[Lord Snooty]

September 2:

Legendary football manager Bill Shankly was born in Glenbuck, East Ayrshire on this date in 1913.

He grew up in the small coal mining community, one of five brothers who all went on to be professional footballers. When he left school, he worked down the pit for two years before in 1932 he was taken on at Carlisle United. He had one season there before Preston North End signed him up.

Bill helped them win promotion to the First Division after a couple of years and then in 1938 achieved the pinnacle of his career when Preston won the FA Cup at Wembley, beating the mighty Huddersfield Town 1-0 (it was never a penalty!). A few weeks before this, also at Wembley, he made his Scottish international debut against England.

The war interrupted his playing career just at his prime and he joined the RAF. By the time hostilities had ended, he was 33 years old. He stayed on at Preston, becoming club captain, until 1949 when he took up coaching and then his first managerial role when he returned to Brunton Park to manage Carlisle.

After that, he had spells in charge of Grimsby and Workington before in 1955 he got the job coaching Huddersfield Town's reserves. That became first team coach and then manager when Andy Beattie resigned soon after. He stayed at Town until 1959, bringing through young players like Denis Law, Ray Wilson and Les Massie.

He was approached by the Liverpool chairman (then in Div 2) and asked how would he like to join the best club in the country, to which he replied: "Why, is Matt Busby packing in?" Of course he went there and became a football legend, let alone a Liverpool legend. He has his own dedicated gates at Anfield and became a media personality often coming out with some of the best quotes on Match of the Day.

At Liverpool he won them promotion from Division 2 and then three First Division titles, two FA Cups and the UEFA Cup. No trophies for Town, but he did win more games than we lost.

Whilst manager of Town, he lived in Oakes and here he is on the Cowrakes Road football pitch having a kick around with the local kids in a famous picture of the time.......

When Shanks shuffled off to Liverpool in 1959, after his Town team had just beaten them 1-0 at Leeds Road, the Town directors put ex player Eddie Boot in as caretaker manager. He had nine games in December and January in charge, winning four of them. That included a 6-1 win at home to Bristol City. But when his team went down to West Ham and hammered the bubble blowing cockneys 5-1 in an FA Cup replay, they really had no option but to offer him the job full time.

He did alright, but the club never looked like going up in the three and a half seasons in charge and Eddie was clearly showing signs of strain. On this date in 1964, after drawing the first three games of the season, Town played Plymouth Argyle at home. Town lost the game 2-1, but it is said that Eddie resigned at half time, walked out and never entered another football stadium for the rest of his life.

How much of that is true, I don't know. According to the book Where Are They Now, by Lee Morris, he and ex team mate John Battye started their own business North Star Tyre Remoulds.

Going back a bit, on this date in 1908, the brand new stadium at Leeds Road was officially opened with a friendly match against Bradford Park Avenue. I say stadium, it was nowt of the sort at this time, just an enclosure, but this was it's first Town game. We won the game 2-1, with Richard Morris scoring as well as an own goal. Ideal preparation for the first North Eastern League match in three days time.

That game didn't count as an official fixture. Another one that didn't was played on this date in 1939 when Town went down to Griffin Park to play Brentford in a First Division match. Eddie Boot played in this one, but it and the previous two games were expunged from the record books as the 1939/40 season was officially suspended. The day after this match, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave his famous speech declaring that this country was now at war with Germany.

So today's poser. Was Chamberlain right to declare war?