James Lawton: Potters promotion stokes memories of Waddington's mastery of management

Tony Waddington, who was the manager of Stoke City for 17 years and has a crescent of new houses near the Britannia Ground named for him, would no doubt be delighted to know that the club he sweated over – most liberally when the Scotch flowed, as it invariably did, into the early hours of the post-match morning – is back in the top flight of English football after 23 years.

However, it must be said – without diminishing for a second the glory of the current manager Tony Pulis and his hard-working, hard-running troops – that long before the end of the excruciating tension of the goalless draw with Leicester City at the weekend Waddington would have been forced to reach out for at least a small nip of the consoling tincture.

The fact is that, had he made it to these days of result-oriented, ProZone, functional football, the legendary "Waddo" would almost certainly have resigned himself to the status of misplaced person.

He prided himself on 15 unbroken years in the competitive company of men like Matt Busby, Don Revie, Bill Shankly, Brian Clough, Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison, Bill Nicholson and Bertie Mee; on bringing back Stanley Matthews to play out his last days among his own people; and on a string of signings predicated on the belief that the last of the summer wine would almost certainly prove better value than that from the green grapes of spring.

The Matthews homecoming was, of course, a stroke of genius that would not have meant anything if the 46-year-old legend had not retained some of the last of his sublime ability to occasionally ransack a defence. He could no longer do it with the blinding 10-yard burst of speed that had, among the very highest class of wingers, made Tom Finney his only serious rival, but what he still had was a radar system which picked up the smallest chink of vulnerability – and the technical skill to thread a killing pass.

Waddington was smart enough and visionary enough to notice this.

He sought out and hoarded great old players as a book collector might rummage for the first editions of Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh in dusty corners of the Charing Cross Road.

They came in a stream ... Peter Dobing, skilled and vital from Manchester City; Dennis Viollet, so long the scoring matador of Old Trafford; Roy Vernon, the moody Welshman who in all modesty, boyo, insisted he was the equal to any goalscoring inside forward in the world; Jimmy McIlroy, a suave Irish craftsman of the first rank; George Eastham, a football revolutionary in the courts when he battled for freedom of contract and a master of the subtle touch on the field...

If a great player wasn't old, he might be disaffected, sniffing for new pastures, and that's how Waddington seized the world's greatest goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, from Leicester City for £52,000. And when his time was done, there was a successful move for the brilliant understudy who made Leicester go for the Banks money, Peter Shilton.

When civil war broke out at Stamford Bridge, the Stoke manager moved for the sometimes indolent Alan Hudson, reckoning, correctly, that he could, with respect and careful treatment, draw out the best of a brilliant talent.

In the end it took one hostile act of nature to end the days of wine and roses at the old Victoria Ground, a gale that ripped off the roof of the Butler Street Stand and required Waddington to sell off the cream of his team – Hudson, Jimmy Greenhoff, another thoroughbred brought to the Potteries in the afterglow of his best years, and the tough, excellent, home-grown left-back Micky Pejic.

Thus denuded, Stoke slid out of the top flight and Waddington, honourable and maybe a little weary of attempting to balance the books while making fantasy football, tendered his resignation.

His list of major trophies was not great – indeed, it consisted solely of the 1972 League Cup, snatched from the favourites, Chelsea, at Wembley after a titanic, four-match battle with West Ham United – but his legacy was huge. It was about the grace of genteel poverty, of living above your means for so long, and leaving reminders that you had passed a certain way, most notably two epic FA Cup semi-finals with Double-winning Arsenal, both settled in replays, and the ending of Leeds United's phenomenal 29-game unbeaten record – one that would only be surpassed by Arsenal a few years ago – in a 3-2 victory in which Dobing resurrected the sharpest of his game to score a hat-trick.

The other part of the Waddington inheritance, for those who survived it, was the valuable lesson that a football club was not only about wins and losses but also an interior life, a warmth that touched everyone, including all kinds of visitors. Of course, such an approach became extinct at least a decade or so ago, but it lives strongly in the memory of those who enjoyed it.

Matthew Engel, a journalist who eventually touched such peaks of his profession as the Washington bureau of the The Guardian and the editorship of Wisden, confessed that his one regret about giving up a brief interlude of freelance football reporting was that he never got to cover a Stoke City home game when Tony Waddington was in charge.

Some sports writers would question that ambition, especially the one who yesterday recalled the time he left the Victoria Ground at 3am and finished up with his car hanging over a Staffordshire river bank rather like the charabanc in The Italian Job.

Derek Hodgson, the No 1 football writer at the Express, which at the time sold more than three million copies a day, was so beguiled he joined Waddington as his assistant manager. It was a career convulsion that later led to Hodgson becoming cricket correspondent of The Independent. "Joining Tony probably wasn't the smartest move I made professionally, but at the time it seemed like one of the most attractive jobs in sport."

The chairman, Albert Henshall, was one of Waddington's most enthusiastic champions. He helped to drum up the money for the fantasy deals and celebrated them more ferociously than most. Known as King Lear for his crooked smile, Henshall led the club on a tour of West Africa. Over the breakfast table a football writer reported he had woken to the company of a large but not unfriendly green lizard with small red eyes. "Sure it wasn't the chairman?" he was asked.

On the eve of the Cup final, Stoke always bought champagne in the bar of their hotel in Russell Square. The toast – apart from the year they beat Chelsea in the League Cup – was almost invariably to success in the Staffordshire Senior Cup.

Today, the celebration, for entirely different but utterly legitimate reasons, is for another kind of success in another age of football, and there is no hardship in drinking to this one. Still, there should be no shame in remembering the days when Tony Waddington gave us the unforgettable taste of that old summer wine.

Keith, dean of writers, whistles up the spirit of Dixie

Before he is finished, John Keith, sports writer and confidant of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley, is a fair bet to have put the entire history of Merseyside football on to the boards.

Buoyed by the success of his Bill Shankly show, Keith staged the opening performance of the Dixie Dean Story at Crosby Civic Hall last night. With the help of actor Steve Hazlehurst, who hails from the same part of Birkenhead as the legendary Dixie, and played centre-forward for the same school team, Keith warmly celebrates the 80th anniversary of Dean's extraordinary record of 60 league goals for Everton (and 100 in all matches.)

If you missed last night's show, tickets are available at the theatre or on 07702 809751 for a matinée and evening performance today.

Matinée tickets are £7.50 and it is £10 in the evening – more than Dean's weekly wage, no doubt, but still remarkable value for anyone who is in search of football's old but still rather stunning values.

O'Sullivan's genius turns snooker into modern marvel

Not since Alex "Hurricane" Higgins turned The Crucible into a theatre of both the compelling and the absurd in the Seventies has anyone performed quite so stunningly on a snooker table as Ronnie O'Sullivan (right) in recent days at the World Championship.

On his bad ones, O'Sullivan is self-indulgent and fragile and, well, just plain wearisome. On the good days he reminds us of what any sportsman can do, whatever his battleground, just so long as he is blessed with something some choose to call genius.

O'Sullivan has this as surely as The Hurricane. He sets the green baize alight. He makes snooker seem so much more than the played-out residual of another sporting age.

Yes, this is the seal, it is a work of genius.

Interesting? Click here to explore further