‘United sent a car to pick me up – the driver was George Best’
Football prodigy Colin Walker had a host of clubs after his signature aged 12 but injuries and bad luck meant his career did not turn out the way he expected
‘The most wanted junior player in Britain” – so began a 1970 BBC television report about a 12-year-old boy growing up near Rotherham, who had caused such a stir in schoolboy football that 15 clubs, from Manchester United to Tottenham Hotspur to Leeds United, wanted to sign him.
Colin Walker was what the BBC reporter of the time described as “a prize exhibit in the magic roundabout of children’s football”, in a news feature that took a dim view of what it saw as unscrupulous professional clubs signing and rejecting promising kids. Plus ca change. The nine-minute report, including interviews with Colin, his parents, and various outraged schoolmasters, was posted this week on the @BBCArchive Twitter feed.
It is an extraordinary window on our past, set in a pit village, where football was king and the posh man from the BBC sounds as if he is from
‘Did I want a better career? You would have to say yes ... but I have no regrets’
another world. Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. Young boys from working-class backgrounds still dream of a career in professional football. Clubs still chew them up and spit them out. But one question stands out above all: what happened to Colin?
His life since 1970 is not the one you might expect, and yet as the now 61-year-old explained to me this week, the reality feels even more remarkable than the career he once anticipated. The BBC had sought him out after he was featured on the back page of The Sun that year. Eager scouts had taken him all over the country. He had visited Old Trafford, where Matt Busby told him that he was to be taken to the Cliff training ground to meet the first team. Colin describes being told to go outside, where a car was waiting to give him a lift. “The driver turned round to say hello,” he recalls, “and it was George Best.”
Everywhere he went, clubs went the extra mile. Don Revie met him. Chelsea had his family to stay in London at Christmas. He could have had his pick but Colin, as he explains in the 1970 report, wanted to wait until he was 15 to sign schoolboy forms. In the intervening years, he did not grow at all. Aged 16, not even Rotherham United would offer him an apprenticeship. The gloomy prophecies of the BBC report about broken dreams had come true.
He got a job in a steelworks, but he continued playing and in December 1976, aged 17, Barnsley offered him a professional deal.
“I went over to sign the deal, but it had snowed really heavily,” Colin says. “Nobody was there. I went to watch my mates instead in the Rotherham association league. They only had nine men so I agreed to play. I broke my leg.”
The Barnsley contract offer was withdrawn. He worked as a bin man and played for Retford Town in the Midland League. He broke his leg again in the same place. He admits he was drinking too much. “I wasn’t a very nice person to be around so I got a kick up the a--- from my parents.”
In 1979 he agreed to play a preseason game for Matlock Town and scored a hat-trick. He was back in the game but was not making enough to give up the bins until he was persuaded to play a season in New Zealand. At Gisborne City he was the league’s leading goalscorer.
He came back to England in 1980 and finally signed a professional contract at Barnsley, his first at the age of 22, five years after that first broken leg and 10 after he was billed by the BBC as the country’s best schoolboy player. He played at Anfield in the League Cup in 1982 and scored against Liverpool, then the European champions, in the replay at Oakwell that ended in defeat for Barnsley.
By 1983, with his first team chances dwindling, he emigrated to New Zealand and was again the league’s leading goalscorer. He took citizenship and played in the 1986 World Cup qualifiers, scoring a famous goal for the All Whites against Israel.
“If I hadn’t broken my leg would I have played international football?” he asks now.
His wife Karen never settled in New Zealand and he followed her back to Yorkshire in 1986. Howard Wilkinson asked him to come into Sheffield Wednesday to make up the numbers for pre-season and ended up giving him a two-year contract. He scored a 15-minute hat-trick in the second half of a League Cup tie against Stockport County and then, on Oct 18, 1986, at White Hart Lane, the best junior player in the country finally made his top-flight First Division debut. He was 28.
Colin had got there. “Did it work out as I thought it might?” he says, “No, not at all. Did I want a better playing career? You have to say yes. But it wasn’t to be. I have no regrets.” That he feels that way is also a consequence of the interesting career he has had in the game after finishing playing. He played just twice in Division One for Wednesday and tore a cruciate ligament at 29. He went into coaching: junior teams, men, women and a brief stint managing York City. He was academy director at Doncaster Rovers. Now he is the head of coaching at League Two Grimsby Town, and nothing much has changed in the game he loves.
“There are things that happened then that happen now. Everyone wants the right kid. Everyone wants the so-called best player,” he says.
His proud parents, Stan aged 87 and Kath, 83, still keep track of his career. Colin’s first grandchild is coming in the new year to his daughter Katy. He has had 40 years in football, which not many can say – even if did not go quite as planned. “As I’m stood here,” he says, “in the sunshine at Grimsby watching the first team prepare, I have to say I’m quite content with my life.”