Bernard Williams (soccer player)

Bernard Williams (born August 25, 1908 in Dublin , † 2004 ) was an Irish - French football player .

Career

The 170 centimeter tall Williams played as a young adult for the English amateur club Dover Athletic before joining AS Valentigney in the early 1930s . Full-time he worked in a bicycle repair shop Group Peugeot , which already at that time with the FC Sochaux had a business association, the 1932 Division 1 as a national premier league and professional league co-founded. The Irishman , who lived in the storm, was allowed to move to the same club in the same year and was one of the founders of the league. At a time when substitutions and substitutions were not yet possible, he was used in the majority of games, even if he was not fixed. In the then usual five-man attack, he played on the wing positions in most cases. In spite of his full-time employment as a footballer, he had an additional job in the office, whereby such professions were seen as a way of effectively circumventing this limitation in view of the limitation of salaries by the association.

After he initially fitted into the Sochaux team, he was barely resorted to for several seasons in the mid-1930s. At the same time, the club went through a very successful phase that brought him to the top of the league in 1935 and thus made Williams part of the championship team. Two years later they made it to the national cup final in 1937 and the attacker was called up despite his relatively rare appearances in the final. He justified this by scoring the 2-1 winner in the 88th minute of the game against Racing Strasbourg . Also in 1937, the native Irishman, who had married a French woman the year before, was granted French citizenship. After several successful seasons for the team, in which he was rarely called up as a player, he came back to the cup more often and thus had a much larger share in winning the national championship again in 1938 than four years earlier. He also moved to defensive midfield and was able to assert himself in this position from 1938.

In 1939, the beginning of the Second World War marked the end of regular game operations on the one hand, and on the other hand, with the exception of Williams, all of his teammates of foreign origin left France. The then 31-year-old, however, decided to stay two years after his naturalization and volunteered for the French army. After a few months on the battlefield and the surrender of France, he returned unscathed to Sochaux and continued his career in the unofficially held war championships. When regular play was resumed in 1945, he was still part of the fixed first team, but had to accept relegation to the second division in 1946 and was completely ousted from the circle of regular players in the lower division. In 1947, at the age of 38, he ended his active career after 110 first division games with five goals, five second division games without a goal and other unofficial first division games during the war. He stayed with his family in Montbéliard near Sochaux and spent the rest of his life in France until he died in 2004 at the age of 96. Neither in Ireland nor in France had he got a call to the national team.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bernard Williams - Fiche de stats du joueur de football , pari-et-gagne.com
2. ↑ The Wild Geese , irishfootballersineurope.blogspot.de