Greatest Ever Toon Striker

Shearer's the only one I've seen play, so I voted for him. 206 goals speaks for itself

 

Shearer for me, on the total goals record Jackie Milburn made his debut during WWII in 1943 and scored 38 goals in what was the Wartime League as the regular football leagues were suspended, this lasted until 1946 and these goals are not included in the 200 he is classed as scoring.

 

Has to be Shearer. Still the Premier League's all time top goalscorer and over 200 goals for us

 

Shearer.

Although Adreas Anderson and Stephane Guivarch run him close.

 

Shearer does it on overall record. But my vote goes to Supermac. Not enough time played i guess. Left as well. But he was faster, stronger and better in the air. He also gave me some money in Roys 2 rooms for helping him win at Black jack. He gave me a couple of hands to play his money when he was playing the table himself. He lost and i won and saved him a canny bit. So he gave me a slack handful of dobbas. Amounted to 3 x my apprentice weekly wage at the time. 60 odd poond.

 

Why I like Shearer.

 

Andy Cole.

KK big mistake was to let him go to Man U and bring in Keith Gillespie.

 

It's impossible to lick your elbows unless you have short arms and a very long tongue.

 

Gillespie + £6m.

 

Voted for Wor Jackie, as I was stuck between him and Shearer and he had 3 or 4 votes, compared to the 50 odd who voted Shearer.

 

And who won silverware, not Gillespie.

SAF knew what he was doing taking Cole to Man U.

 

Hughie Gallacher, born in 1903 in Lanarkshire, was arguably the first footballer to become a start in the North-East. He arrived at St. James' Park from Airdrieonians in 1925 for the then staggering fee of £6500. By that stage, Gallachers reputation, both on and off the field, was well established. During Airdrie's Cup-winning season he had scored forty-six times;he had incensed his father, a staunch Orangeman, by supporting Celtic and mattying a catholic; he hit five goals for Scotland ina 7-3 win in Belfast and been shot at by a sniper next day for his pains. Wherever Gallacher went, people were assured of two things;brilliance and bother.
For Newcastle Gallacher scored 143 gaols in 174 matches, 39 of them during the '26-'27 Championship season. Photos show a flat-featured man with crinkly hair, his chin tucked in like a boxer's. Against Spurs we see him heading the ball goalwards, one foot firmly planted on the ground;his limbs swing one way,his body the other,giving the impression of a cartoon charachter making a swift exit.
An old man I met said: 'We used to play football every Sunday afternoon in a field up by Castleside. There'd sometimes be thirty lads per team we were that keen. And the best of them was this little retired miner, belonged to Leadgate. He could dribble with it, that lad. But by, if you took it off him you had to watch out. He was adirty little bugger. Quick footed and quick tempered. You know, like Hughie Gallacher.'
At the time I thought this was funny, that he should think that I knew what Gallacher was like. Then I later realised that the man himself couldn't have been more than five or six himself when wee Hughie left Newcastle. He had no more first hand experience of him than I had. But Hughie Gallacher was that sort of player;so memorable taht even those who had never seen him play could recall him vividly.
For three more seasons Gallacher's presence kept St. James' Park packed to the rafters, but despite his goals the Championship win was not repeated and increasingly wee Hughie's behaviour was becoming a problem. In 1927 he was suspended for two months without pay for shoving referee Bert Fogg into the bath after a match at Huddersfield. In 1929 he was called before an FA investigating committee having been sent off for Newcastle for being 'drunk and disorderly'. In the pubs and clubs of Tyneside, dressed up like James Cagney, he swanked and scrapped, swaggered and staggered and squandered his money. He started having pre-match drinking sessions with fans in bars around St. James' Park, often being pulled from a heaving saloon by colleagues moments before kick off. It is one of the enduring traditions of football that any story involving a wayward genius carried legless from a bar must end with him being decanted onto the pitch a short time afterwards and the words, 'And you know what? He played a blinder.' So it is with Hughie Gallacher. And maybe it's true, too. But the certainty was even if he could do it once, tice, twenty times, he couldn't go on that way idefinitely. Gallachers drinking meant that he was playing on borrowed time and by 1930 Andy Cunningham, the then Newcastle Manager, had decided his time was up.
After spells at Stamford Bridge, Derby County and Grimsby Town he'd returned to the North-East to play out the remainder of his days at Gateshead in the Third Division (North). His skills still remained impressive. A man I'd met who played against him in a works football match during the war recalled him 'leaping six feet - well, five feet, anyway, into the air and twisting like a crokscrew to get his header on goal.', but by now his life was in an accelerating state of collapse. An acromonious divorce from his first wife was followed by bankruptcy. His second wife died of a heart attack. As his playing career ended, the drinking and the violence escalated. In May 1957 Gallacher's son was taken into care by the NSPCC and he was ordered to appear before Gateshead Magistrates court on charges of alledged child abuse. The day before he was due in court, Hughie Gallacher stumbled down a railway embankment close to his home, placed his head on the track and waited for the Edinburgh train.

