The ultimate TUFC team: Chosen by the man who knows

“Player first at this club” growled Frank O’Farrell as he scooped a plate of scrambled eggs on toast from under the fork of a nervous cub reporter in a Dorchester cafe one afternoon in 1968.

As a trainee on the old Torquay Times, I’d been invited onto Torquay United’s team coach for a midweek game at Bournemouth, and I’d done everything I could to make sure that everyone had their pre-match meals before I tucked into mine.

I hadn’t spotted that a couple of our promotion-chasing Third Division (League One) stars, John Bond and John Benson, hadn’t returned from the loo.

It didn’t pay to protest to the relentlessly driven and sometimes scary O’Farrell at times like that, and I did wonder if I’d ever be allowed near the team again.

I kept my head and voice down for the rest of the night, but I wasn’t alone. We lost 3-0, and I can remember to this day the complete silence that hung over the bus on that long road back down the A35.

Little did I dream then that United would one day go to Wembley. Not once, but five times. And I’d be there to report on the lot.

My friend, colleague and never-deterred Gulls fan Guy Henderson and I are still waiting for the chance, ‘when’ United go back there again, to walk up to the appropriate steward and say: “Our usual seats, please!”

They say that time flies when you’re having fun and, although the Gulls have been through more downs than ups over the last half-century or so, I hopefully still have a smile on my face.

Why not, after so much kindness from fans, players, managers and staff, and when you see supporters flooding back in 2024 and feel the atmosphere that makes Plainmoor such a special place to play and watch football?

I pinch myself that I’m still allowed a seat in the Press Box or the chance to chatter away on the radio. Thank-you.

Anyway, enough of all that.

Trying to pick an All-Time Torquay United XI is something many of us have chewed over.

It sure is daunting.

We’re all bound to leave out wonderful players who could or should be in the final team. Or even on the shortlist.

In a side to play for our lives, if that’s just one criteria, do we send out an XI packed with men like Twitchin, Boulton, Cooper and Hargreaves or full of more mercurial geniuses like Mitchinson, Loram and Jack?

Of course, you try for a bit of everything, in the sure and certain knowledge that plenty of people will still think you’re bonkers for leaving any of them out.

If I have a single regret, even though I first stood on the Pop Side as a teenager in 1964, it’s that I never saw Don Mills play for United.

I had the pleasure of knowing him after he’d retired, both as a revered coach of United’s reserve and youth teams and later as Torquay’s friendliest and best-loved traffic warden.

As a peerless inside-forward who scored 86 goals in 367 games (1948-1962) he was, as one teammate described him, ‘a First Division player in a Third Division team’.

I never watched the great Don, or record goalscorer Sammy Collins or many more stars of United’s first four decades in the Football League. I wish I had.

To all our great frustration, United have spent most of the last 15 years outside the EFL.

There have been many fine servants of the club during that time, and one or two of them will earn a deserved mention.

But for sheer quality, and the levels at which they performed, Third and Fourth (League One/Two) stars inevitably dominate.

Formations never won a football match, but we’re going for a 4-4-2, if only because it accommodates ‘proper’ full-backs and wingers.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll go for goalkeepers, then right-backs, left-backs, centre-backs, right and left wingers, central midfielders and strikers, with some nostalgic stories thrown in for good measure.

We’ll finish with a selection of the best managers to take charge of a team for the ages.

No pressure there then!

I’ll draw up a shortlist in each ‘category’ and then name my Final XI at the end of the series.

Of course, we’d love you to join in the conversation and send us your own All-Time XIs, and your happy memories of the days you cheered them on.

Here’s to many, many of them... Up The Gulls!