Thanks to Mark Wilbraham for spotting that the previous picture was incorrect.
Position : Midfield (also played centre half)
Played : 1988-89 to 1990-91
Appearances : 109
Goals : 16
Here's a player I thought was seriously over-rated by many fans (one of my mates had Steve's picture on his wall long after he'd left the club) and here's the first of them. Steve was the other player signed by Eddie Gray just before he left and inevitably had been a junior at Leeds before moving to Bradford for whom he had made just one league appearance.
Ostensibly a centre half , Danny Bergara played Steve in midfield and he attracted a lot of praise in the early games of the season and I couldn't see why. His touch was awful and for a big guy he was hopeless in the air and didn't put himself about as much as you'd expect. Terry Dolan was the manager who'd let him go at Bradford and he did the same again at the end of the season but then changed his mind. It was in the subsequent season that "Shosh" showed where his real talent lay - taking piledriver free kicks and he scored some memorable goals ; the one that springs most to mind is the one at home to Scarborough in the Worthington Cup in 1990 which was so far out that Scarborough didn't construct a wall and then saw it fly into the top corner. For that 1990-91 season he was moved back to centre half to accommodate the infamous Chris Lee which was a risky switch given Steve's allergy to heading the ball.
Steve didn't fancy sticking around for the Dave Sutton era and Alan Ball signed him for Exeter for £10,000. The move failed to work out and Steve headed north to Darlington after only 3 appearances for them. Steve made 88 appearances for the Quakers over 3 seasons, at one point being made team captain, but surprisingly only scored twice. He was released in the summer of 1994 and after a brief spell in Hong Kong started a long career in the League of Wales only interrupted by a season at Stalybridge Celtic in 1995-96. By the time he retired in 2004 he had played for 10 different Welsh clubs. He has also managed four of them , his most recent being Gap Connah's Quay who he left in 2009.
No comments:
Post a Comment