The Ultimate Torquay United team: Strikers

Plainmoor’s chief reporter for over 50 years, Dave Thomas, continues his countdown to the ultimate Torquay United team:

In over 50 years of covering the Gulls, I’ve been able to report on only six players – Willie Brown, Steve Cooper (twice), Paul Dobson, David Graham, Tim Sills and Jamie Reid (twice) – scoring 20 or more goals in a season.

A bit sobering, when you think about it.

So you might assume that Torquay United fans had been starved of decent strikers down the years.

Far from it.

As a young fan and then a trainee reporter, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was lucky enough to see at least three men who will all be on the final shortlist.

One, of course, was Robin Stubbs.

You can talk about ‘stats’ in any sport, but they usually tell only half the story. Stubbs’ goals, and the rate that he scored them, makes astonishing reading to this day.

In his first six seasons at the club (1963-69) – he was an injury-slowed shadow of his former self when he returned from Bristol Rovers in 1972 – Stubbs played 241 games and hit 132 goals.

They included four hat-tricks, two ‘fours’ and a ‘five’.

In one extraordinary spell from October to January 1964-65, Stubbs scored 22 goals in 18 matches, including three against Tottenham Hotspur over two famous FA Cup ties.

Only illness and injury, which ruled him out of the last five games of that season, surely stopped him adding to his 39 goals and overtaking Sammy Collins’ record tally of 41 in 1955-56.

Yet even all those remarkable figures can’t convey the excitement that Stubbs generated when he latched onto a through-ball or controlled it, turned and used his physique and pace to leave defenders in his wake and bear down on goal.

Why, in the face of such talent, did the former Birmingham City youngster not move on to bigger things elsewhere? There were certainly plenty of offers.

But Stubbs had fallen in love not only with Torquay, but playing for United. And even when Rovers finally persuaded the Gulls to accept £20,000 for him, he never wanted to leave.

That sale helped to bring a less explosive, but often underrated centre-forward to Plainmoor in John Rudge.

Wolverhampton-born Rudge was better in the air than Stubbs, and a better targetman, and his 40 goals in 110 games would have been plenty more but for niggling injury issues.

He was a very classy and unselfish player and, after coaching at Plainmoor, he didn’t do too badly in management either – they’ve just erected a statue of him at Port Vale!

Two younger strikers who often played alongside Rudge, and benefited from his service, were Alan Welsh and Mickey Cave.

Welsh was signed from Millwall by Frank O’Farrell and became a huge favourite with Plainmoor fans.

He was skilful, quick and brave and scored 50 goals in 161 games before Plymouth Argyle paid £15,000, a bargain, for him in 1972.

There wasn’t much of the equally pacy Cave, who cemented his place in the hearts of Torquay fans when he scored a 25-yard ‘special’ to beat Aston Villa 1-0 in front of nearly 30,000 at Villa Park in November 1970.

Goals like that saw Cave earn United another £15,000 when he joined the early-70s ‘exodus’ to Bournemouth, on his way to a good career with the Cherries twice, York and then in the USA, where he died in tragic circumstances at only 35.

He reportedly suffered a fatal reaction to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Bournemouth’s Player of the Year award is still named after him.

Many United fans from that era have fond memories of an action-packed few months in Spring and Autumn 1967 when Stubbs was partnered with burly ‘Big’ Jim Fryatt.

Fryatt, signed from Southport, had a receding hairline, sported ‘mutton chop’ sideburns and was brilliant in the air.

He and Stubbs hit it off immediately, scoring 16 goals in their first dozen (League One) matches together, and they’d made a good start to the 67/68 season when Stockport suddenly offered twice what United had paid for Fryatt.

Always a happy wanderer, he was soon gone, O’Farrell using some of the money to sign Welsh. But if there was a ‘One That Got Away’ story from that era, it was surely Fred Binney.

The bustling, irrepressible Plymothian was snapped up by United as a teenager, but despite hitting the net at will in the reserves, he could never convince O’Farrell that he was the real deal.

