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.
Dean had by this stage moved from Everton to Notts County and was only just coming back from injury, had initially been contacted by Sligo, with a request to find them a centre-forward but when he was unable to identify any suitable targets, he came back to them offering his own services. Ireland had achieved full independence from the United Kingdom two years earlier and Dean recalled: “I asked one or two players and the first thing they said to me was: ‘Isn’t it a bit dangerous out there with all this IRA lark going on?’
Dean’s reference alludes to what Little describes as “a sabotage and bombing campaign being waged by the Irish Republican Army across 1938 and into 1939 aimed at customs outposts along the partitioned island and that also stretched to targets in mainland Britain” and he acknowledges “tensions were high, and so it was hardly surprising that going to play in Ireland wasn’t an especially attractive proposition for some Englishmen at the time.” Nobody could ever accuse Dean of lacking bravery though and after he admitted that Sligo had come back and “offered me terms I could not possibly refuse”, the Goodison Park legend was on his way.
While Dean himself made no bones of the financial incentives that facilitated the audacious swoop, back in devoutly Catholic Ireland, local newspaper the Sligo Champion hinted at possible divine intervention, proclaiming: “Given the enormity of what they had pulled off, the club’s committee members would have been forgiven for wondering if some greater power was at work. And as it happens, they may well have been right!” It turns out that Sligo-based clergyman the Right Reverend Monsignor Pat Collins claimed to have initiated the club’s contact with Dean having got to know him during his Everton playing days when he was working in Liverpool.
However the deal had come about though, the Sligo public were whipped up into a frenzy over the prospect of Dean’s arrival, confirmed in a six-word telegram he sent, stating: “Offer accepted. Will be there Friday.” However, Little explains how the legendary centre-forward kept an enthusiastic 2,000-strong welcome committee including the club’s committee and the town’s mayor waiting and sweating when he failed to arrive on time.
He writes: “The train duly arrives, steaming slowly into the station as if deliberately building the excitement and the tension. And there is a swell of excitement as the passengers alight. Eyes strain, necks crane. The welcome is ready. But Dixie Dean does not come.
“William Ralph Dixie Dean is not on the morning train from Dublin. And one can only imagine the disappointment, the shock, as the train empties and the platform clears and the biggest star ever to come to Sligo doesn’t in fact come to Sligo.
“Imagine how the club officials must have felt? Hearts in mouths. Had it been a ruse? Had they been set up? Were they going to look like fools? And the fans and the people?
“Ah, sure it never could happen. What on earth would football’s greatest centre-forward be doing coming here? Had everyone lost their heads?
“Perhaps the report in the Irish Independent the previous Tuesday, stating that Dean had only agreed to help find players for the club and that he had ‘definitely declined to make a personal appearance’, was true after all?
“But then a phone call from Dublin, an update and an apology. And relief all round. Dixie Dean said he was coming, and Dixie Dean is coming – but on the later train. He’ll be there at 6.40pm.
“Sincere apologies for the misunderstanding. The former Everton man had taken the opportunity while in Dublin to visit an old friend – Dean was renowned for his loyalty to friends – the former coach of Bohemians FC and former Evertonian, Billy Lacey.”
In the end, Dean’s time at Sligo lasted just four months but Little covers it in detail and having been on the brink of hanging up his boots at Notts County prior to his switch, the then 32-year-old’s time in Ireland, where he netted 11 goals in as many appearances, including in the FAI Cup final against Shelbourne (they’d draw 1-1 before losing the replay 1-0) seemed to restore his appetite for the game. He started the following season with Cheshire County League outfit Hurst FC (now Ashton United), who, like Sligo, were not constrained by the Football’s League maximum wage rule and were therefore able to make him one of the best-paid players in the country but a mere week after his debut, Britain declared war on Germany, competitive football closed for the duration and the final curtain came down on Dean’s illustrious career.
- In the Shadow of Benbulben: Dixie Dean at Sligo Rovers is available now from Pitch Publishing for £16:99. You can click here to order your copy.
