A MARRIAGE FROM HEAVEN
CHRIS DUNLAVY TELLS OF THE PERFECT PARTNERSHIP
BILL WILLIAMS is 77 and a veteran of half a century in the game. He has, by his own admission, seen a lot of goals over the years.
Yet a strike from Mark Gall in Maidstone United’s title-winning 1988-89 campaign glistens with unrivalled clarity.
“To this day, I’ve neer seen a link-up like it,” says Williams, then working as general manager after handing the managerial reins to John Still in 1987.
“The ball came up to Steve Butler. Gall took it off his chest on the halfway line. Butler then spun out to the left. Mark hooked it out to him on the volley, Butler crossed it on the volley, Gall met it on the edge of the box – with another volley – and it flew into the net. If they’d had that goal on film it would still be played today. It was magnificent.”
And far from an isolated piece of brilliance. Like Teddy Sheringham and Alan Shearer, Gall and Butler were players whose contrasting styles fused into a deadly and intuitive alliance.
They weren’t friends. They didn’t practise. Yet they would score 26 goals apiece that season, and many more in the Football League. To this day, they remain the only strike duo in Conference history to share a golden boot.
Butler, who made 21 appearances for Brentford before joining the Stones in 1985, was already recognised as one of the most skilful forwards in the semi-professional game when Gall arrived from county football in February 1988.
“Nobody had heard of Mark,” Butler recalls – but that isn’t strictly true. Williams, in fact, had registered an interest as early as 1984 when Gall, a Brixton boy, was plundering goals for Greenwich Borough.
Contrast
“The first time we saw him, we’d gone to watch Ian Wright,” recalls Williams. “We had the programme in front of us and it said Wright: 89 goals, Gall: 101 goals. We thought it was a printing mistake.”
It wasn’t, and by the evening’s end, Williams judged Gall a superior striker to the man who would become Arsenal’s record scorer.
He wasn’t alone. Scouts from QPR, Spurs and several Football League clubs attended Harrow Meadow. Manager Mick Wakefield was inundated with offers.
“He scored 150 goals and people were always after him,” said Wakefield, speaking in Rick Glanvill’s book
The Wright Stuff. “He had the potential to be even more successful than Ian, but when I said people were interested in signing him, he didn’t want to know. Like a lot of lads, he preferred to enjoy his football on a Saturday and stay around his friends.”
Interested eventually waned to the extent that Still was able to procure Gall for just £2,000. “I was amazed then and I’m amazed now,” he said. “He was an exceptional player.”
Gall’s greatest asset was undoubtedly his pace, a stark contrast to the stately craft and guile of his partner. “Butler was tall and thin,” recalls Williams. “Good control, good set up play, good brain. Gally couldn’t trap a bag of cement – until he got into the 18-yard box. After that, his touch was incredible. And he was like greased lightning. He was so quick and so strong and powerful.”
Butler concurs. “Me and Mark didn’t socialise or anything like that,” he says. “And Stilly wasn’t really a coach then, so we weren’t doing sessions. It wasn’t ‘If he goes there, you go there’ and drilling it for hours.
“What made the partnership so effective is that we could both do stuff that the other one couldn’t.
“I wasn’t blindingly quick. He was. But he needed someone to pick him out, and that was my game, really.
“I made loads of goals for him that year. I would help it on or find an area and Mark would get on it. People would say ‘That’s a great ball from Butler’ but, really, it was Mark who made it look good because of his pace. He got to everything.
Technique
“If the ball was a 50-50 chase, he would get there. People would try to play offside and he’d be streaking clear. It was like Ian Rush – once he got his legs going, he was gone. “And he could finish with both feet. Pure power. I’d dink them and bend them, pick a spot. He’d just blast it with tremendous power off either foot, a bit like Alan Shearer. And he was brave, very good in the air for someone who wasn’t tall.” Williams adds: “Butler had been trained professionally and you could tell. But I don’t think Gall ever got enough credit for his technique. Every strike was clean. He could clip, he could volley.
“I remember saying to him ‘Where did you learn that from?
It’s like watching Pele’. But nobody taught him. He’d just played men’s football from the age of 12.”
Gall would later sign for Brighton, where he won the club’s Player of the Year award in his one and only season before a serious knee injury ended his career – aged just 29 – in the summer of 1992.
Butler, too, forged a successful career in the Football League. After a misfire at Watford, he spent his thirties at Cambridge United and Gillingham, scoring 80 goals in 254 games – the last of which was an extra-time equaliser at Wembley in the Gills’ playoff final victory over Wigan in 2000.
Yet those seasons with Gall at Maidstone are fondly remembered as his peak years, when goals and assists flowed like rain.
“Peter Beardsley was never a high scorer, but everybody he played with was,” says Butler. “I always thought of myself like that.
“At Maidstone, I did both. Not only did I make a lot of goals, I also took a lot of my chances. As you get older you can’t do that. But everyone has a two or three-year period where they can and that was mine. It was a brilliant time, and a brilliant marriage.”