Sandy Brown (soccer player, 1939)

Sandy Brown
Personnel
Surname	Alexander Dewar Brown
birthday	March 24, 1939
place of birth	Grangemouth ,  Scotland
date of death	April 8, 2014
Place of death	Blackpool ,  England
position	Full-back (left)
Juniors
Years	station
	Broxburn Athletic
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1958-1963	Partick Thistle	112 (8)
1963-1971	Everton FC	209 (9)
1971-1972	Shrewsbury Town	21 (0)
1972-1973	Southport FC	19 (0)
	Fleetwood Freeport
1 Only league games are given.

Alexander Dewar "Sandy" Brown (born March 24, 1939 in Grangemouth , † April 8, 2014 in Blackpool ) was a Scottish football player . Mostly used as a left full -back, he won the English championship with Everton in 1970 , but also often only served the club as a substitute player.

Athletic career

Brown was born near Falkirk in Grangemouth, Scotland. His path to professional football led him at the end of the 1950s to the first division club Partick Thistle, based in Glasgow . There he came to the train more regularly from the 1959/60 season after initially sporadic appearances and a few years later he was one of the regular players in the team, which in 1963 occupied a surprisingly good third place in the final table - even before the top club Celtic Glasgow . His strengths were mainly in the fighting area; to do this, he could flexibly switch between positions. For 38,000 pounds he was finally hired in September 1963 with the reigning English champions FC Everton , who had started the new season 1963/64 a bit sluggishly.

As a substitute for right-back Alex Parker , he completed all the remaining 30 competitive games from the end of November 1963, before switching mostly to the left side in the following season 1964/65, where he served as a safeguard for the newly signed Ray Wilson . Often Brown remained at Everton FC only the role of the supplementary player, whose achievements were often underestimated in retrospect. The object of criticism was an allegedly weak positional play and the occasional lack of timing in duels. Under coach Harry Catterick , Brown worked consistently on his weaknesses and often Catterick put him in front of the four-man defensive line to prevent the opposing expansion game in the center. He acted regularly in a "special role " against West Ham United , when he fell into the primary role of intercepting passes for Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters . His preferred position, however, was clearly that of the full-back, even if he was occasionally called on the offensive as a "substitute striker" - the five league goals in the season 1964/65 were an expression of his scoring threat. Brown's first big success with Everton was his contribution to winning the FA Cup in 1966 , when he started four games up to and including the semi-final against Manchester United (1-0) - missing in the final against Sheffield Wednesday (3-2) but he. After qualifying for the European Cup in the 1966/67 season associated with the cup win , he stood out with a goal in the second leg of the second round against Real Saragossa to make it 1-0, which, however, was not enough for progress in view of the 2-0 defeat in the first leg. A few months earlier he had contributed a goal to the 3-1 win in the Merseyside Derby against Liverpool .

More anchored in the collective memory of the two rivals remained his curious own goal in December 1969, when Brown artificially pushed a cross from Liverpool's Peter Thompson into his own case. Due to the departure of Wilson, who had been injured for a long time in the 1968/69 season, Brown acted at that time in the favorite position as a regular player and so his contribution to winning the 1970 championship with 36 league appearances was not insignificant. But immediately after the league title he lost his place to the England international Keith Newton, who was committed in the winter of 1969 . After only 18 competitive appearances in the 1970/71 season - including two substitutions in the European Cup in the first two rounds - Brown left Everton in May 1971 for the third division club Shrewsbury Town . He stayed there for a year as well as with his successor club Southport FC , which was in the fourth division. He then ended his career in the non-league area at Fleetwood Freeport .

Title / Awards

• English Championship (1): 1970

literature

• Ivan Ponting: Everton Player by Player . Hamlyn, London 1998, ISBN 0-600-59581-1 , pp. 55 .

Web links

• Statistical data from the Post War English & Scottish Football League AZ Player's Database
• Profile on playerhistory.com ( Memento from April 9, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Deviating information with 105/6 may result from not taking into account the seven league appearances from the 1957/58 season; a gate to this may be debatable.
2. ^ Sandy Brown in the barryhugmansfootballers.com database. Retrieved August 16, 2020.