Charlie Hurley, the greatest player Sunderland ever had, died on Monday. He was tough, powerful and composed, captain of Alan Brown’s promotion side of 1963-64, which may have been the best of all postwar Sunderland teams. Certainly it was the side my dad talked about the most, far more than the FA Cup-winning team of nine years later. Montgomery, Irwin, Ashurst, Harvey, Hurley, McNab, Usher, Herd, Sharkey, Crossan, Mulhall: names that flitted through my childhood as legends of a greater age. Imagine if Brian Clough hadn’t done his knee.
George Mulhall, the Scottish outside-left, was his favourite, I think, but only because there was no point celebrating Hurley; everybody did that. Decades later, fans still sung Hurley’s name and bought No 5 shirts with his name on the back. His popularity at this remove is hard to explain. Other than promotion, Hurley won nothing. He wasn’t even local: born in Cork, he moved to Millwall at an early age and spoke with a pronounced London accent.
