• Football League champions: 1963, 1970.
• Division Two champions: 1959.
• FA Cup winners: 1966.
• FA Cup runners-up: 1968.

• Wasting the Golden Vision
• Selling Alan Ball
• Losing the 1968 Cup Final

Everton shirt cuffs are blue, only the collar is white.  The shorts are white, the socks are white.  There is no need for a badge on the shirt, we are the team that plays in blue and white.  Everyone knows who we are.  We don't need to tell them.

As a player, he was one of Everton's pre-War professionals.  Unheralded, unsung and unassuming, but he was the ideal club man who gave yeoman service.  He signed professional for Everton from Cheadle Heath in 1937.  Everton were fortunate in having his services during the War years when he was a most prolific goal scorer.  Five feet nine inches and 11 st 8 lbs, he had the ideal build for an attack leader, his tenacity and tireless roving being contributing factors to his success.

Alex Young: What was he like to play for?  Hellish!  Before Harry Catterick even arrived at Everton the top sports writer for the Liverpool Echo at that time, Leslie Edwards, warned me to beware.  He said Harry Catterick was after my blood because he didn’t like the way that I played, and that was before I’d ever met the man!

It never changed all the time I was there.  It was a constant battle all the time I played for him. He couldn’t encourage me to play because if he said anything I didn’t believe him.  He had some good sides, but I don’t think he liked to go a great deal for flair players.  I think he preferred other types. (From Talking Blue by Becky Tallentire)

 

 

 

Headmaster of Blues stylish school of science 

Aug 12 2002

By Len Capeling, Daily Post

RIGHT at the close of a century which had seen him surrender the title of Everton's most successful manager, prime-time television played a dirty trick on Harry Catterick.

Casting around for an actor to play the Everton legend in a docudrama about the downfall of Tony Kay, the film's producers lost their marbles and gave the part to the portly, prattling actor-dramatist Colin Welland.

It was an insult, a travesty, M'Lud.

There was the elegant Harry, who prided himself on his measured words, his tidy figure, his well-groomed head, and his expensively-tailored mohair suits being grotesquely caricatured as some ranting, rotund Yorkshireman who sounded like a Barnsley barrow-boy and had the dress sense to shame even Kenneth Clarke.

Imagine what the Cat must have thought, peering down on this fearful scene from his lofty vantage point in the Blue Heaven promised to Goodison heroes.

He would have put a boot through his harp, hurled some colourful celestial cuss words - along with a passing thunderbolt - at one of the worst theatrical take-offs since Dick Van Dyke essayed his gorblimey Cockney in Mary Poppins.

Apparently no-one had told Colin Welland that any accent Harry may have possessed in his Darlington childhood had long been sanded away by an Alf Ramseystyle voice job before he landed back at Goodison Park in 1961.

Where Welland played Catterick as a flatulent chancer with a glutinous, Yorkshire pudding delivery, the Goodison boss in fact spoke in the measured tones of a frost-rimmed civil servant anxious to impress, particularly on the social scene.

Where Welland was gross and unbuttoned, Catterick was the very model of the reserved soccer scholar in an age when there were more rough edges on managers than spikes on a porcupine.

For that reason, Catterick was probably one of the least understood of 60s managers.

Stern as a Presbyterian preacher, a stickler for discipline and for players knowing their place - all their interviews came via Harry - he looked as if he had difficulty in smiling with his eyes.

My take on him was of a remote and solitary figure, lacking real warmth, though part of that perception may have stemmed from the great contrast in character between the two Merseyside managers of that era.

Set against the mega-mouthed, Messianic Bill Shankly, from whom the lava of life seemed to flow, the dissimilarity couldn't have been more marked.

Did the Everton fans care? Not a bit.

Not then, and not now. For when it came to the important business of winning trophies in the Beatles era, Catterick was in no way outshone by the glamorous Scot from across the Park.

In fact, the achievements of the two men in the years up to 1970 are surprisingly similar - both won two first division championships, and an FA Cup, and both held on to prominent positions in the league throughout the decade.

Some of the praise for Catterick has been grudging, possibly because he never sought favour with the Press. Never set out to be a man of the people.

On the contrary, he had a reputation for tetchiness that the equally peppery Shanks managed to keep hidden from public view.

But that dourness did mean that when it came to the oxygen of publicity, Shankly, superbly quotable, knew how to fuel it, while Harry played a publicity game later trademarked by Kenny Dalglish.

That probably led to Catterick's formidable record being undervalued, even to this day.

