The Ultimate Torquay United team: Left-backs

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

Since most of us are right-footers, you’d expect right-backs to outnumber ‘lefties’ in any gallery of the best full-backs ever to play for Torquay United.

Not a bit of it.

You can go back as far as you like, and the Gulls seem to have been blessed with an almost unbroken line of high-quality left-backs or left wing-backs.

In Frank O’Farrell’s outstanding sides of the late 1960s, the Scot Bobby Baxter and Bill Kitchener often competed for the spot, but although Kitchener was equally at home as a central defender, it was in the No.3 shirt that fans of that time remember him best.

Like John Bond on the right, 6ft 2in tall Kitchener first joined from West Ham on loan, and he then moved permanently in 1967.

He eventually joined the exodus to Bond’s Bournemouth in 1971, but not before he’d played 187 utterly reliable and often polished games.

It seemed like a huge hole to fill when Kitchener was sold to the Cherries, but United had two more than adequate men to take over – one from within their own ranks and the other from Dean Court.

Plymouth-born Phil Sandercock, whose brother Ken played in midfield, was a 16 year-old apprentice when he made his debut at Brighton in November 1969.

But he went on to make 225 appearances (13 goals) before moving on to Huddersfield Town in 1977 and later Northampton.

Sandercock also featured prominently in one of Plainmoor’s most remarkable games.

Against Cambridge United on an icy January day in 1977, Gulls centre-half Pat Kruse scored what was at the time the fastest own-goal in league history – after five seconds.

Sandercock then ‘scored’ another OG just before half-time, only for Willie Brown to net two ‘specials’ of his own in the second half.

It ended as a 2-2 draw with that season’s Fourth Division champions, managed by a young Ron Atkinson, with Torquay scoring all four goals!

Like Kitchener, former Charlton Athletic youngster Stocks was equally effective at left-back or centre-back.

Considered surplus to Bond’s requirements at Bournemouth in 1971, he was an instant hit at Plainmoor.

Stocks was formidable in the tackle, and he mischievously dubbed his left foot the ‘Scythe’ in defence and the ‘Wand’ in attack. Both were justified.

His 161 games in more than four years would have been a lot more but for two broken legs which eventually curtailed a fine career.

Steve Ritchie was an exciting left-back in Mike Green’s entertaining sides in the late 1970s, following the sturdier duo of Peter Darke and Lindsay Parsons.

Ex-Celtic and Cardiff man Freddie Pethard could and did play on the right and left, and he was a good, if slightly less attacking, alternative to Ritchie.

They were followed all too briefly but sweetly by a player who made only 33 appearances under Bruce Rioch over the 1982-83 and 1983-84 seasons, but left his mark – Jimmy Holmes.

Holmes had won 30 caps for Eire in a top-flight decade with Coventry and Spurs, but Rioch had known him during a spell in North America with the Vancouver Whitecaps and he persuaded Jimmy to pick up his UK career here.

Holmes went on to play for Peterborough before dropping into non-League and then coaching, but few classier left-backs ever played for Torquay.

Holmes gone? No problem.

Rioch had a quality replacement in Geordie Colin Anderson, signed from Burnley in 1982.

Anderson played 124 games before West Bromwich Albion paid £25,000 for him in March 1985, by which time Dave Webb was in charge.

In the summer of 1986 Webb’s successor Stuart Morgan made a series of bargain free transfers, including two from far-off Hartlepool United.

One was a quick, game striker, Paul Dobson, who proceeded to score 42 goals in two seasons. The other was Glasgow-born Tom Kelly.

Over the next nine years, split by a couple at Exeter City, Kelly was a fixture at left-back in 290 games.

He was often used as a wing-back, without quite the buccaneering instinct of Jim McNichol on the right, but he never gave less than his best and was rightly popular with fans over an eventful decade at the club.

If you like your full-backs to have their defensive priorities right, you could hardly do better than John Uzzell.

He’d already played more than 300 games for Plymouth Argyle before Cyril Knowles signed him in 1989.

He was the sort of player you always wanted on your side and, of course, he would have carried on for a year or two more but for the facial injury he sustained on the end of Brentford striker Gary Blissett’s elbow in December 1991.

None of us who saw that sickening incident has ever quite forgotten it.

The wholehearted and versatile Lee Barrow, signed by Neil Warnock to help drag United out of trouble in 1993, was a terrific servant in most defensive positions over the next four years, although he wore the No.3 shirt most of the time.

But the club’s next specialist ‘wing-back’ was Paul Gibbs.

Gibbs, a ‘free’ from Colchester, played only one season (1997-98), but it was one to remember.

Andy Gurney on the right and Gibbs on the left each scored ten goals as Kevin Hodges’ fine 3-5-2 side was pipped for automatic promotion and then lost to Colchester (1-0) at Wembley from a penalty which still grates with the Gulls faithful.

