Doog In Stripes – And On Score-Sheet

He didn’t score in his own testimonial game but there is quite a story behind the goal he managed in a similar fixture two nights later.

Derek Dougan had a thing about teams who played in stripes – he thought they won nothing. Yet he pulled on Albion’s navy blue and white in October, 1975 and found himself among the marksmen in a special game at The Hawthorns.

He struck from a cross by Bobby Charlton, no less, on an evening on which they had another World Cup winner, Nobby Stiles, among their team-mates.

The Doog, having been chaired off Molineux by adoring spectators when Wolves drew 0-0 with a Don Revie XI on his own big night, was part of an an even stronger Leeds theme when they provided the opposition for Johnny Giles’s testimonial match.

And he opened the scoring in a 3-1 win for Second Division Albion as he appeared in a forward line of Dougan, Giles, Charlton, Geoff Hurst and Willie Johnston.

The Northern Ireland international and long-time PFA chairman had left Wolves the previous summer but showed a continuing willingness to help his fellow pros by turning out and helping swell the Hawthorns crowd to 8,652.

Paddy Mulligan and Alistair Brown followed Dougan on to the score-sheet and a Leeds side in transition after Jimmy Armfield had followed Brian Clough in trying to emulate the success achieved by Revie at Elland Road were a pale shadow of the one we had known for much of the previous decade. Revie was by now the England manager.

The game on October 22, 1975 was arranged as part of Giles’s £48,000 transfer to Albion as player-manager, with the beneficiary and his long-time former midfield colleague Billy Bremner as respective captains.

The handy Old Trafford representation came about as Giles is the brother-in-law of Stiles and was a United player himself for several years in the early 1960s.

And how well remembered is the fact that The Doog was supposedly well in the frame when Albion started the search for a new manager after the departure of Wolverhampton-born Don Howe late in 1974-75?

As the accompanying article shows, the Daily Mail’s Jeff Farmer reckoned he was the choice of the squad, although nothing came of the supposed link and Giles was appointed a few weeks later. Dougan subsequently became player-boss of Kettering.

Maybe he would never have wanted to cross the Black Country divide anyway after his years of adulation at Molineux. There was also that hang-up he had about teams who wore stripes – a subject about which he once wrote at length!

Dougan scored at home to Albion in 1970-71 and also helped provide the bullets in a 2-0 home victory over them at Molineux in March, 1973, a few weeks before the Baggies were relegated.