Binney still managed to score 11 goals in 24 starts (1967-70) before Exeter, where he’d already doubled that tally on loan, finally bought him for £4,000.

It turned into an outrageous bargain, and a major mistake by United, for Binney proceeded to score more than 200 goals in a career that took him on to Brighton, St Louis All Stars (USA), Plymouth and Hereford.

The mid-70s were mid-table years at Plainmoor, but among the strikers who brightened many an afternoon were the wholehearted and brave centre-forward Dave Tearse from Leicester, ex-FA Cup winning (Everton) forward Mike Trebilcock from Plymouth, skilled targetman John Fairbrother from Mansfield and the pacy Eddie Rowles.

But none stirred Plainmoor fans in quite the same way that Willie Brown did.

It’s probably fair to say that few pros enjoyed their football, and their life, more than the mustachioed Brown.

A joke and his ever-ready smile were never far away when Willie was around, but behind all the laughs was a seriously good, out-and-out goalscorer.

Signed from Brentford, he scored 17 goals in his first full season, 22 in his second and 14 in his third. And never in that time did United threaten to be promoted

Towards the end of his career here Brown, whose first-touch and awareness were second to none, had a young, locally-born and highly promising partner up front in Colin Lee.

Although he hailed from Buckfastleigh, Lee was at Bristol City when O’Farrell, back in charge briefly, bought him for £8,000.

Lee played just 38 games (the only reason he’s not quite on the shortlist), scoring 15 goals, before Tottenham Hotspur paid £60,000 for him in October 1977.

Utterly dedicated and a serious student of the game, the lanky Lee was an instant hit at White Hart Lane.

He helped to win their First Division place back, spent three years there, seven at Chelsea, who paid £200,000 and moved him to right-back, and two at Brentford before moving into a successful career in coaching and management.

If Gulls fans were sad to see the end of the Brown-Lee pairing, they were about to be treated to something entirely different - and just as good.

When friends asked me at the start of this series who my two strikers were going to be, more than one suggested: “Just stick Coops and big Les up front.”

When first Les Lawrence, from Shrewsbury, and then Steve Cooper, from Southern League Stourbridge, arrived at Plainmoor, they were rough, raw and unready.

But through hard work, and the coaching of Mike Green and the same John Rudge who’d filled their roles nearly ten years before, they turned themselves into the most feared pair strikers in the Fourth Division.

Lawrence was 6ft 3in and Cooper 6ft when he stood up straight, and they could have been made for each other.

Cooper, brave to the point of fooolhardiness, was the better in the air, and Lawrence was quicker and slicker on the ground.

The key to them was their movement – they were never still, Cooper always trying to attack the ball across defenders, and at set-pieces he would often go near-post, leaving Lawrence at the far.

In their first three seasons together (1978-81) they scored 90 goals between them, supplied from the wings by Donal Murphy, Peter Coffill and Roy Davies.

And Lawrence was injured for half of one campaign before new manager Bruce Rioch made him an emergency centre-half.

Les moved on, to Port Vale, Aldershot, Burnley and Peterborough, but Cooper never did, eventually dropping down in 1983 to local semi-pro and amateur football and later the pub business.

If United had been able to field a defence anywhere near as good as their attack then, they must have won promotion. But they were certainly entertaining days.

During their last year together Cooper and Lawrence had a distinguished attacking teammate in former WBA legend Tony ‘Bomber’ Brown.

Brown – he’d scored 279 goals in 720 games for the Baggies – had been playing in the USA before Rioch and O’Farrell persuaded him to join Torquay at the age of 36 with a testimonial against Manchester United as part of the deal.

Those sort of ‘old mate’ signings don’t always work, but Brown was great value for a year (1981-82) in which he scored eleven goals in 40 starts.

After Lawrence left, Cooper also teamed up with the barrel-chested Jackie Gallagher.

Pretty well they did together, especially in a run to the Fourth Round of the FA Cup in 1983 when Sheffield Wednesday beat them 3-2 in a belting tie at Plainmoor.

Gallagher always had to watch his weight, but he was deceptively clever and proved it in later spells at Peterborough twice and Wolves.

