Return of the prince of sharpness

The Len Shackleton interview: Football's original joker gives verdict on Gazza's gamble as both write a new chapter

Paul Gascoigne was out in Tuscany, sweating off the pounds and earning his first week's £20,000 wage-packet as an Everton player. Back on home soil, Len Shackleton was in fine form. "Just a second," he said. And before settling into his armchair in his flat overlooking Morecambe Bay at Grange-over-Sands, the smirking septuagenarian jabbed his right index finger into the midriff of a toy clown belonging to one of his grandchildren. The doll convulsed in a battery-driven laughing fit.

Paul Gascoigne was out in Tuscany, sweating off the pounds and earning his first week's £20,000 wage-packet as an Everton player. Back on home soil, Len Shackleton was in fine form. "Just a second," he said. And before settling into his armchair in his flat overlooking Morecambe Bay at Grange-over-Sands, the smirking septuagenarian jabbed his right index finger into the midriff of a toy clown belonging to one of his grandchildren. The doll convulsed in a battery-driven laughing fit.

Gascoigne has become known as the clown prince of soccer but Shackleton was the original. Indeed, it was the title of his autobiography, which rolled off the presses in 1955 with its legendary "Chapter Nine: The average director's knowledge of football". At the foot of a blank page a "Publisher's Note" recorded: "This chapter has deliberately been left blank in accordance with the author's wishes."

"How did the idea come about?" Shackleton said, echoing the question in his broad Bradfordian tones. "David Jack, whose father played for Arsenal and Bolton after the First World War, ghosted the book for me and he used to travel up from London - he lived next door to Spike Milligan - when Sunderland were playing at home and we'd get through a chapter every other weekend. He came up one Friday and I said, 'Look, David, have a weekend off'. He said, 'What do you mean?' And I said, 'There you are', and threw him a blank sheet of paper.

"He said, 'What's that?' I said, 'That's Chapter Nine'. He said, 'How do you mean?' I said, 'Well, the average director's knowledge of football'. He thought that was hilarious. It was just a private joke on my part but he said, 'That's brilliant. We'll have to incorporate that.' And we did. It proved a very good talking point, which it still is. It was dead right then and it's dead right now, when you getNewcastle directors calling the Tyneside women dogs. How stupid can you be?"

Stupidity was one of the accusations levelled at Shackleton when The Clown Prince of Soccer hit the bookshops. He didn't just ridicule the men in the boardroom. He ridiculed the system that left himself and his fellow players shackled to a maximum £15-a-week contract. And he ridiculed the England selectors for their reluctance to play individualists, "like myself and Stanley Matthews, who might commit the unforgivable sin of beating an opponent by employing any skill we happen to possess as ball players".

"It caused a stir, all right," Shackleton said, chuckling at the memory. "It was a recognised footballer speaking his mind and that had never been done before. The books and articles players wrote back then weren't like they are now. It was all pat-on-the-back stuff.

"The point I was making was how ridiculous it was for the players at the time. I mean, when I was playing for Newcastle they'd get average gates of 56,000 and on a Saturday morning myself and Dougie Wright, the wing half-back, would be walking past St James' Park to get our groceries in town and at 10 o'clock people were already queueing up to get in. I said to Doug a few times, 'That's not right. Why the hell should therebe 56,000 in the ground and they're paying us a tenner?'

"Money didn't motivate me. It doesn't now. But that was totally wrong. It was the same with England. I played against Germany in 1954, just after they'd won the World Cup. There were 90,000 at Wembley and the FA gave me a ticket for a third-class sleeper back to Sunderland that night.

"Now the boot is on the other foot. The sky's the limit for players' wages. My wife says it's obscene. I don't think it is. It's commercial, that's what it is. Nobody pays anyone £20,000, £50,000 a week because they like them. They do it because they're producing. And they are producing in a commercial world."

So, as it happens, is Leonard Francis Shackleton - or "Shack" as he will always be fondly remembered in the North-east, where he spent the bulk of his playing career as an inspirationally unorthodox inside-forward, with Newcastle from 1946 to 1948 and then with Sunderland until 1957. Prompted by demand for his long-out-of-print book, which commands £200 on the second-hand market now, he has teamed up with one of his three sons, Roger, to pen Return of the Clown Prince, which will be available for cyberspace sale from Oct-ober (via www.lenshackleton.com).

"It'll be two books in one, really," Shackleton senior said. "We'll be reproducing the original and then getting into the modern-day issues. It was Roger's idea, because I get so many letters asking for The Clown Prince of Soccer. My ego's been satisfied a long time since, but I'm 78 now and it's nice to think that people still remember you. They say, 'Ah, Shack. My dad spoke about you. My grandad talked about you.' It's nice to be remembered, especially when they've forgotten about people who played five or six years ago."

Those who were fortunate enough to behold Shackleton's princely clowning will tell you he was simply unforgettable. "A player prompted by an imp of mischief," Bill Murray, his manager at Sunderland, described him. And tales of the Yorkshireman's impish antics are legion: such as the time he dribbled into the penalty area at Highbury and mockingly sat on the ball before shooting; the time he deliberately whacked the ball into a five-foot snowdrift on the cricket-field side of Bramall Lane with Newcastle leading 2-0 in an FA Cup tie; and the countless occasions he embarrassed his markers by playing one-twos with corner-flag posts.

"I don't mean to, but I keep coming back to money," Shackleton said. "We had a maximum wage then. It didn't matter if you played for Hartlepool or Arsenal. You could only get £15. What I got into my head was, 'If I can't get paid according to what I'm worth then I'm going to get something out of the game: i.e. enjoyment'. And I got that enjoyment by how I used to play.

"I'll give you one typical instance. We were playing Manchester City at Roker Park and I got the ball in the centre-circle and took it at a right- angle along the halfway line towards the touchline. None of the opposition tried to follow me because they didn't know what was going on. I stood on the touchline, put my foot on the ball, flicked my hair as if I was combing it, glanced at my wrist as if I was checking my watch.

"What I was doing was telling the fans, 'We're winning 2-1. It's the last five minutes of the game. If we've got the ball they're not going to score and we're going to win.' Now I had to make sure I got the ball to one of our men at the finish, because if I'd given it away and City had broken away and scored I would have been a right Charlie."

Invariably, it was the opposition who were left looking Charlie-like - much as George Allison, the secretary-manager of Arsenal, was made to after he called the 17-year-old Shackleton into his office and told him: 'Go back to Bradford and get a job. You'll never make the grade as a footballer.' Shackleton, in fact, got a job with London Paper Mills at Dartford before going back to Yorkshire and making the grade with Bradford Park Avenue. The next time he met Allison, in a hotel lift, he was heading to Hampden Park to make his debut for England.

Shackleton won only four more caps, prompting one journalist to ask an England selector why a man blessed with such talent he could flick a coin with his feet into the breast pocket of his jacket should be consistently overlooked. "Because we play at Wembley Stadium, not the London Palladium," came the famous reply.

Now, of course, the latter-day showman of English football is about to take his last chance on the big stage. "I'd be very much surprised if Paul Gascoigne turned it on at Everton," Len Shackleton said of the Geordie who is cast less than perfectly in his own clowning image. "You can't live the kind of life that he's lived and retain the necessary sharpness that separates the stars from the run-of-the-mill players: that quickness over five yards which gives you time to consider what to do with the ball. For me, that's what Gazza's lost. And once that sharpness goes, that's it. Nobody can be the same player."

At 78, though, English football's original clown prince has lost none of his sharpness. "I'm planninganother blank chapter in the new book," he revealed. "It's called, 'What the average football writer knows about the game'." Enough said.