A safe pair of hands (From The Northern Echo)

A safe pair of hands

2:38pm Thursday 19th January 2012 in Backtrack

Jeff Wealands has played football all over the world and made a small fortune in business. Not bad for a Darlington lad without a single CSE.

YOU probably have to be getting on a bit, or to be a member of the goalkeepers’ union, to remember Jeff Wealands. Paul Merson couldn’t.

The two fell into conversation during a chance meeting at a swanky London restaurant. Wealands recognised the former Arsenal and England star immediately, Merson merely asked what the stranger did for a living.

“Same as you, I was a professional footballer,” said Jeff, and offered a brief CV. He might still have been communicating in Merse code.

“I’ll tell my dad, though,” said the younger man, politely. “He’ll be delighted that I’ve met you.”

Jeff, now 60, happily tells the tale against himself, casually wishes that he were 25 years younger – “I might have been a bit more dedicated” – is well worth the acquaintance, nonetheless.

He was a kid from a council estate in Darlington, made almost 400 Football League appearances – including two spells with Manchester United – and played Conference football until almost 41.

As a power-game entrepreneur he was even more successful, retired at 55, owns a smart house in the affluent part of Cheshire, a holiday home in Florida and admits to being “financially secure”.

Since his playing career ended, however, he has seen just two football matches, neither of them involving his home town team.

“I could get a ticket for every Man United home game, but I’d rather they went to a fan. I’ve been in corporate hospitality a couple of games, but you watch through glass, like a 96in telly, and then it took us an hour-and-a-quarter to get out of the car park. It’s like football has been homogenised – that’s the word isn’t it? – and it isn’t for me.

“It’s sad and worrying what’s happening at Darlington. I look out for their results, as I do of all the teams I’ve played for, but I don’t know how teams survive full-time at that level.”

His name had appeared, in passing, in the Barrow v Darlington programme a few days earlier. Whatever happened to Jeff Wealands? Over lunch in a pub near his home, we spent three agreeable hours finding out.

The old goalie, in short, still keeps very well. It is necessary, however, to retreat to a safe distance before venturing the name of Ron Saunders.

HE is probably a few pounds heavier, the familiar blonde hair now mousier, the reading glasses on a lanyard round his neck.

He sticks to coffee during the day, but nips out for the occasional fag.

Though affable and articulate, though there has been a month in Florida, he winters disagreeably. For one thing, there’s not enough golf.

“I’m one of those people who has to be doing something, otherwise I can lie in bed until after nine o’clock just flicking the channels. I always wanted to retire at 55, but I suppose I get a bit bored.

“When I’m 78 I’ll probably pop up working at B&Q. ‘Hello, my name’s Jeffrey, how may I help’?”

Basically, he insists, he’s a simple soul. “I’m phlegmatic. I just take what comes and make the best of it.

I’m no great plotter, no Machiavelli.

I just get on with life.”

And Ron Saunders? “How long have you got?”

HIS parents had been among the first residents on the postwar Skerne Park housing estate in Darlington – “good, hard working families, all of them.”

His mum, still in the town, will be 85 next week; his dad, Fred, was a familiar contributor to Hear All Sides.

“Crafty old bugger put my name on a letter once,” he recalls, with the utmost affection.

His dad also took him to watch Darlington – the Quakers, he remembers, of Jimmy Lawton and George McGeachie, of the formidable Ray Yeoman and the indestructible Ron Greener.

When he was 13 they moved to South Terrace, right next to Feethams. “It was perfect for us. My dad used to walk the dog so often round there that I think George Reynolds gave him a free season ticket.”

The youngster went to Beaumont Street primary and Eastbourne comp, failed to get any CSEs – “I think I got fed up” – got an engineering apprenticeship at Cleveland Bridge because his uncle worked there.

He’d fancied himself as in inside forward, supposes that all goalkeepers do, did OK up front but was pushed back between the primary school sticks because the replacement goalie couldn’t catch crabs.

He’d played for Star Juniors and for the Cleveland Bridge second team – “mainly just young apprentices like me” – helped them surprisingly reach the league cup final against Darlington RA, cocks of the local walk. “It was like Hartlepool playing Liverpool at Wembley,” he recalls.