Nothing ever stayed the same for long in the depressing Dave Webb years in the mid-80s, strikers like former Derby and Plymouth targetman John Sims, the hard-working John Durham and Steve Phillips, who scored more than 200 goals in a long career elsewhere, among those who passed through.

When Stuart Morgan took on the job of trying to keep United in the League, he inherited a lean, sometimes erratic but ever-game young centre-forward in Mario Walsh.

Morgan then pulled off an inspired free transfer signing in Paul Dobson from far-off Hartlepool.

Few did more to keep Torquay up in the first Great Escape season 1986-87 than Dobson and Walsh, who was only 21 at the time.

Neither of them was particularly skilful, but they would work and run all day, just what you needed for a relegation scrap.

Dobson scored 17 goals that season, including that all-important stoppage-time equaliser on the last day against Crewe, and 25 during the next marathon 1987-88 campaign under Cyril Knowles.

Forty-two goals in 96 appearances was some return by Dobson, who then earned United a bonus in a cash-and-player deal with Doncaster that also brought right-back Paul Holmes to Plainmoor.

Dobson started the 1987-88 season alongside former WBA starlet Gerry Nardiello, who was pretty useful in his own right but suffered when Knowles brought in one of the most charismatic centre-forwards ever to play for the Gulls.

Scot Dave Caldwell had a reputation as a hard-living, ill-disciplined character who’d excited but also exasperated Mansfield Town and Chesterfield.

But in his time as manager at Darlington, Knowles had spotted Caldwell’s undoubted talent and was convinced that, properly fit and focused, he should have been playing at a much higher level.

He paid £7,000 for him.

From the moment that he beat Hereford 1-0 with an overhead kick on his home debut, Gulls fans took to Caldwell bigtime.

He was still booked, sent off and suspended several more times, but the Plainmoor faithful, who had never seen anyone quite like him, forgave their ‘Raging Bull’ everything.

By the end of a 62-game season of cup runs and a Play-Off Final, which United lost 5-4 to Swansea City on aggregate, Caldwell had accrued an historical eight-match ban.

He avoided it by going abroad, to a Belgian club for £13,000 and then South Africa.

But when Your Correspondent broke the news that Caldwell was set to return to Plainmoor under Dave Smith in December 1989, there was a crowd of United fans at Newton Abbot Station to greet him. Enough said.

By his own admission, he’d slipped back into some of his less-than-dedicated ways and, although he found that old overdrive gear to help beat West Ham United (1-0) in the FA Cup, he was never quite the same force again.

But no one who saw him in his first spell, especially at holders Coventry City in the Cup, scoring twice in a brilliant all-round performance at Leyton Orient (2-0) on New Year’s Day, beating Scunthorpe (2-1) in the Play Offs or on many other occasions, could doubt what a player he was.

Knowles paired first Richard Thompson and then Carl Airey, who’d played under him at Darlington, with Dean Edwards.

Targetman Airey did score in seven successive league matches in the autumn of 1989, without ever approaching the heights or impact of Caldwell.

But Exeter forward Edwards, a straight replacement for Dobson, enjoyed four good years in which he scored 34 goals in 155 appearances.

Edwards’ pace was his forte, he scored two vital goals in the 1989 Sherpa Van Trophy Semi-Final victory over his boyhood club Wolves, one against Bolton at Wembley and 18 in the 1990-91 promotion season.

His partner by then was Tommy Tynan.

Brought in by his old Plymouth boss Dave Smith, Tynan may have been in the twilight of a prolific career, but Fourth Division defences held few fears for a master finisher like him.

He scored 17 goals before he picked up an injury in March 1991 and, by the time he was fit again, new manager John Impey had signed Stewart Evans in his place, United had turned round a flagging campaign and he couldn’t get back in the side.

Despite being available, Tynan wasn’t even on the bench for the PO Final victory over Blackpool, especially galling for him as he’d never played at Wembley.

The early 1990s weren’t good ones in terms of results, but they did feature another huge ‘character’ in United’s history.