But from the moment ambitious chairman John Moores summoned him back from Hillsborough to the club he'd previously served as a rough-and-ready centreforward, Harry Catterick wrote himself into the record books as an outstanding manager.

Typical of Moores, the call for Catterick came after the Littlewoods multi-millionaire - always a winner - had written a taxi ride with Everton's previous boss, Johnny Carey, into the folklore of soccer sackings.

What Moores demanded - nothing less than the championship - Catterick delivered.

A mere 12 months after his appointment the Blues were on their way to their sixth title triumph, won by one of the purest footballing sides in Everton's distinguished history.

It came after the brutal winter of '63 when the league - pre-undersoil heating - hunkered down for six weeks, a pause used by the crafty Catterick to strengthen his hand with the signings of Tony Kay and Alex Scott - two vital elements in a terrific team that also included Roy Vernon, Alex Young, Jimmy Gabriel, Brian Labone, Alex Parker, Gordon West and Johnny Morrissey.

Three years later, with the influential Kay gone (to jail for his part match-fixing while with Sheffield Wednesday) and a new team still under construction, Everton won the FA Cup against the same Yorkshire side after one of the most memorable encounters in the competition's history (3-2 the final score - cue the galloping Derek Temple, cue an audacious managerial gamble on unknown striker Mike Trebilcock).

Already Catterick had in place one-third of Everton's greatest-ever midfield trinity.

The youthful Colin Harvey would be joined later that World Cup-winning year by the phenomenal Alan Ball, and, in March 1967, by Howard Kendall.

They helped drive Everton on, via a losing Cup final in 1968, to another championship triumph in 1970, and, with the new centreforward sensation Joe Royle knocking in the goals, Goodison smiled broadly.

Only to awaken shortly afterwards to the frightening sound of a season that plunged the new champs to 14th place in Division One.

Alan Ball departed in mysterious circumstances, injury finished the illustrious career of Mr Reliable, Brian Labone, and Harry Catterick lost his magic and his health with it.

Driving back from Sheffield in January 1972, he suffered a serious heart attack and a year later found himself shunted sideways and replaced by another ex-Everton player, the personable Billy Bingham.

In March 1985 - still Everton's most successful manager - Harry Catterick had another coronary, this time at Goodison Park during the game against Ipswich Town

Despite frantic attempts to revive him by paramedics and the Everton club doctor, Harry Catterick died at the ground where he'd helped restore lost pride and the will to win in style.

Ironically, his death came in the blossoming early days of the Howard Kendall era, an era which would see Harry eventually being overtaken as Everton's most successful manager by one of his most successful signings.

But Catterick is not devalued by that second spot in the hall of fame, far from it says Brian Labone who was Harry's skipper from 1964 onwards, and an England regular at centre-half. Labone also takes issue with some of the judgments on Catterick as being a bleak, unemotional, uncommunicative man.

"He could keep you at arm's length," Brian admitted, "but at the same time he was a good communicator with his players. He could let his hair down, too. He was a lover of fine wines and fine cigars.

"He was tough. He didn't hesitate to let you know if he thought you weren't playing well enough. But by the same token he would reward you by inviting you for a game of golf.

"He was a very good manager, a tremendous tactician, a great thinker about the game and like all ex-centre-forwards he wanted the foundations of his team to be down the middle - goalkeeper, centre-half, centre-forward. Look at his record in the 60s. I think Everton were only out of the top six once and that was the year we won the FA Cup in 1966. He was one of the first to have the charts in the dressing-room, with the magnetic counters.

"Obviously I liked him because he picked me all the time, but I always found him very straight in all my dealings with him as captain. I very rarely saw him blow his top in the dressing room. He'd perhaps pull an individual to one side, but he'd never belittle you in front of others. And that counts for a lot with players.

"He made Everton a very attractive side, full of goals, full of good players. I think that's his legacy as much as anything else. I think the flamboyance of Shankly made him appear less exciting.

"But on the other hand I think he enjoyed the image of himself as the thinking man's manager,

"We used to joke that he was the only manager with creases in his tracksuit trousers, but it was said in fun and we respected him for his ability, and Everton's centenary in the top division reminds us how much we all owe him."

No more needs to be said, except to invite Harry, wherever he is, to take a bow, to acknowledge the cheers of those of us lucky enough to have been around when the school of science held classes.

I wish I could assure him that an apology from Colin Welland is winging its way to Cloud Nine. I can't.

But I do still wonder who should have played Harry's game in his absence.