Footballers and their Birds

I get confused picking up the papers these days, there was a time when I headed straight for the back pages but now you are just as likely to find plenty of sports stars hogging the main headlines. Unfortunately most of the stuff that goes on the front page tends to drag our game further into the myrrh. To be fair to a large number of professional footballers we rarely hear what they do when they leave the training ground. Mostly they spend their spare time doing nothing more controversial than surfing the World Wide Web or taking the dog for a walk. Perhaps in that respect times haven’t changed as much as we think. If you go back 50 years you’ll find the average professional was a home loving family man who spent most of his spare time playing with the kids.

A recent purchase from e-bay was the 1957-58 Charles Buchan Football Annual and within its pages we see Aston Villa’s Stan Lynn posing proudly behind son Eric and daughter Janet in a scene straight out of The Walton’s. Granted further down the page there is a rather unnerving picture of Bill Ponton and Jimmy Scoular of Newcastle sharing a bath but I’m sure that’s a story for another day. Both are part of a series called "Far From The Roaring Crowd" in which stars of the day are pictured at home. Not all of them though were quiet family men for some it appears that was a little too reckless. Fulham’s Ernie Lowe for instance is shown putting stamps into one of his many albums, evidently he had a collection of over 4,000 at the time. Now I once heard tell of Southampton’s Matt Le Tissier being spotted playing Bingo but even that seems a bit radical for our Ernie.

He though I’m afraid only comes second in the strange hobby stakes because beneath him on Page 131 is pictured Doncaster’s Eddie McMorran. A tough tackling Irish international who had quite a reputation while playing for Leeds. I’m sure though not many who faced up to our Eddie knew his secret. When he left the training ground his hobbies were woodwork and breeding budgies! In fact the picture even shows him and his wife Muriel trying to teach one of their feathered friends to talk. Strangely Eddie wasn’t the only fifties footballer with a budgie fixation as on Page 142 we see Jimmy Dudley of West Bromwich Albion with Pip the budgie perching on his finger. Before you ask we will never know if it was one of Eddy’s!

There is amazingly another link between football and budgies in the shape of former Rangers manager Bill Struth who legend has it shared his office with a budgie that flew in through the window one day and decided to stay. Contract negotiations in his office must have been interesting as not only was his feathered friend present but also the managers collection of bones. Evidently he was so obsessed with all things medical he followed his players into the operating theatre to observe proceedings. Now compared to that having a budgie as your assistant seems totally normal!