Justin Fashanu was a one-man cabaret show.

Apparently destined for greatness when a sensational start at Norwich City earned him a £1 million move to Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest, his career had stalled and then gone into freefall.

He eventually ‘came out’ as Britain’s first openly gay professional footballer, not long before Bateson took him on at Plainmoor.

They needed each other, sort of.

Fashanu wanted to relaunch himself and Bateson wanted someone to boost flagging fortunes and gates. He reportedly paid ‘Fash’ £1,000 a week, plus considerable other benefits – in 1991!

Over the course of 14 months in which he was seldom off either the front or back pages, Fashanu played 46 matches and scored 17 goals.

He never allowed his avowed sexuality to be an issue at Plainmoor, but he took horrendous stick on most away grounds.

There were days when his mind seemed to be elsewhere, but when he was fully motivated, he was still a formidable centre-forward, even in League One.

The shame was that, despite his efforts, United were relegated in 1992, struggled again the next season and Bateson’s hopes for that financial spin-off were dashed.

Things were certainly never dull with ‘Fash’ around, but he knew that he’d no longer be indulged when Neil Warnock arrived on a rescue mission in New Year 1993 and he promptly left.

He and I kept in touch over his next few increasingly chaotic years, wherever in the world he was trying to make ends meet.

So you can imagine the sadness that his old Plainmoor friends and teammates felt when Fashanu was found dead, hanging in a Shoreditch lock-up, on Saturday, May 8, 1998.

It was only a couple of miles away from Brisbane Road, where many of us were involved in a last-day bid to win automatic promotion at Leyton Orient. United lost 1-2.

Warnock signed 6ft 5in tall Mark Sale to help keep United up, and he proved good value then and in the 1993-94 Play-Off season under Don O’Riordan when he shared the striking duties with ex-trainee Duane Darby and Adrian Foster.

Neither Sale nor Darby was fit for the opening game of that season, at Walsall.

O’Riordan turned to a burly but completely untried trainee in David Byng. Not only did Byng become, at 16 years 36 days, the youngest player ever to play a league match for the Gulls, he scored both goals in a 2-1 victory.

He made only three more appearances, left later that season and took up rugby.

Darby and Foster, who’d been signed by Paul Compton on a free from WBA, complimented each other – one was a strong, natural finisher, the other a tireless runner.

Over more than four years Darby scored 29 goals in 127 appearances, many of them as a sub, before he moved on to better things at Doncaster, Hull, Notts County, Rushden & Diamonds and Shrewsbury.

Foster, who hit 28 in 91 games (1992-94), joined Gillingham, he and Darby earning United nearly £100,000 between them – more power to that Youth scheme and the club’s scouting prowess.

Richard Hancox, later to become assistant to manager Leroy Rosenior, and Nigerian-born Chima Okorie had their moments up front before a tantalisingly brief spell when Eddie May and then Kevin Hodges paired experienced targetman Paul Baker with an emerging Rodney Jack (covered in the Right Wing chapter).

Geordie Baker was a proper old-school centre-forward, strong on the ground and exceptional in the air, and he and the flying Jack made a storming start to the 1996-97 campaign alongside player-coach Garry Nelson, who’d scored more than 150 goals for Southend, Swindon, Plymouth, Brighton and Charlton but was 35 by then.

Baker then left for Scunthorpe (£15,000), Nelson was injured for a while and the season fell away despite the £20,000 signing of the lanky Andy McFarlane.

McFarlane was sidelined for much of the 1997-98 season, but for three important and thrilling months Hodges found a new and dynamic partner for Jack – 20-year-old Wolves loanee Jason Roberts.

Strong, quick and talented, Roberts may have been a bit full of himself when he arrived, but he was impossible to dislike and, in defenders like Jon Gittens, Alex Watson and Jamie Robinson, he had the perfect pros to teach him his trade.

After scoring 180 goals for Torquay, Bristol Rovers, WBA, Wigan, Blackburn and Reading, Roberts MBE acknowledged in his autobiography that he learned more in his three months at Plainmoor than in the rest of his career.

