FOX, GIANT, MAJOR AND BILLY

August 1957 was the month that a British Football League player William John Charles left home to play for Juventus for a fee of £65,000. This was an amount twice the previous record spent by Real Madrid on John Fox Watson of Fulham, one of the few early international transactions from an British league club and of course Charles opened the flood gates, with Jimmy Greaves, Gerry Hitchin, Dennis  Law and others heading south (for a while).

Watson was a Scot who had played local football as a youngster and then signed for Bury FC pre-war. He lost a few years being called up and then he joined Fulham, went to Real Madrid briefly, came back to Crystal Palace and ended up at Canterbury City (Kent!).

I have given John Charles quite a bit of space in a previous blog which you should read. He was an outstanding player and gentleman. The Gentle Giant.
http://baileyfootballblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/with-il-gigante-buono-wales-might-have.html

Taken from his local side Gendros in Wales, he trialled at Leeds and was signed on in September 1948 by Major Frank Buckley and making his debut in front of a small appreciative crowd against Queen of the South in a friendly.

The result was 0-0 which does not sound too exciting, but Charles was still a teenager and he snuffed out Billy Houliston, a Scottish international who, 10 days earlier, had run England riot at Wembley in front of over 98,000, helping the Scots to a 3-1 victory.

Houliston played 120 games after the war, in the Scottish league and scored 60 goals. His robust style of play unsettled the England defenders and he scored 5 goals in 7 appearances for his country. He did not upset JC in the friendly, however.

The remarkable link is that Charles was scouted and then joined Leeds Utd in 1948 managed by the POMO man, Major Franklin Charles Buckley. Buckley managed clubs from 1919 including Norwich, Blackpool, Wolves, Hull, Leeds and finally Walsall through till 1955.

The Major was responsible for the development of the Position Of Maximum Possibility, a style of play adopted by Graham Taylor, John Beck and David Bassett and others. Basically Long Ball!

John Charles, between 1948 and 1974 played 715 matches scoring 370 goals, remembering that he could play anywhere, he often found himself at centre half, whihc makes that tally all the more impressive. His career took him from Juve to Leeds again, briefly, Roma, Cardiff City, Hereford Utd as player-manager and then Merthyr Town and finally Hamilton Steelers in Canada. He died in February 2004 aged 72.
JC represented Wales 38 times scoring 15 times. He was never cautioned or sent off.