WORTHY OF HIS PLACE IN CLUB HISTORY
ACCORDING to Chris Kinnear, David Leworthy was the equal of any finisher, in any country, in any division.
“He reminded me of Jimmy Greaves,” says the 66-year-old, who signed the striker from Farnborough for a (still) club record £50,000 in 1993.
“They weren’t runners. They’d not hit 30-yarders. They weren’t athletic at all, really. But, blimey, they were the ones you wanted in that box. Anything in there, the slightest bit of space, it was a goal.”
To those who remember Leworthy as a Non-League legend at Farnborough, Dover and Kingstonian, Kinnear’s comparison may seem absurd.
Yet he, too, plied his trade on the hallowed turf of White Hart Lane, and is still regarded by many at Tottenham as a talent that slipped through the cracks.
Schooled at hometown club Portsmouth, Leworthy’s reward for a decade of teenage service was a 12-minute cameo in 1981, officially the shortest first-team career in Pompey history.
Hurt and disillusioned, he rebooted at Fareham Town. There, alongside an 18-year-old Steve Claridge, Leworthy plundered 39 goals in just 18 months.
“I knew Dave from Pompey and he was always a very good footballer,” recalls Claridge, the now Salisbury boss who would go on to play for Leicester City in the Premier League.
“Bustling, good touch, always moving. Managers always knew exactly what they were going to get, and his finishing was a class above.”
Which is clearly what Spurs thought when they shelled out a NonLeague record fee of £43,000 in 1984. “I always believed I’d get back pro,” he once said. “But even I didn’t expect that.”
For 18 months, Leworthy lived the dream. Sharing a dressing room with Glenn Hoddle, Clive Allen and Ossie Ardiles. A debut in the North London derby watched by 53,000 fans.
Popular with fans and team-mates, there was widespread dismay when he was sold to top-flight rivals Oxford United after just 11 appearances.
There, too, he was rarely spotted, squeezed out by competition from the likes of John Aldridge and Dean Saunders despite a brace on his debut, a goal against Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United and a formidable record for the reserves.
“If he’d had the breaks at the right time, or got a manager who’d stuck with him, you never know,” adds Kinnear. “But David wasn’t a natural athlete, and I think that’s probably what stopped him playing more in the league.
“That’s not knocking him. You are what you are. He was fit, he was dedicated. He was mentally very positive.
As a finisher, he was up there with anybody. But to be a top player, you need the whole package.
“It’s like goalkeepers. You look at some of them and they’ve got all the talent in the world. But if they’re only 5ft 10, they aren’t going to make it.”
Diagonal runs
Yet the pro game’s loss would prove Non-League’s gain. In late 1991, after three unproductive years at Reading, Leworthy joined Farnborough.
Over the subsequent decade, he scored over 200 goals, won the Conference golden boot, single-handedly saved Rushden from relegation and capped his career with back-to-back FA Trophies at Kingstonian.
“He was an exceptional player,” says
Jamie Horton, a teammate at Farnborough.
“Not quick. Not strong.
But so, so sharp.
“You didn’t even have to be a quality player to put him in. By the time you looked up, he’d already worked himself five yards behind and you just had to find a general area.
“I had no pace, so I wasn’t beating a man. With Dave, that didn’t matter. All I had to do was come inside, play a straight ball and he’d make a diagonal run that took the centre-half out of the game. It was as simple as that.
“As a midfield player, you didn’t even have to think.
Dave’s run made your mind up. And when he got a chance - bang. It was buried.”
Kinnear, who left Dover in 1995, feels likewise.
Intelligence
“We signed Dave to make a statement,” he recalls. “Two years before, we’d won the league and they wouldn’t let us go up because of the ground. So when we finally got promoted, we wanted to say ‘We are a big club’. David was our way of doing that.
“And he justified it, absolutely. With Dave in the team, you didn’t even need to play well. You just needed to create a couple of chances and he’d put them away. His finishing was…calm. That’s the best way to put it.
“It was intelligence more than natural ability. He spotted weakness. He read the game. He always kept a little bit back for the last five minutes, when he knew defenders were tired. Last minute or first minute, he was just as focused.”
Leworthy finally retired in 2003 and, after brief stints in charge at Banstead Athletic and Croydon, now gets his football fix running junior teams at St John’s College in Southsea.
It is a role that suits the amiable warmth with which he always conducted himself, despite those record fees and years in the top flight.
Claridge recalls a trial at Oxford in the mid-eighties, orchestrated by Leworthy. “I was playing for Weymouth at the time, and Dave had persuaded Oxford to give me a shot,” he says.
“If they’d signed me, I’d have been a rival for his place. But I’ll always remember how much he helped me during that game. He was a lovely bloke.”
Kinnear adds: “You could speak to a hundred people in football and I guarantee that nobody would have a bad word to say about him. He was the nicest man you’ll ever meet, and a very good player.”