They drew 2-2, lost the replay 2-1, the games watched by Wolves scout Joe Mycroft – “lived Gainford way” – who invited the 15-year-old for a trial.

There’s a cutting about it. “Jeffrey has the world at his feet,” it says.

He spent a year as a part-time junior, signed professionally at 17, got on well with manager Ronnie Allen – “He took a shine to me, I think because he could tell me all his stories” – but saw first team hopes disappear with a complex collar bone fracture.

“I still have the lump where they fused the bone together.”

He returned to Darlington, whence he had come, a year as reserve to the long-serving Tony Moor and then 28 Football League appearances in the first team. “It was nice to play for my home club, but Wolves were the old first division,” he says.

“In some ways it was obviously a step back, but I just had to buckle down.”

THE manager was Len Richley, the trainer the ever-present Dickie Deacon – “lovely old bloke” – the chairman George Tait, a Newcastle carpet dealer. It was Tait who desperately rang Jeff at his home, in 1972, ten minutes after he’d got back from signing for second division Hull City, managed by Terry Neill.

“To be honest, I hadn’t even known where Hull was,” he admits.

“I knew it was a fishing port but thought it was maybe something like Whitby.”

Leeds United had offered twice as much, said Tait, and swore roundly.

The carpet dealer had failed to make his pile.

In seven seasons, Wealands made 240 League appearances for Hull.

“My dad would only come two or three times a season. Hull’s trouble was that it was south of the Tees; he was very much Mr Darlington, my dad.”

No one from City told him that they’d turned down a £150,000 offer from Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty – “footballers were just pieces of meat in those days, it was ages afterwards that I learned that from a reporter” – though his Old Trafford opportunity was to come.

He joined newly relegated Birmingham City for £30,000 in July 1979.

In his first season he kept 16 clean sheets, was named player of the year, saw City return to the top flight.

When manager Jim Smith left, he was replaced by Saunders, the only man to manage all three Birmingham clubs.

Suffice, for Ron Saunders is still very much alive, that they didn’t get on. Jeff puts it more strongly. “I’d loved everything about Birmingham until then. Hate is a very strong word, I don’t like it, but I can say that Ron Saunders is the only man I’ve ever hated.”

Dropped down the ranks, he was playing third or fourth team football when an emergency compelled his first team recall. “I told the local press it was nice of him to remember that I was alive, that I’d thought I must have had bubonic plague or something. I turned up for the match and he immediately suspended me for two weeks.”

It tolled the end of his time at St Andrew’s. Manchester United, who’d already had him on loan as cover for Gary Bailey, took him permanently, though he’d only made seven appearances when a back injury ended his full-time career.

“My back was getting worse and worse. I can still see the specialist standing at the top of the stairs, like the harbinger of doom,” he says.

Both the insurance and the club proved generous.

He made 200 appearances for Altrincham, had a spell with Barrow – where, happenstance, we came in – was in the Alty side which in 1986 when an FA Cup third round tie at Birmingham, the last non-league side to beat a top division team on its own ground.

The manager was still Ron Saunders.

“You could say,” reflects his nemesis, “that the man had got his comeuppance”.

HE also got a job in insurance – “they called me a life inspector” – became the top salesman in the Manchester office, hated every minute. “I think it was because I didn’t like working for other people,” he reflects. “I still had to make a living. I had a wife and two sons, a mad Irish setter and a nice house to upkeep.”

He joined a cousin in a successful property restoration and development business, still restores houses – “just a hobby now” – and when the energy industry was deregulated in 1994 set up a consultancy offering to explore the best options for corporate clients.

“I’d done a lot of research on it. At first there was just me in a little room in Manchester but by 2006 there were 40 employees in an 8,000sq ft office.” Still a safe pair of hands, that’s when he sold out; that’s where we came in.

“It was such a high intensity business that if I hadn’t got out when I did, I’d have died of a heart attack or of stress.”

It’s possible nonetheless to suppose a restlessness, to suspect that being a B&Q jumper at 78 might not altogether be a joke.

“I need to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, I don’t want to vegetate. I’m not ostentatious about what I’ve got but, yes, I’ve done well enough for someone who hadn’t a single CSE. I’ve played football all over the world, live in a nice house, play some nice golf courses, done well in business and I’m financially settled. I suppose it’s okay for a kid from a council estate in Darlington.”