David Peter Stainwright, born 13 June 1948, Nottingham, England.
PART ONE
Dave Stainwright grew up in Nottingham and it surprised nobody when a promising local inside forward found himself drawn towards Nottingham Forest. The club had only lately clawed their way back to the top flight, regaining First Division status in the 1956–57 campaign after a spell in the Second Division, and then, in the 1958–59 season, had gone one better still, defeating Luton Town 2–1 in the FA Cup final at Wembley Stadium to bring the city a trophy it would talk about for a generation.
Stainwright joined Nottingham Forest’s youth ranks in 1963 and for two full years he learned his trade in the shadows of the City Ground before the club, satisfied with his progress, rewarded him with a professional contract in August 1965 at the age of seventeen. That step, from the reserve pitches to the fringes of a First Division squad, was no small matter for someone not long out of school, and it placed Stainwright under the watchful eye of manager Johnny Carey.
The Irishman had once patrolled Manchester United’s back line under Matt Busby and now ran Forest with the same calm, old-fashioned authority he had shown as a player. Carey, appointed to the City Ground hot seat back in 1963, had steered his side to a string of thoroughly respectable mid-table finishes, and his Forest were neither relegation fodder nor genuine title contenders, a comfortable sort of mediocrity that, paradoxically, gave the manager licence to blood the odd promising youngster without risking too much in the process.
Stainwright´s debut eventually arrived on 29 January 1966, when Nottingham Forest welcomed Newcastle United to the City Ground, and the young forward was summoned from the bench in the eighteenth minute of a match that would finish 2–1 to the visitors. It was a modest debut but it opened the door to a run of appearances that, brief though it proved, would come to define his entire spell at Forest. Over the following two seasons Stainwright made seven league appearances in total across the 1965–66 and 1966–67 campaigns, scoring once along the way, a single goal that, as it turned out, would linger far longer in the memory than the seven appearances that framed it.
That goal came on 2 April 1966 at White Hart Lane, and the afternoon it produced stands, without much argument, as the undoubted highlight of Stainwright’s time at Forest. He gave the visitors an early lead inside the first five minutes, seizing on a half-chance with the sort of composure that belied his tender years, and Forest, sensing weakness in a Tottenham side then wrestling with troubles of its own, pressed home the advantage without mercy. Bob McKinlay doubled the lead seven minutes later, thundering in from midfield, and then Roger Hoy, harried by a rampant Forest forward line, turned the ball into his own net in the fourteenth minute to make it 3–0 before the game had barely settled into its rhythm.
Tottenham pulled one back through Jimmy Robertson just before the interval and adding a second through Eddie Clayton deep into the closing stages, yet the damage had already been done by then, and Forest held firm for a 3–2 win that owed no small debt to Stainwright’s early strike. It was, by any measure, the sort of afternoon a young forward dreams about on sleepless nights before a big match, though such afternoons, as Stainwright would soon enough discover, do not always come round again.
Indeed, Stainwright´s very next outing arrived on 11 April, a rather more sobering 1–0 defeat against Tommy Docherty´s Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, and he featured once more on 10 May in a 1–1 draw with already crowned Football League champions Liverpool at the City Ground, a game that underlined in equal measure both his promise and the maddening inconsistency of his involvement. Throughout this period he found himself playing alongside senior professionals such as Henry Newton and Barry Lyons in midfield, men whose accumulated experience only sharpened the competition he faced further forward, where Joe Baker and Ian Storey-Moore had long since made the two central attacking positions their own under Carey’s cautious, experience-favouring approach to team selection. Consequently, opportunities for a teenager, however gifted, remained scarce on the ground, and by March 1968 Stainwright had left the City Ground altogether, his Forest career amounting to seven appearances and that single, cherished goal at White Hart Lane.
PART TWO
His departure from Nottingham Forest did not, however, mark the end of his ambitions, and he signed for Doncaster Rovers at the beginning of the 1968–69 season, dropping down to the Fourth Division in search of the regular football that had so stubbornly eluded him in Nottingham. Rovers themselves carried a curious recent history: they had won the Fourth Division title in the 1965–66 campaign only to suffer relegation straight back out of the Third Division the following season, a tragedy compounded that same September by the death of their popular captain, John Nicholson, in a car accident, a blow from which the club took some time to recover.
Player-manager Keith Kettleborough had given way to the experienced George Raynor for the start of the 1967–68 season, and it was the-ex Sheffield United, Mansfield Town, Rotherham United, Bury and Aldershot winger who was still at the helm when the 1968–69 campaign kicked off and when Stainwright first pulled on the Rovers shirt. It was only in December 1968, some months into that promotion-winning season, that Lawrie McMenemy arrived to take the reins at Belle Vue, having previously served as a Coldstream Guard during his National Service before a brief and injury-curtailed playing spell at non-League Gateshead, a club he had joined after his dream of a Football League career with Newcastle United had come to nothing. From Gateshead he had drifted into coaching, spending several years learning the trade there before management posts at Bishop Auckland and, later, as a coach at Sheffield Wednesday, prepared him for the hot seat at Doncaster.
Once installed, McMenemy brought a discipline to Belle Vue that the club had perhaps lacked, and Rovers went on to clinch the Fourth Division title with 59 points, finishing two points clear of Halifax Town and three ahead of both Rochdale and Bradford City, all three of whom joined them in promotion to the Third Division. At Doncaster, Stainwright found himself alongside experienced campaigners such as Bob Gilfillan and Alick Jeffrey, yet Belle Vue, for all the club’s collective triumph that season, offered him little more personal encouragement than the City Ground had done, and he managed only two league appearances for Rovers before moving on again in the summer of 1969, this time to York City, another Division Four side with ambitions plainly written on its sleeve.
At Bootham Crescent he found rather more of the regular football he craved, featuring in eight league matches during the 1969–70 season and finding the net once along the way, a modest return in the grand scheme of things but one that at least hinted at a player finally settling, however briefly, into some sort of rhythm after the stop-start years that had come before. That settling, though, proved short-lived once more, and in July 1970 Stainwright stepped away from the Football League altogether, signing for Heanor Town, a non-League club in Derbyshire situated only a short journey from the streets where he had grown up.
There was something rather fitting about the move, a young man returning almost exactly to where he had started, and he took up the inside forward role once again, contributing to Heanor’s efforts in regional competition from the 1970–71 season onward. As it turned out, Stainwright’s playing days on the pitch drew quietly to a close with the Lions in the early 1970s, a modest full stop to a story that had, for one glorious afternoon at White Hart Lane at least, promised so very much more.