Ronnie Allen

Ronnie Allen
Personnel
Surname	Ronald Allen
birthday	January 15, 1929
place of birth	Fenton ,  England
date of death	June 9, 2001
Place of death	Great Wyrley ,  England
position	striker
Juniors
Years	station
	Northwood Mission
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1944-1950	Port Vale	123 0(34)
1950-1961	West Bromwich Albion	415 (208)
1961-1965	Crystal Palace	100 0(34)
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1953-1954	England	5 00(2)
1954	England B	2 00(0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1965-1968	Wolverhampton Wanderers
1969-1971	Athletic Bilbao
1972-1973	Sporting Lisbon
1973	Walsall FC
1977	West Bromwich Albion
1977-1979	Saudi Arabia
1980	Panathinaikos Athens
1981-1982	West Bromwich Albion
1 Only league games are given.

Ronald "Ronnie" Allen (born January 15, 1929 in Fenton , † June 9, 2001 in Great Wyrley ) was an English football player and coach . Initially trained as a right winger, he made a name for himself as a center forward at West Bromwich Albion in the 1950s and is still the player with the second most goals for the club to this day. After his active career, he worked as a coach for this club as well as for local rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers and also worked in Spain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Greece.

Athletic career

Career as a football player

Although Allen played for the rugby team at his school in Hanley when he was a child and he only discovered football at the age of 13 in the Christian youth organization Boys' Brigade and with the Boy Scouts in Wellington, he made rapid progress as a late starter . Even when he was already active in organized club soccer, he was able to afford to pursue the oval play equipment at the same time, because a professional career as a soccer player was not planned - the career aspiration of the young Ronnie Allen was that of a chemist. At his first club, Northwood Mission, he was trained on the right as a winger . There he met Bill McGarry and Basil Hayward , who were later his teammates at Port Vale . With 57 goals for "Mission" he demonstrated his goal danger for the first time in the 1943/44 war season.

In December 1944, Port Vale secured the services of the young talent and hired everyone on an amateur basis. There he came at the age of 16 for the first time on April 2, 1945 in the 2-2 draw against the Welsh club AFC Wrexham in the Football League North for use. As a right winger, he prepared a goal and put in this "War Replacement League" in August 1945 in the 4-3 win against Norwich City his first own goal. For a "hand money" of ten pounds he signed his first professional contract on a part-time basis in March 1946 - a few months before the official resumption of play in the Football League . In the third-rate Third Division South , he completed his first competitive game in the regular Football League operation on September 7, 1946, but had to take a 1: 2 defeat. Due to his obligations for the National Service, the missions were limited to only 18 games in which he scored five goals. It was only in the subsequent 1947/48 season that he became the club's best scorer with thirteen goals. He showed himself to be versatile and held every possible attacking position, with the exception of that of the center forward, which he later exercised with great success. At the same time he played for a selection of the Royal Air Force , which he had joined in the spring of 1947 and served until June 1949.

For the club's record sales total of 20,000 pounds, Allen moved on March 2, 1950 from Port Vale to West Bromwich Albion , which had returned to the top English league the previous year. Just two days later he made his debut in the home game against bitter rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers and scored one goal to make a 1-1 draw - the duel at The Hawthorns Stadium is still the most popular game with 60,945 spectators this place. In the following years, the short and lightweight Allen fought for a regular place in the "Baggies". He celebrated his final breakthrough as one of the best national strikers in the 1951/52 season . Mainly responsible for this was a previous goal doldrums, which prompted coach Jack Smith to transfer Allen from the right wing to the center forward position, which he "rewarded" with 35 competitive goals (32 of them in the First Division alone ). At the end of the season, he also played his first international match on May 28, 1952, but remained without a goal in the 3-0 win against Switzerland .

It was worth mentioning Allen's modern interpretation of the central striker, with which he benefited from his technical skills at the latest from 1953 under the new coach Vic Buckingham and also compensated for his lack of physical robustness. He did not move into the front line of attack, but fell back in order to pull opposing defenders out of the network as a ball distributor - he was even ahead of the Hungarian international Nándor Hidegkuti , who finally perfected this role. After a good fourth place in the 1952/53 season - four years after the first division promotion - Allen won the runner-up with WBA a year later behind the "Wolves" and was in the final of the FA Cup against Preston after a semi-final goal against his old club Port Vale North end . With two goals he was instrumental in the 3-2 success and the club's first title win in 23 years. Although he had reached a sporting climax and almost two years after his debut in April and May 1954 against Scotland (4: 2) and Yugoslavia (0: 1) came to two more international matches, the selection committee decided not to nominate him for the World Cup. Tournament in Switzerland . Everyone was considered a "loner" and the center-forward position was still anchored by traditionalists in English football with the ideas of the athletic attack leader in the jersey of the number 9 instead of a strategically thinking and technically shod "hanging tip". And so it happened that after two last appearances for England, Allen left international football at the end of 1954 at the age of only 25.

