Teenage Talent Took Maine Road To Stardom

Manchester City away is where it all started for the young Peter Broadbent. Not as a Wolves player but as a 17-year-old with Brentford.

The various programme pages that illuminate this article – supplied by Sussex-based Bees fan Rob Boddie – show the prodigy’s name in the visitors’ line-up and in the pen pictures. The latter of those sections also gave a name-check to George Poyser, a man connected at different times to Griffin Park, to Molineux and to Dover, the Kent-born player’s first club.

And it’s interesting to be reminded that Ron Greenwood – a future West Ham and England manager – was the visitors’ no 5 when Broadbent made his League debut on October 14, 1950.

That wasn’t the only star name in their line-up either because the no 10 was Jimmy Hill, also a forward with Fulham for many years but best known later as an heroic promotion-winning Coventry manager, PFA chairman and TV personality.

So the young Broadbent, having signed professional a few months earlier, had natural leaders around him as he set foot in sky blue territory – not the Etihad Stadium which Wolves return to this weekend but City’s old Maine Road home.

Alas, the evidently talented line-up did not spare Brentford a hammering in this Second Division clash. They were beaten 4-0, having crashed 4-0 at home to Coventry the week before.

And the outcome was in line with the nightmare start Broadbent made to his Wolves career after moving north four months later.

Remarkably, his first eight appearances in Stan Cullis’s side, starting with a home clash against Portsmouth, all ended in defeat.

And when the sequence ended, it was with no more spectacular a result than a goalless draw against Sunderland on the final day of a season in which Wolves finished a moderate 14th in the top flight.

Broadbent, having sat out the Molineux victory over Middlesbrough during the run-in, might then have made the first of his visits with Wolves to Maine Road on the opening day of 1951-52.

He didn’t play in that 0-0 stalemate, though, but played and scored in a 2-2 draw when the sides were pitched together at the same venue in the FA Cup third round five months later. 

Whatever the disappointment over his start with both Brentford and Wolves, it’s fair to say the brilliant inside-forward made up for lost time.

He was part of three title-winning sides at Wolves and also helped the club lift the FA Cup in 1960.

He wasn’t seen as the nervous newcomer for very long…..he became pure star quality.

*At no 9 in the Manchester City line-up against Brentford 75 seasons ago was the former Molineux goal machine, Dennis Westcott, who top-scored at Maine Road in both 1950-51 and 1951-52.