Dennis Westcott

Dennis Westcott
Personnel
Surname	Dennis Westcott
birthday	July 2, 1917
place of birth	Wallasey ,  England
date of death	July 13, 1960
Place of death	Stafford ,  England
position	striker
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1936	AFC New Brighton	18 0(10)
1936-1948	Wolverhampton Wanderers	128 (105)
1948-1950	Blackburn Rovers	63 0(37)
1950-1952	Manchester City	72 0(37)
1952-1953	Chesterfield FC	40 0(21)
1953-1956	Stafford Rangers
1 Only league games are given.

Dennis Westcott (born July 2, 1917 in Wallasey , † July 13, 1960 in Stafford ) was an English football player . The striker has scored the most championship goals for the Wolverhampton Wanderers in one season with his 38 goals in the 1946/47 season to date .

Athletic career

After an unsuccessful trial at Everton FC , Westcott, whose brother Ronnie had briefly played for Arsenal in the same 1935/36 season , joined the AFC New Brighton in December 1935 as an amateur in his home on Merseyside , which was then a third division still had a rather prominent name. In only 18 league appearances, he scored ten goals by the end of the season, making him the best league goal scorer in his team; in January 1936 he was promoted to professional.

In July 1936 Westcott moved for a transfer of £ 300 to Wolverhampton Wanderers , where he made his debut in the FA Cup against Grimsby Town on February 24, 1937 and scored his first goal in a 6-2 win. In his first full season in 1937/38 , the strong-shot attacker developed into a top scorer - both with 19 hits in the 26 league games and with a total of 22 goals in all competitions. His final breakthrough came in the subsequent 1938/39 season , when the new crowd favorite scored 43 goals in 43 competitive games, setting a club record that Steve Bull broke only 50 years later . In only seven of the last 26 games he was without a goal of his own and scored three times against both Brentford FC and Grimsby Town - he also shot his “favorite opponent” from Grimsby almost single-handedly out of the FA in a 5-0 win with four goals. Cup semifinals. Despite this sporting peak performance, he failed at the side of strike partner Dicky Dorsett , who also contributed 26 league goals, in 1938 with the runner-up and the 1: 4 final defeat in the FA Cup against Portsmouth FC just to win a title. Westcott had followed in the footsteps of Billy Hartill , the legendary storm leader of the Wolves of the late 1920s and early 1930s, from an early age. The outbreak of World War II and the associated almost seven-year interruption in the official game operations of the Football League ensured that Westcott only came to missions in the war leagues in the "prime of its time". There he indicated with 91 goals in 76 appearances - including three goals for the 6: 3 final success in the Wartime League Cup back and forth against Sunderland AFC in 1942 - his talent was still there, but the sporting importance of these "Wartime Games" were often classified as low. It was also used four times for an English selection between 1940 and 1943, but all of them were of an unofficial nature.

In the first post-war season 1946/47 he proved that Westcott had not forgotten anything of his scoring qualities . He scored 38 championship goals alongside his new strike partner Jesse Pye , which to this day represent the club's record for the most league goals within a season. He was also the first top scorer in the First Division after the Second World War. After another year, the now 31-year-old striker surprisingly left the "Wolves" in April 1948 for the second division, where he spent two years hunting for goals for the Blackburn Rovers . As in the case of the "Rovers", Westcott joined a fresh first division relegated in 1950 with his next engagement at Manchester City . With "City" he succeeded in direct promotion and so he completed one last year in the top English league in the post-war 1951/52 season . In the two Manchester years, Westcott was once again the top scorer of his team before he ended his career from 1952 at third division Chesterfield FC , for whom he scored four times in his league debut, and then until 1956 with the lower-class Stafford Rangers .

Shortly after retiring from active sport, Westcott died of leukemia at the age of 43 .

successes

• Top scorer in the English First Division: 1947

literature

• Matthews, Tony: Wolverhampton Wanderers - The Complete Record . Breedon Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-85983-632-3 , pp. 158-159 .

Web links

• Information on the homepage of Wolverhampton Wanderers (Engl.)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Garth Dykes: New Brighton in the Football League: A Complete Record and Who's Who 1923-1951 . SoccerData, Nottingham 2012, ISBN 978-1-905891-56-6 , pp. 110 f .