Regardless of this, he made another positive development in club football and was at the end of the 1954/55 season with 27 goals the top scorer in the top English division. Without winning another title for the "Baggies", Allen remained a constant in the team for the next six years. In the season 1955/56 he was also the top scorer of his club with 17 goals before he was replaced in this role by the new "Goalgetter" Derek Kevan . He consolidated his status as a crowd favorite with a 1-1 goal on the last day of the 1958/59 season against rivals Aston Villa , which sent the opponent to the second-rate Second Division . After 234 goals in 458 competitive games, Allen left "WBA" in May 1961 for London to Crystal Palace . There he played for three years in the third division and a final fourth year in the second division, before he retired as a professional footballer after exactly 100 league games for “Palace”.

Coaching stations

Allen switched to coaching in March 1965 and initially assisted Andy Beattie as a co- trainer for Wolverhampton Wanderers . After Beattie's dismissal, Allen took over not only his head coaching position in September 1965, but also a difficult legacy with a place in the lower ranks of the second division. With the obligations of Mike Bailey and Derek Dougan , he led the team in the 1966/67 season for promotion to the first class. Once there, he and his team just managed to stay up in 1968, but after poor results at the beginning of the 1968/69 season - including a 6-0 home defeat against Liverpool FC - the club's management dismissed him in November 1968.

In March 1969 Allen moved to Spain and hired the Basque club Athletic Bilbao , who won the Spanish Cup under his direction in the same year with a 1-0 final victory over FC Elche . Allen's move abroad was not surprising given his then “un-English” penchant for the fluency of the game in football. His tenure lasted until November 1971 and had respectable success with winning the runner-up in 1970 (just one point behind Atlético Madrid ) and qualifying for the UEFA Cup over the fifth place in the final table a year later. His next coaching position was the Portuguese club Sporting Lisbon before he ended his four-year stay abroad in 1973 and took over third division club FC Walsall in his home region . As a scouting consultant he worked again for the "Baggies" from January 1977 and temporarily helped out as head coach in December of the same year before a successor for Sammy Chung could be found in John Barnwell .

With the financially lucrative support of the Saudi national team , he left England for a second time at the end of the 1970s and then concluded a short-term engagement at the Greek club Panathinaikos Athens between June and September 1980 . Allen led it back in the 1981/82 season in a responsible position to its old place of work and trained West Bromwich Albion one last time. He took over from Ron Atkinson , who had just moved to Manchester United , and made it to the semi-finals with his team in both the FA Cup and the League Cup . However, disappointing for the team, which had to cope with the departures of Bryan Robson and Remi Moses to Old Trafford , was the early exit in the UEFA Cup and the relegation only realized in the last league game. After the end of the season he became managing director and remained in the club's coaching staff on a part-time basis until 1996. At the age of 66, he even stood one last time in Cheltenham himself when the WBA played a friendly there.

Allen, whose son Russell also played professional football for the lower-class clubs Tranmere Rovers and Mansfield Town in the 1970s , died in June 2001. His long-time club remembered him during a friendly against Athletic Bilbao and donated the proceeds from the Alzheimer's "Ronnie Allen Memorial Match" -Foundation, endowment. Three years later, WBA named Allen to the list of the "16 Best Players of West Bromwich Albion" after a poll to mark the club's 125th anniversary.

successes

• as a player
  • English cup winner: 1954
  • Top scorer in the English First Division: 1955
• as a trainer
  • Spanish cup winner: 1969

literature

• Matthews, Tony: Wolverhampton Wanderers - The Complete Record . Breedon Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-85983-632-3 , pp. 168-169 .
• Matthews, Tony: West Bromwich Albion - The Complete Record . Breedon Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-85983-565-4 , pp. 98 .

Web links

• Obituary The Independent (Engl.)