Six of Gibbs’ goals were penalties, but he was perpetual motion up and down the left, laying on at least as many goals as Gurney and, visibly enjoying every minute of it, becoming a big fans’ favourite.

When Hodges was lured back to Home Park as Plymouth’s manager, he took Gibbs with him under the ‘new’ Bosman freedom-of-movement rules.

If he’d signed a two-year deal, as Gurney had done, Argyle would have had to write out a serious cheque. Gurney cost Reading £100,000 six months later.

Torquay born and bred, Robbie Herrera was lost to his hometown club for 12 years after he moved to Queen’s Park Rangers under Dave Webb when he was only 16.

He later cost Fulham £60,000, and he was a popular player at Craven Cottage for five years and nearly 160 games.

Although he’d had a couple of loan spells here, it wasn’t until 1998 that another £30,000 finally brought Herrera back to Plainmoor permanently.

Technically gifted and a good athlete, it was a shame that we probably never saw him at his peak, a succession of injuries interrupting his four years and 120 appearances here.

Herrera went into coaching and management and, of course, he’s now United’s head of youth.

‘The final piece of the jigsaw’ was how many United fans saw Brian McGlinchey when he joined, at first on loan, in September 2003 and then for good four months later.

The Ulsterman had served an apprenticeship at Manchester City, before spells with Port Vale in the Championship, Gillingham and Plymouth Argyle, where he’d won promotion each time.

It’s amazing to think that no one ever paid a fee for him.

The side that Roy McFarland had partly built, and Leroy Rosenior completed and set free, was packed with quality players in every department, and when McGlinchey slotted in alongside his former Argyle teammate Craig Taylor, the picture was complete.

Not only did McGlinchey have a great left foot, he was so seldom out of position that few wingers could get past him.

His astute style of play was perfect for the fast-passing game which left nearly all opponents chasing shadows.

United supporters hadn’t seen football like it for 30 years.

McGlinchey was just as good after promotion to League One, and it was a shame that his Plainmoor career was ended early by a back injury that probably wasn’t fully diagnosed quickly enough.

Derby-born Kevin Nicholson was also an experienced pro (Sheffield Wednesday, Northampton Town, Notts County) when he signed for Paul Buckle’s new-look United in the summer of 2007 after relegation to the ‘Conference’.

But after spells at non-League Scarborough and Forest Green, he wasn’t one of the higher profile arrivals of that busy close-season.

‘Nicho’ wasn’t the quickest, but like all good players who may lack something in one area, he’d learned to adapt and not be caught out by faster opponents.

Many an opposition manager tried to target him, and many failed, especially as Buckle posted hard-working wingers like Chris Zebrowski and Danny Stevens in front of him, just to make sure.

Buckle used to rib Nicholson and his great friend and teammate Lee Mansell that, if he could transplant the former’s educated left foot onto the latter’s tireless legs, he’d have had a Premier League player on his hands.

Neither lost too much sleep over the sideways compliment.

Over nearly 350 games, as player and later player-manager, Nicholson became one of the Gulls’ most popular servants in recent memory.

That long line of quality left-backs has been carried on in the National League and NLS by Liam Davis, all-too-briefly because of a career-ending injury, Ryan Dickson and now, of course, Dean Moxey.

Moxey has been great value to the club, and a treat to watch.

If he’s still been this good approaching 40, what must he have been like in his heyday with his hometown Exeter City, Crystal Palace, Bolton Wanderers and Derby County?

And like Nicholson, Moxey’s legs apparently went out with Punk and plasticine. Yeah, well...

Goodness, how do I pick a shortlist, let alone the best, from that distinguished line?

Left-Back Shorts

When Robbie Herrera moved from QPR to Fulham for £60,000 in 1993, it was widely reported that the fee had been paid by film star and avid Cottagers fan Hugh Grant.

Grant may well have answered chairman Jimmy Hill’s appeal for donations to buy Herrera, but the bulk actually came from a director.

The foul by Brentford striker Gary Blissett that shattered United defender John Uzzell’s cheekbone in 1991 was bad enough for Blissett to be charged with GBH.

FL secretary Graham Kelly controversially testified for the defence, even though he wasn’t at the game - Blissett was acquitted, but later settled a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.

TV presenter Helen Chamberlain’s passion for the Gulls is well-known, and she bears a tattoo of the club’s crest on her behind to prove it.

Helen and United left-back Paul Gibbs were an ‘item’ at the time, but she insisted that wasn’t the reason for doing it - she remains a staunch Gulls supporter to this day.

Tickets for the Dave Thomas Team of a Lifetime event at Plainmoor on Friday, December 13 are available to purchase from www.torbayweekly.co.uk