War stopped Brook’s scoring feats, before a car crash brought his career to an end
A CAR crash merely postponed the goal that makes Sergio Aguero the joint top goalscorer in Manchester City’s history.
Three weeks after breaking a rib in Amsterdam, the Argentine scored his 177th goal for City from the penalty spot yesterday.
For the man whose record he has equalled after 78 years, a road accident spelt the end of his football career.
In 1939, Eric Brook was travelling to an England international against Scotland at St James’s Park in a hire car, after he and team-mate Sam Barkas had missed their train in Leeds.
The two players were involved in a crash near Ripon that left Brook with a fractured skull. He was no longer able to head the ball and was forced to retire at the age of 32.
The story of the coalminer’s son is far removed from that of Aguero, who was born into poverty in the Buenos Aires slums but ascended to football royalty; the one-time son-in-law of Diego Maradona and best friend of Lionel Messi.
While Aguero cost City £38million when he arrived from Atletico Madrid in 2011, and would be worth significantly more in the current market, Brook joined the club for a combined £6,000 fee with his Barnsley team-mate Fred Tilson, in 1928.
His 177 goals came in 494 appearances for City. A 178th was scored but then expunged from the record books when the First Division was suspended at the outbreak of the War.
It’s a measure of Aguero that his recordequalling goal arrived in his 262nd game.
Brook was a tough character who did not miss a club game for a record 11 years until a bout of acute appendicitis forced him out of City’s win over Grimsby in May
1936. His most famous appearance in an England shirt came in November 1934 and a brutal clash with Italy at Highbury.
Despite having an early penalty saved, he scored twice inside the first 11 minutes with a header and what the great Stanley Matthews later described as ‘the best free-kick I’ve ever seen, a thunderbolt’. Afterwards, it emerged that he had played with a broken arm.
Brook was capped 18 times by England, scoring 10 goals. Many felt he should have played more but he was often overlooked for Arsenal’s Cliff Bastin.
Brook later ran a pub in Halifax and drove coaches in his native Yorkshire before returning to the Manchester area, where he worked as a crane operator. Brook died suddenly at the age of 57 at home on a Manchester council estate.
The two men are connected by a simple statistic but otherwise they are generations, and worlds, apart.
Soon, when his record falls, Eric Brook will slip back into history.