Players

Cyril Lello – Everton’s Shropshire Lad

Cyril Lello – Everton’s Shropshire Lad

By Rob Sawyer Ludlow, now the gastronomic capital of the beautiful county of Shropshire, is considered a football backwater, yet even seventy years after his sporting heyday, Cyril Lello is held in high esteem in the market town. In Everton’s dark days of the early 1950’s, with the team struggling to return to the topflight of English football, it was the Salopian, a quiet man with matinee idol looks, who brought authority, effort - and no little ability - to the Blues cause.  The road to Goodison Park was a long one: Cyril Frank Lello came into the world on…
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Bobby Parker – an Everton hero

Bobby Parker – an Everton hero

Bobby Parker is an Everton hero. A real life, bona fide hero in the truest definition of the word. On a football pitch Robert Norris Parker was a goalscoring hero who struck at the rate of almost a goal a game. But off it he was a war-hero, a man who sacrificed a sparkling career for his country – cruelly a sacrifice precious few people were aware of. Everton’s history is littered with what might have been stories – but none is more tragic than the experience of a superb Scottish centre-forward who deserves a place near the top of…
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Everton’s First League Match

Everton’s First League Match

Everton 2 v 1 Accrington Football League Division One, 8 September 1888 Anfield - Attendance: 12,000 - Referee: J Bentley Everton: Smalley, Dick, Ross, Holt, Jones, Dobson, Fleming, Lewis, Chadwick, Waugh, Farmer Accrington: Horne, Stevenson, McLellan, Haworth, Pemberton, Wilkinson, Lofthouse, Bonar, Holden, Chippendale, Kirkham It started with just twelve. A dozen trailblazers striking out to create what would become the greatest football league in the world (at least until the Premier League ruined the top flight with its orgy of consumption, its vapid razzmatazz, and its Jamie Carraghers). The 8 September 1888 represented a watershed moment in English Football. After…
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Derek Temple and The Story of Everton’s 1966 Cup Glory

Derek Temple and The Story of Everton’s 1966 Cup Glory

by Rob Sawyer with Derek Temple Derek Temple with his wife Maureen, pictured at home with Rob Sawyer in July 2023 As Everton kicked off their 1966 FA Cup campaign the omens were inauspicious, the club’s previous taste of cup glory had been 33 years previously when Dean, Stein and Dunn hit the goals to defeat Manchester City. A season of underachievement in the league had boiled over the previous weekend. In the aftermath of a 2-0 defeat on an icy pitch at Bloomfield Road, the infamous ‘Blackpool Rumble’ (© David France) took place in the car park. Some Toffees…
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Pat Nevin – ‘Football and How to Survive it’

Pat Nevin – ‘Football and How to Survive it’

Pat Nevin interviewed by Everton FC Heritage Society in St Luke’s Before the Bournemouth home fixture on 7 October 2023, former Everton star winger Pat Nevin made a visit to St Luke’s to meet fans with copies of his latest book ‘Football and How to Survive it.’ Rob Sawyer and Lewis Royden of the EFCHS Media Team met up with Pat before his book signing session, to talk about his career and his new book. Pat Nevin with media team; Lewis Royden (left) and Rob Sawyer (right) Photos by Sarah Deboe (EFCHS / MintCollective) and Rob Sawyer Click for Amazon linkClick for Amazon link
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Richard ‘Dickie’ Boyle

Richard ‘Dickie’ Boyle

By Rob Sawyer [Above photo: Dickie Boyle of Everton c.1894(colourised by George Chilvers) ] Everton was awash with Sons of the Rock in the early years of the Football League: fellow Dumbarton-raised John Bell, and the long-serving Jack Taylor, the latter being the captain of Everton’s first victorious FA Cup side in 1906. No less vital and dedicated to the Toffees cause in the last years of the nineteenth century was Richard Hill Boyle. Commonly known as Dickie (or Dicky), he was one of those indomitable Everton servants, like Peter Farrell and Mike Lyons, who never earned the silverware he…
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Tammy Burgess in conversation with Rob Sawyer

Tammy Burgess in conversation with Rob Sawyer

Tammy Byrne (now Burgess) was one of the emerging talents in the Everton Ladies squad which won, to date, the club’s only league title. Not a follower of a particular club, or football in general, as a child, the course of her life was changed by an encounter at Moss Farm in the mid-1990s. Here, Tammy describes the transformative impact on her of football and her Everton clubmates. I had older brothers and played football in my area, Croxteth, with the likes of Francis Jeffers. I hadn’t played football in a team, so I didn’t actually know how good I…
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Bobby Irvine – The Prince of Dribblers

Bobby Irvine – The Prince of Dribblers

Bobby Irvine, the Everton forward whose threepenny-bit dribbles used to have the million-pound note look. (Ranger – Liverpool Echo, 1954) Rob Sawyer Bobby posing in a Belfast studio in the early 1920s Hard as it is to imagine, forty years before George Best was thrilling football supporters up and down the land, Northern Ireland possessed a forward of similar talents - who played for Everton, rather than Manchester United.   Born on 29 April 1900, and raised on Low Road in Lisburn, Robert W. Irvine (always known as Bobby) made his name as a skilful and versatile forward, with a…
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John Turner – from a Ram to Japan

John Turner – from a Ram to Japan

Steve Zocek  The name of John Turner would not be particularly familiar to most Evertonians, whatever their age. It would be a stiff challenge in a pub quiz to guess his connection to Everton in relation to the pre-season tour of Japan under manager Howard Kendall in 1981. A Geordie by birth, he never hid the fact that he was a fanatical Sunderland supporter who would go along with his father to watch his heroes –notably Charlie Hurley, Len Ashurst, Martin Harvey, Brian Clough and Ernie Taylor – at the famous old Roker Park in the early 1960s. A former…
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Tommy White – A Player of Many Parts

Tommy White – A Player of Many Parts

by Rob Sawyer I have played in almost every forward and half-back position for Everton. That versatility helped me more than once to get a first team place. On the other hand, for a time I was regarded as nothing but a sub for other players. When they were ready for the first team again, I was out. That’s how it has been all through my football career. Shocks and pleasant surprises always round the corner. I never knew which I would meet. Tom White (June 1937) Born at Goulden Street, in Weaste, Salford, on 29 July 1908, Tom Angus…
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