In the 13 league games that Roberts started for United, they won ten, drew one and lost two, including a club record run of eight successive victories that lifted them into the automatic promotion spots.

If he’d stayed for even one more month, United would surely have gone up, but Wolves recalled him, quoting an injury crisis, Jack sustained a training ground injury which knocked him out for three vital games (1pt) in April and the Gulls eventually lost to Colchester (1-0) in the PO Final at Wembley.

After Jack had left for Crewe for a club record £600,000, McFarlane, Scott Partridge (45/19gls) and Tony Bedeau (also covered in the Right Wing section) did the striking duties for a while under Wes Saunders before he persuaded Bateson to lash out another record fee of £70,000 for a striker from Welsh League club Barry Town.

Eifion Williams may not have been a household name, but he had scored 200 goals in four LoW seasons and was the coolest of finishers.

Williams announced his arrival in sensational style, with a debut hat-trick against Hartlepool (3-0) at Plainmoor in March 1999.

United had struggled that year, but things picked up for a while before falling back again in a 2000-2001 season which ended with Colin Lee taking over from Saunders and keeping the Gulls up with the oft-recalled 3-2 last-day win at Barnet.

Williams, who might have been unstoppable in a better side, ended up with 24 goals in 118 games before Roy McFarland sold him to Hartlepool for £30,000.

Williams, who could also play out wide, proved popular on Teesside, scoring nearly 60 goals in five years at Pool.

Apart from keeping United in the League, Lee also signed striker David Graham.

A teenage prodigy at Rangers, Graham’s career was on the slide at Dunfermline and Inverness when Lee took a proverbial punt on him.

His talent was clear to see, he took to life in quieter Torquay, helped in the 2001 relegation battle and then got steadily better.

New boss Rosenior found him good partners in fellow Scot Martin Gritton – he and Graham were dubbed the ‘G-Men’ – and Jo Kuffour.

After 15 goals in 2002-2003 it all clicked gloriously the next season.

United’s classy side mixed it up, keeping the ball on the ground for the skilful, quick-turning Graham and occasionally going longer for the pacier Gritton and Kuffour.

Graham, looking after himself better than he’d done before or probably since, top-scored with 23 goals as United won their first automatic promotion for 38 years.

A club like Torquay was always going to find it hard to hold on to a player as talented as Graham, and when ambitious Wigan Athletic came in with £315,000 for him that summer, he was gone.

He later moved on to Sheffield Wednesday, Gillingham and Lincoln among others, including a brief and slightly sad loan spell back at Plainmoor when he looked a shadow of the player who had entertained us so royally before.

Graham’s departure upped the ante to get his replacement right for the challenge of League One football, and United got it wrong – but right too late.

Adebayo Akinfenwa had already earned a reputation as a potential match-winner who never stayed anywhere for long when Rosenior signed him just before the start of the 2004-2005 season.

He’d been released by Doncaster and he arrived palpably unprepared for the tough job at hand. It took at least three months for him to start firing on all cylinders, by which time United were struggling at the bottom of the table.

Akinfenwa eventually scored 16 goals, eleven of them from January to May, when he was almost unplayable at times.

He already had the barn-door frame which grew even bigger as his headline career progressed at Swansea, Northampton. Gillingham, AFC Wimbledon and Wycombe.

But in those last five months at Plainmoor, he could run as well, especially when an opposing defender riled him.

Bayo seldom agreed more than one-year deals and he duly left after United’s galling relegation with the Player of the Year award under his arm.

During the course of that season United has splashed a new record £75,000 fee on beanpole forward Leon Constantine from Southend.

He’d scored a few goals on loan first, but never followed that up and finished with seven in 30 games before moving on to Port Vale.

As United slid, Kuffour and Bedeau battled on manfully, as players like Lee Thorpe and Jamie Ward came and went.

Targetman Thorpe and the gutsy, rapid Ward, who’d been rejected by Aston Villa, were both signed by Ian Atkins as he pulled off another Great Escape in 2006.

