Norris still has his golden boot tucked away at home
IN THE latest installment of our My Time At Town series, Steve Norris reflects on his astonishing goalscoring form at the start of the 90s.
It was a rainy Wednesday night in September 1990 and Bury Reserves were hosting Carlisle Reserves.
Halifax Town manager Jim McCalliog was among those in attendance, in need of a striker to solve his team’s goal drought.
The Shaymen had made a disastrous start to the 1990-91 campaign, failing to score in any of their opening seven league matches, and were stranded at the foot of the Fourth Division
But McCalliog was convinced the man he watched that night was the answer.
“I fell out of favour with Carlisle, well I never really got in favour there!” recalls Steve Norris.
“They’d signed me from Scarborough for about £65,000 and I only started and finished about five games.
“I’d played in the reserves at Bury on a cold, horrible Wednesday night, and after the game Jim McCalliog came up tome.Wewenttoapub,hada pint, and he said ‘I know you can score goals, your record proves that, don’t concentrate on the defensive side, we need a goalscorer’.
“I remember speaking to my dad the next day and I said ‘bloody hell, has it come to this, Halifax Town?’”And my dad said ‘look, sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards, and it’s better to be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond’.
“So I signed, and the rest was history. It was just a perfect fit, I loved the club, they loved me.”
Norris’ impact was almost immediate. The team’s goal drought stopped, and the striker plucked from Carlisle’s second string lit up the Fourth Division.
“I scored nearly every game. I think the most I went was two games without a goal.
“I’ve got a scrapbook somewhere with all the cuttings, and if you look down the results it’s just Norris, Norris, Norris, Norris, Juryeff, Juryeff, Norris.
“It was great. I always used to look at the centre-half and think ‘they can’t stop me’.
“I used to say ‘just give me the ball, just give me one chance’. As soon as I got it, I knew I could drop my shoulder, beat one or two and I’d score.”
Norris went on to notch 30 league goals that season, many of which were scored when put clean through on goal before rounding the keeper.
Norris was the first player since Ted McDougall to score more than half his team’s league goals, netting 30 of the club’s 59. Only Matt Le Tissier and James Beattie, both for Southampton, have done it since.
“It’s a good quiz question that isn’t it!” he says. “It was one of the highlights of my career.
“I got two awards for that, one was a Rothman’s cap, and the other was from the Sunday Mirror. But the club wouldn’t let me go down there because we were back in for the following season by then. I was supposed to have been sat next to Neil Warnock, who’d signed me at Scarborough, Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank and a few others. They couldn’t believe someone from Halifax Town hadn’t turned up to collect an award because people from Halifax never got awards.
“I’ve still got my golden boot, it’s in my house.”
Norris continued to score goals the following term, and quickly became the club’s biggest asset, a fact not overlooked by John McGrath, McCalliog’s successor.
Looking for a quick buck, he sold Norris to Chesterfield in January 1992, much to the astonishment of the supporters.
Norris ended up as top goalscorer at Chesterfield for three seasons running, and finished his career with 101 goals in 210 league games. But it’s his time with Halifax which Norris looks back on with the most fondness.
“I had some great times there, some wonderful people, a lovely club,” he says. “The supporters were brilliant for me. I loved it. That’s probably the highlight of my career, without a doubt.”
ONLINE: See the full interview at www.halifaxcourier.co.uk