Author: David Prentice

    Run through the list of Everton’s record scorers against almost every club we’ve ever faced and one name predictably dominates. William Ralph Dean. Everton’s top scorer against Arsenal? Dixie with 12 goals. Liverpool? Dixie with 19. Chelsea? Dixie again with 10. But not today’s visitors Hull City. The man who tormented the Tigers even more than the celebrated Dixie throughout his career was another Everton striker, a man who doesn’t feature as frequently whenever lists of Everton’s great forwards are mentioned but whose goals return was impressive. John Willie Parker was described as a “stylish inside- forward” who played much of his football for Everton during the brief spell we spent outside the top flight between 1951 and 1954. He scored 89 goals in his 176 Everton appearances, many of them in that spell – and in the promotion campaign of 1953/54 top-scored with 31 goals in 38 starts. He scored once against Hull that season, but it was in Everton’s first campaign of Second Division football...

                  Cartoon “Referees and the Heat Wave. Suggested Outfit”; headline from the Liverpool Daily Post & Mercury –   “Football Hot O! Players Collapse”; a cartoon from the Football Echo of Saturday 8 September, reflecting on the heatwave. Caption reads: ‘Overheard last Saturday: “Tommy, come and stand in the shade; it’s cooler.” The start of September 1906 saw England sweltering in a heatwave – the most intense temperatures recorded in the 20th century. It was weather for sunbathing, not sport, as the temperatures topped 32 degrees for four successive days throughout most of the country. No surprise, then, that the Liverpool Daily Post & Mercury’s headline for Monday 3 September read: Football Hot O! A Warm Kick- Off And Enormous Crowds. Players Collapse. While the editorial began: “The Glorious First, which duly celebrates the commencement of two distinct classes of sport – football and partridge shooting – will long be remembered for its overpowering heat.” Maybe the heat helped explain the events at Goodison Park on  the  Monday evening of 3...

ON BRODSWORTH CINDER PITCHES TED SAGAR LEARNED TO MAKE HIS WONDER SAVES May 14, 1949. The Liverpool Football Echo Twenty Glorious Years By Ted Sagar As Told To Allan Robinson Ted Sagar, Everton’s long-serving international goalkeeper –he is in his 21st year with the club 0begins 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 39. Most top-class footballers hand 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...