 

ON A bright morning in June 1957, two young trainspotters saw a small man standing on a footbridge over the main railtrack at Gateshead. For half an hour they watched him as he paced backwards and forwards. He seemed agitated and confused, openly weeping, and occasionally pounding the bridge-rail with his fists. At exactly 12.08 he looked up suddenly as he heard the whistle and roar of a northbound express train. Moving quickly now,he stepped down from the bridge, jumped over a low fence and began to clamber up the embankment. He paused briefly near the young trainspotters, smiled almost in embarrassment, and said only one word - "sorry" - before walking without hesitation on to the line and into the path of the oncoming train. His decapitated body was found 100 yards down the line, at a spot known locally as Dead Man's Crossing.

Neither of the two boys who witnessed this brutal moment had ever met the stranger. But in those brief seconds of their passing on the embankment they recognised his face instantly.

Hughie Gallacher was 54 when he died. He had not kicked a ball in competition for nearly two decades, and he was not even a native of Tyneside. He had been born and raised in Scotland. Yet his deathparalysed an entire region.Crowds packed into the city for his funeral,as if they were saying farewell to a friend. Even those too young to have seen him play knew all about the fame and glory of Hughie Gallacher. Their dads had told them all about the man they called the King of Tyneside, the deadliest centre forward of them all, one of the most prolific goalscorers of the century.

The stretch of track on which Gallacher died is still there, at Down Bell Vue Bank on the Gateshead side of the Tyne.So is the bridge where he took his decision to die. And from the high ground of Gateshead, you can look across the great river and its Bridges and see a sight that symbolises the power and majesty created by an old and simple game: the great cathedral of St James's Park, home of Newcastle United.

Gallacher arrived 1925, already a cocky little 20-year-old eager to take on the best of English football. He'd been down the pit at the age of 15, and he was as handy with his fists as he was with his feet. For 3 years, from the age of 17, he had been the best-known player north of the border, the leading goal scorer in the land and already a full international. It was inevitable that one of the big English clubs would sign him, and it was Newcastle who paid the then huge sum of £6500.

He was a natural athlete and a player of tremendous speed,guile and instinct, with the kind of physical ruthlessness that often made him dangerous to the health of his opponents. Even as a teenager, his goal-scoring record was incredible. At his first club, Queen of the South, he had banged in 19 goals in 9 games. And in the Scottish First Division, with Airdrie, he scored 100 goals, often in multiples of three, four and five a game.

There was never anything shy or modest about Gallacher. From the moment he walked into the Newcastle dressing room, he was a dominant figure. Men 10 years his senior and a foot taller than him were made fully aware that they were privileged to be playing in the same team. There was nothing of the sporting gentleman about him, either. On the field he was known for his full-blooded tackling, and he had developed every sneaky trick in the book, regularly fooling goalkeepers by imitating the voice of one of their team-mates and scoring when they let the ball go through. One of his other favourite tricks was to stand "accidentally" on the foot of the 'keeper at corner kicks.Yet strangely, these goalkeepers always talked fondly of him. "He was the greatest centre forward I ever saw," said the legendary Frank Swift. "But he had more tricks than a bucketful of monkeys."

Goals were everything to Gallacher. If he failed to score in any game he was inconsolable, even when his team won. Even in the modern era - where far more games, both league and international, are played - there are few players, if any, who could match his record as a goal scorer. In a career spanning more than 20 years he played in a total of 624 league, cup and international matches, scoring a total of 463 goals. This goals-per-game ratio has never been equalled, and he is the only player who ever scored five goals in one match for Scotland.

