Some fun snippets taken from the Gillette Book of Cricket and Football (ed. Gordon Ross 1963):
Middlesborough were beaten 9-0 by Blackburn Rovers on November 6th, 1954, and kept the same team the following week.
Six players who figured in the same position with Football League clubs in London have represented England in Test match cricket – Patsy Hendren (Brentford), Leslie Ames (Clapton Orient), John Arnold (Fulham), Laurie Fishlock (Millwall), Bill Edrich (Tottenham Hotspur), and Denis Compton (Arsenal). All of them played at outside-left.
John Hewie, Charlton Athletic, had never been to Scotland before he played for Scotland against England at Hampden Park on April 14th, 1956. Hewie was born in South Africa and his father in Scotland.
Wilfred Minter, playing for St Albans City against Dulwich Hamlet in 1922 scored seven goals. His team lost 7-8.
Which last reminds me at one remove of the ten greatest sporting come-backs of all time.
Charlton
5-1 down with half an hour to go, having played most of the match with 10 men, they won 7-6. Second Division, The Valley, 21 December 1957
Huddersfield manager Bill Shankly watched in horror as Charlton’s hero of the hour – dashing left-winger Johnny Summers (pictured) – engineered the most remarkable comeback in football history, scoring five and just for good measure setting-up the other two. From being four down, Summers’s goals – including a six-minute hat-trick – gave Charlton a 6-5 lead with two minutes left. Huddersfield promptly equalised, only for Summers to lay on the winner for John Ryan, who scored with the final kick of the game. ‘Amazing, incredible, fantastic…’ as one reporter put it at the time. Summers later revealed that he changed his boots at half-time after his old pair had started falling apart.