Barry Powell, who returned to Molineux as a coach in the late 1980s.

“It was a desperately sad day,” Thompson said, “but the turn-out showed how highly thought of he was by so many people. He was very much part of the life and soul of that Wolves team.”