After one season with Newcastle he was made captain, and led the team to the championship in the 1926-27 season. He could do no wrong in that golden year, rattling in 39 goals in 41 games, a club record. And off the field he enjoyed his fame on a nightly basis, drinking and carousing in the city's numerous pubs and clubs.

He often drank heavily and throughout his life smoked up to 40 Woodbine cigarettes a day - but he was never a problem drinker. Every morning he was first on the pitch for training, and right up to the end of his playing career, at 36, he could cover 50 yards faster than most athletes.

He was brave, too. From the very first match he played in England he was a marked man, hacked and elbowed and gouged by defenders acting on instructions to stop him scoring at all costs. One team-mate described how Hughie would sit in the dressing room, sucking on his half-time Woodbine, with pieces of flesh hanging from his legs and his socks and boots soaked in blood. He sometimes wept with pain, but he couldn't wait for the second half to start. He wanted both goals and revenge.

England was providing everything he wanted, in the way of money, fame and girls. Newcastle in the Twenties became a playground for the young superstar. He loved expensive, double-breasted suits and matching waistcoats, and began to wear what became his trademark accessories - white spats and a snazzy bowler hat. Photographs of Gallacher and his cronies out on the town circa 1925 were more reminiscent of Al Capone and his hoodlums than of young athletes in hard training.

He loved the pubs and clubs of the city. And he spent his money as fast as he earned it. In his entire career he was never paid more than pounds 10 a week, including pounds 1 bonuses for wins, even though crowds of 70,000 and 80,000 were turning out to see him every Saturday. Indeed, in 20 years at the top, Gallacher never earned more than pounds 500 a year, making a total of just pounds 10,000 - about a fifth of what some present day strikers earn in a week.

At the age of 32 he was still playing for Scotland. But after spells at Chelsea dn Derby County he missed living on Tyneside, and finally, in 1938, Gateshead FC, a modest team languishing in the bottom division, paid pounds 500 for him. If ever any sportsman had earned his honours and his retirement, it was Hughie Gallacher. Right to the end he gave full value. Crowds at the Gateshead ground soared to 20,000 a week; in his final season, 1939-40, he scored 18 goals in just 31 games. So why then did he chose to take his life in 1957?

All that is known is that in May of that year officers of the local branch of the NSPCC made a complaint to the local authority that the youngest of Gallacher's three sons, Matthew, aged 14, had been injured following an incident at the house. And that is what the papers seemed to suggest. But there is another account of the affair, and if it is true then history and fate dealt a very unfair and savage final blow to Hughie Gallacher.

It states that Hughie adored his kids and he never laid a hand on any of them. The real reason for the tragedy was the death of his wife some years earlier, which shattered Hughie. Over the following years he became a very depressed and lonely man, but according to his sons he did the very best he could in looking after them. He hadn't saved any money, but he was willing to go out and earn a living to keep his family together. He did a variety of jobs just to keep the family together. And by all accounts it was a happy home. What happened was so sudden and and trivial that it should have stayed a domestic affair, but somehow the details got out and the authorities acted out of all proportion. Then the newspapers blew it all up, implying there had been drunkenness and persistent abuse in the house. People who knew him were convinced that it was all nonsense. But the shame contained in the accusation of child abuse and neglect was too much for him. For a man as depressed as he was, and who was so proud of his achievements, the hints and the innuendoes were more than he could bear. In reality, Matti had been misbehaving and had been told off by his father several times. When he persisted his father lifted an ashtray, a small plastic dish and threw it across the room in exasperation. It struck the boy on the temple and he ran from the house. There was no injury, not even a cut.

The next day, when police and social workers called to take the boy away,Gallacher realised he was about to be charged with an offence that could mean losing custody of his children. For several weeks, according to his friends, the shattered man spent hours wandering the streets. Players and officials from Newcastle came to see him, offering their support and assuring him that nobody would believe he had done such a thing intentionally. But for a man like Gallacher,the looming court appearance and the fact that he could not see his son was driving him closer to the edge.

"It's no good fighting this thing now," said Hughie. "They've got me on this one. My life is finished." Finally, he headed up the hill towards the railway track and up on to the little bridge. From there it would have been possible to look across the river and see the huge ramparts of the old St James's Park stadium, the place where had given and received so much all those years ago. But it was a weekday, and the stadium would have been silent. And anyway, for Hughie Gallacher the sounds of glory were long gone, and all he could hear was the sound of an oncoming train.

 

Extremely sad story^