Willie Bryant (soccer player)

Willie Bryant
Personnel
Surname	William Bryant
birthday	1874
place of birth	Rotherham ,  England
date of death	October 25, 1918
position	Winger (right)
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
	Wath Athletic
	Chesterfield Town
1894-1896	Rotherham Town	54 (19)
1896-1900	Newton Heath	109 (27)
1900-1902	Blackburn Rovers	25 0(8)
1 Only league games are given.

William "Willie" Bryant (* 1874 in Rotherham ; † October 25, 1918 ) was an English football player . The right winger played between 1894 and 1902 for Rotherham Town , Newton Heath and Blackburn Rovers a total of 188 games (56 goals) in the Football League .

Career

Bryant played for Wath Athletic and Chesterfield Town in local leagues before joining Rotherham Town in the Football League Second Division in 1894 . With Rotherham, Bryant played in the lower region of the table in the Second Division, and Bryants could not change anything for a winger, a remarkable goal rate of 19 goals in 54 games. In April 1896 he moved to Manchester for league rivals Newton Heath , Rotherham meanwhile occupied penultimate place in the table at the end of the season and stopped playing. At Newton Heath, the fast and tricky winger was one of the most constant players in the following years. The team missed promotion to the First Division as runner-up in 1897, when they lost out in the promotion games against Sunderland called "Test Matches" and remained in the Second Division. In the following years, the team continued to belong to the top flight of the league, but only finished fourth three times in a row. In 1898 they won the first significant title in the club's history with a 2-1 success over Blackburn Rovers with the Lancashire Senior Cup .

In addition, Bryant represented on November 6, 1897 as the first player from Newton Heath the Football League in an Inter-League match. In the game on Hyde Road , the home stadium of Manchester City , he formed the line of strikers against the Irish League with Steve Bloomer , Billy Beats , George Wheldon and Joe Schofield . Despite an 8-1 success, this remained his only mission, the position on the right wing in the national teams at that time was mostly occupied by Charlie Athersmith .

In March 1900, Bryant and Bob Parkinson were suspended from the club 's management for an unknown reason and only a little later he moved to first division Blackburn Rovers for a transfer of £ 50 . At Blackburn, Bryant could not get past the established players Arnold Whittaker and Fred Blackburn on the outside positions and was therefore called up as a half-forward and even in the runner row . Even by working in positions that were unfamiliar to him, Bryant did not succeed in establishing himself permanently in the team; but scored in a 3-3 draw against Aston Villa in October 1900, Blackburn's only hat-trick that season. Ultimately, he left the club at the end of the 1901/02 season again, after a total of eight goals in 25 missions.

literature

• Garth Dykes: The United Alphabet - A Complete Who's Who of Manchester United FC . ACL & Polar Publishing Ltd., Leicester 1994, ISBN 0-9514862-6-8 , pp. 56 .
• Mike Jackman: Blackburn Rovers - The Official Encyclopaedia . Breedon Books, Derby 1994, ISBN 1-873626-70-3 , pp. 37 .
• Michael Joyce: Football League Players' Records 1888 to 1939 . 2nd revised edition. Soccerdata, Nottingham 2004, ISBN 1-899468-67-6 , pp. 41 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ aboutmanutd.com: Manchester United players »Willie Bryant ( Memento from July 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive )