Conker Editions

Tag: West Bromwich Albion

How good was Laurie Cunningham?

One of the greatest joys of writing Football’s Black Pioneers was that it gave us an excuse to watch old You Tube videos of Laurie Cunningham in his prime. In truth, no excuse should ever be needed. As his manager at the time said, ‘if he ran on snow he would leave no footprints.’

Dave Bowler, co-author of Samba in the Smethwick End (a great book if you can get hold of a copy) has produced a tribute to Laurie to coincide with what would have been his 70th birthday on 8th March. It gives us great pleasure to share it with you:

https://www.wba.co.uk/news/laurie-cunningham-remembering-albion-legend-70

Check him out for yourself on You Tube, there are plenty of short videos to choose from, this is just one of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG0P3ZA5RwI

Oh, and how good was Laurie Cunningham? B****y brilliant!

 

 

Football’s Black Pioneers on the Adrian Goldberg talk show

It was a pleasure to chat to Adrian Goldberg about ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’. He was enthusiastic about the book which he described as ‘a simple but brilliant concept’ and ‘a really great book’. There are a couple of slips of the tongue on my part, I should clarify that Arthur Wharton was the first professional black player, Willie Clarke was the first black player to score in the English Football League and Charlie Williams was the only black man in his village not in the whole of Yorkshire!

Brighton Rock – The podcast

Bill Hern certainly gets around, this week he was ‘in’ Brighton – not literally of course, Bill is a law abiding citizen! He spoke to Russell Guiver and David Townsend who run the Brighton Rock blog. Funnily enough Russell and David are Brighton fans. Brighton Rock has been described as “Probably the best podcast you will hear concerning Brighton fc. Very insightful, hosted by a presenter who is passionate about our club.”

It didn’t take long for the conversation to get round to a discussion of Brighton’s first black player and it soon became evident that Dave Busby (for it was he) had slipped under the radar of both Russell and David. This is precisely why we felt it was important to write ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’ now before the contributions of players like Dave are completely lost to history.

You can listen to their wide-ranging discussion here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/footballs-black-pioneers-with-guest-bill-hern/id1504890714?i=1000499448132