When Atkins paired Ward with veteran ex-Plymouth centre-forward Mickey Evans the following season, they looked the real deal for a while, but new chairman Chris Roberts soon put a stop to that.

His antics dismayed Evans so much that he left, so did Atkins and United’s best hope of staying in the EFL, Ward, was sold on January deadline day to Chesterfield for £90,00 to prop up Roberts’ creaking regime.

Ward went on to star for Sheffield United, Derby, Nottingham Forest and Northern Ireland.

The extraordinary hiatus which saw Bateson take back control from Roberts and then, after reappointing Rosenior for a few hours, sell the club to the Paul Bristow-backed board headed by new chairman Alex Rowe in May 2007 prompted a new manager in Paul Buckle.

Among Buckle’s first of several statement signings were muscular strikers Tim Sills and Lee Phillips.

Sills already had a reputation as one of the best centre-forwards outside the EFL and ex-Plymouth, Weymouth and Exeter favourite Phillips completed a no-nonsense duo up front.

They scored 34 goals between them in 2007-2008 with Sills, especially good in the air, hitting 21.

Phillips dried up in the second half of a marathon season which saw United lose to local rivals Exeter in the Play Offs, and he left for Rushden and eventually Cambridge.

Elliot Benyon then grew from a ‘super sub’ into a starting striker alongside the ever-reliable Sills and, with one or two improvements elsewhere, Torquay thrillingly won promotion at the second attempt.

In the 2009 PO Final against Cambridge at Wembley, Phillips was in the beaten U’s attack and, as all Gulls fans know, Sills headed the clincher (2-0), his 16th goal of that season.

He eventually left for Stevenage midway through the following year, as Buckle began to rebuild the side for life in League Two, but Sills rightly remains a much respected figure in United’s recent history.

The hard-working and popular Benyon stayed on, eventually scoring 45 goals in four seasons before a lucrative move to Swindon, and then returning to Plainmoor for a second spell from 2013-2015.

When Martin Ling took over from Buckle, following the 2011 League Two PO Final defeat to Stevenage at Old Trafford, he took a major gamble with the signing of Rene Howe.

Even more than Akinfenwa seven years before, Howe was overweight and unfit, but he was a naturally talented and imposing targetman.

United physio Damien Davey got him fit a fair bit faster than Akinfenwa had done, and Howe was soon the focal point of a Eunan O’Kane-inspired side which attacked from all angles.

Howe actually preferred to play on his own, usually with his back to goal, and he was strong enough to hold off two defenders, let alone one.

If his appetite for goals and running had been a little keener, he would have played at a much higher level.

Howe, who scored 29 goals in 85 appearances (2011-2013), combined well for a while with Devonian Ashley Yeoman, an instinctive finisher with ice in his veins in front of goal.

A typically cool effort at Morecambe (2-0) effectively clinched safety from relegation in the Spring of 2013.

Yeoman eventually left in 2015 after seven goals in 59 games, but 46 of them as a substitute.

United’s non-League years have seen several strikers but few quite good enough to regain that longed-for return to the EFL.

Paigntonian Kieffer Moore, who’d been lost to United during one of the club’s Youth scheme closures, definitely was good enough.

He proved it by scoring five times in an all-too-brief four-match stay on loan from Forest Green Rovers, before Torquay were gazumped by Ipswich Town as Moore headed off to international (Wales) fame and fortune.

Other forwards included Nathan Blissett, the tireless Ruairi Keating, Louis Briscoe, Scott Rendell, Ryan Bowman, Duane Ofori-Acheampong, Ben Harding, Elliott Romain, Brett Williams, Shaun Harrad and talented loanee Rhys Healey, who was sent by Neil Warnock from Cardiff City to help United out as they tried, eventually unsuccessfully, to avoid relegation to the NL South under Gary Owers.

Jamie Reid, also lost to his hometown club because the Youth team had been shut, played through several of those seasons with mixed success, mostly as a winger.

But it was Gary Johnson who finally told Reid: “I want you on the end of moves, not in the middle of them.”

