The days when Sunderland were near enough invincible

So he did. Three times in four seasons in the early 1890s, Watson – officially secretary/manager – led the side he had recruited to the old first division title. “The team of all the talents,” said Football League founder William McGregor, and it stuck.

Born in Newcastle and formerly manager of Willington Quay and of Newcastle West End, Watson was a rotund and jovial figure known never to be short of a song. Particularly, he was fond of a number called A Farewell to Bricks and Mortar – something to do with Irish navvies being packed off to Botany Bay on a ship called the Ragamuffin – which never failed to bring the house down.

After six years at Sunderland he joined Liverpool as assistant secretary – for twice the money – and led the Anfield team to the championship in 1901 and 1906.

Liverpool’s official history, perhaps inevitably called You’ll Never Walk Alone, recalls that they won the 1901 league with a Monday night win at West Bromwich Albion, returning to Liverpool Central Station before midnight and greeted by a fife and drum band playing The Conquering Hero.

Most of the victorious party were carried shoulder high through the streets. “Only Tom Watson’s vast girth,” noted the Liverpool Echo, “prevented him from being picked up, too.”

The column had mentioned all this as far back as 1992, noting that Watson had happily combined secretarial and managerial duties at Sunderland. “They didn’t have all the hangers-on in those days,” the late Billy Simmons, then the club’s historian, had said.

It was also in the early 1890s that team skipper Hugh Wilson – his single-handed thrown-ins so prodigious that they are said to have led to the introduction of the “two hands” rule – became the first Sunderland player to be sent off, that the club ran a train trip to Aston Villa for 6/6d return and that they played the whole first half against Derby County before the referee turned up.

The official insisted upon restarting the game, Sunderland winning 8-0 after 135 minutes play.

Back in 1992, the Association of Football Statisticians had also produced a “league table” of Sunderland’s 17 managers, based on things like the average number of points and goals per game.

Tom Watson led by the length of Roker promenade, Billy Elliott second, and Alex Mackie, manager from 1895-1905, third.

Len Ashurst was bottom, behind Ian McColl, Alan Durban and the ineluctably remembered Lawrie McMenemy.

It’s just possible, of course, that in the intervening years others may have claimed the nadir.

BILLY Simmons, then 74, had been in a good mood that February morning back in 1992 – home at 2.30am from a midweek second division victory at Oxford under Malcolm Crosby’s management.

“We used my first rule of football to great effect,” he said.

So what was the first rule? “If in doubt, hoof it out,” said Billy. “If we’d always remembered that, we’d never have been relegated from the first division in the first place.”

LOOKING no more than a mite on the plump side – and most of that waistcoats – Tom Watson features in a marvellous painting sent by Peter Jeffries, in Durham.

Peter thinks that the picture, completed in 1891, may be the oldest football painting. A slightly later painting, showing the Team of All the Talents, used the same poses but changed some of the faces.

Watson is on the right of the back row. On the left of the three is Tom Porteous, the only Englishman in a side otherwise recruited entirely from north of the border and the first Sunderland player to be capped by England – a 4-1 win over Wales at Sunderland’s Newcastle Road ground. Porteous was never chosen again.

In the centre is Ned Doig, nicknamed the Prince of Goalkeepers, who made 456 league and cup appearances before Watson – who else? – lured him to Liverpool.

His signing had caused problems, however, since he’d played for Blackburn Rovers the season previously and Sunderland – Watson, presumably – hadn’t completed the necessary papers. Sunderland were fined £25 and became the first club in Football League history to be deducted two points.

That the red-and-white-striped Doig wears a cap isn’t just to differentiate him from the rest of the team, but because Doig was said to be particularly sensitive about his ever-growing bald spot.

Folk still pass on stories of the match in which the cap blew off and the custodian, wholly occupied with its retrieval, completely forgot about the ball.

All the Lads, the Sunderland players, history, has the good grace to suppose the anecdote apocryphal.

PETER Jeffries also owns a medal commemorating Sunderland’s Durham Challenge Cup win in 1884, reckoned by the National Football Museum to be the only one in existence and presented by the Mayor of Sunderland because, it’s said, Durham FA couldn’t afford a trophy. They bought one the following season for £15.

The final, against Darlington, was played at Birtley after the Quakers had protested about the choice of Sunderland as venue. They lost 2-0.

James Allan, who’d formed Sunderland as a teachers’ team five years earlier, was still in the side. Darlington included the latterly celebrated Arthur Wharton, who became England’s first black professional.

Back then, Sunderland played in navy blue – supposedly because the first ground was Blue House Farm – and might have barely outlived infancy had not a player auctioned his prize canary. It saved the club for all that was to come.

THE Backtrack column, 30 years old this month, appears to have mentioned The Team of all the Talents on just one other occasion.

That was in 2013 when it was listed, however posthumously, as one of Sunderland’s official soubriquets in Shaun Tyas’s Dictionary of Football Club Nicknames in Britain and Ireland.

Dr Tyas, who grew up in Guisborough but insisted upon being no relation to Middleton Tyas – which is near Scotch Corner – also listed Egham as the Sarnies (honest), Forest Green as the Lawnmowers and Blackpool as the Donkey Lashers.

Leeds were just plain Dirty.