These days transatlantic moves to the USA are the choice of many Premier League stars towards the end of their playing careers but a new book tells the story how Everton’s most-celebrated player Dixie Dean was lured across the Irish Sea in a sensational transfer. The likes of Tim Cahill, Wayne Rooney and current Blues boss Frank Lampard all went down the Major League Soccer route before hanging up their boots and while such switches are now commonplace in our global society, upping sticks to what was perceived as one of football’s backwaters seemed a curious choice for Dean over 80 years ago.
Paul Little sheds light on this curious tale though as he explores Dean’s time at Sligo Rovers in Pitch Publishing’s new release In the Shadow of Benbulben. The title comes from the large flat-topped rock, part of the Dartry Mountains, which dominates the landscape around the seaport on Connacht’s wild Atlantic coastline where Everton’s record goalscorer briefly went to play in 1939.
Sligo Rovers of course would later provide the Blues with Seamus Coleman, now captain of both club and country, with David Moyes snapping up the Killybegs-born right-back for that famous bargain “Sixty grand” fee, immortalised in the Goodison Park terrace chant, in 2009 but some seven decades earlier it was the promise of a bumper pay day that persuaded Dean to make his switch to the Emerald Isle. Affectionately known by their supporters as the ‘Bit O’Red’, Sligo’s team had only been formed in 1928 – the year of Dean’s record-breaking 60-goal season (nobody had subsequently got closer than 11 goals of this total in English top flight football) but at the time they were an ambitious outfit eager to acquire a big name from England to spearhead their attack.