Reid was duly galvanised and proceeded to score 63 goals in 176 appearances, 53 of them as United walked the NL South in 2019 and then established themselves in the NL Premier.

Reid found a lively partner for a while in Bristol City loanee Saikou Janneh before proving his worth with Mansfield and now Stevenage.

If you like your centre-forwards in the Howe/Sills mode, you could do a lot worse than Danny Wright, who led United’s attack with gusto and no little quality from 2020-2022.

If former Histon and Cheltenham man Wright hadn’t suffered a costly injury, after scoring in a 6-1 thrashing of Yeovil at Plainmoor on Boxing Day 2020, United might well have gone on to win the NL Premier, instead of being overhauled by Sutton United and beaten on penalties by Hartlepool in the PO Final.

So, with two striker spots available, I need a shortlist of eight players from that long and formidable line.

I’m going for a mixture of quality, service and impact with: Robin Stubbs (1963-69/71-73), Alan Welsh (1967-72), John Rudge (1969-72), Willie Brown (1975-78), Les Lawrence (1977-82), Steve Cooper (1978-84), Dave Caldwell (1987-88/89-90) and David Graham (2001-2004/2006/7).

Striker Shorts

Aldershot always dreaded playing against Gulls star Robin Stubbs. In four matches against the Shots (1964-66) Stubbs scored NINE times!

When COLIN Lee was sold to Spurs for £60,000 in 1977, he was under treatment for an achilles tendon injury that would almost certainly have kept him out of Torquay’s next match.

But he headed up to White Hart Lane, made his debut against Bristol Rovers with the help of pain-killers – and scored four goals in a 9-0 victory!

Justin Fashanu, player-coach at the time, was nowhere to be seen before one match at Plainmoor in 1992.

He was entertaining Coronation Street actress Julie Goodyear in a photoshoot after selling a story to a national paper that they were an ‘item’.

Dave Caldwell needed a check-up after being injured in a typically no-holds-barred Play-Off victory over Scunthorpe in 1988.

He arrived at Torbay Hospital’s A&E department to find two Scunthorpe players already there, after both had been hurt in earlier challenges

The Shortlist So Far

GOALKEEPER – Mike Mahoney 1970-75, John Turner 1978-80/1983-84, Neville Southall 1998-2000, Bobby Olejnik 2011-2012

RIGHT-BACK – John Bond 1966-69, Jim McNichol 1986-91, Paul Holmes 1988-91/1999-2003, Andy Gurney 1997-99

LEFT-BACK – Tom Kelly 1986-95, John Uzzell 1989-91, Brian McGlinchey 2003-2006, Kevin Nicholson 2007-2017

RIGHT CENTRE BACK – Dick Edwards 1970-73, Matt Elliott 1989-92, Alex Watson 1995-2001, Steve Woods 2001-2009

LEFT CENTRE BACK – Mike Green 1977-79, Phil Lloyd 1987-92, Wes Saunders 1990-93, Craig Taylor 2003-2007

RIGHT WING – Donal Murphy 1978-80, Paul Smith 1988-91, Rodney Jack 1995-98, Wayne Carlisle 2008-2011

LEFT WING – Tony Scott 1967-70, Mark Loram 1985-93, Kevin Hill 1997-2008, Danny Stevens 2007-2014

CENTRAL MIDFIELD (2) – Tommy Mitchinson 1969-72, Bruce Rioch 1980-83, Alan Little 1982-84, Sean Joyce 1988-1993, Alex Russell 2001-2005, Jason Fowler 2001-2005, Chris Hargreaves 2007-2010, Eunan O’Kane 2009-2012

STRIKERS (2) – Robin Stubbs (1963-69/72-73), Alan Welsh (1967-72), John Rudge (1969-72), Willie Brown (1975-78), Les Lawrence (1977-82), Steve Cooper (1978-84), Dave Caldwell (1987-88/89-90), David Graham (2001-2004/2006-2007).

Tickets for the Dave Thomas Team of a Lifetime event at Plainmoor on Friday, December 13 are available to purchase from https://www.tickettailor.com/events/clearskypublishing/1440324