John Anthony Read, born 5 July 1942, Haydock, England.
PART ONE
Tony Read entered professional football as a young goalkeeper with Sheffield Wednesday, where the size of the club and the strength of the competition offered him a demanding education but no first-team opening, because Wednesday were operating among the leading sides in England and a young man trying to break through at Hillsborough required ability, patience and the good fortune to find the senior goalkeeper injured or out of form. Read had the ability and was prepared to wait, but the opening never arrived, and instead of remaining indefinitely in the reserves he moved south to Peterborough United, believing that a smaller club might provide the regular Football League football that Sheffield Wednesday could not offer him.
Yet London Road presented much the same problem, for the route into Peterborough’s senior side was blocked and his league contribution amounted to only two appearances, which was hardly enough for a young goalkeeper who needed matches if he was going to improve. Some players would have accepted reserve-team football and waited for another club to make an approach, but Read was too practical and too eager to play to confine himself to one position, and when Peterborough required somebody further forward he volunteered to operate in attack. At six feet one and a half inches he had the height and strength to challenge centre-halves, he understood how goalkeepers reacted when crosses entered the penalty area, and he was willing to turn an awkward situation to his advantage, which was how a man who had spent his early years learning to prevent goals suddenly began trying to score them.
That unusual switch might have remained a minor Peterborough story, mentioned occasionally by reserve-team followers and then forgotten, but Read was selected as a forward against Tottenham Hotspur’s reserves and scored past Pat Jennings, who was himself still a young goalkeeper but was already displaying the size, reach and calmness that would eventually make him one of the finest of his generation. The goal did much more than brighten Read’s afternoon, because Luton Town manager George Martin was watching from the stands and immediately recognised that the Peterborough reserve offered something extremely difficult to find, for he was a trained goalkeeper who could also provide height, physical force and a genuine threat in attack.
Martin remembered what he had seen and moved quickly, and in March 1965 Luton paid Peterborough £800 for Read, which may have been a modest fee even in those days but remained a significant investment for a club attempting to rebuild. The reasoning behind the transfer was straightforward, because Ron Baynham had reached the end of his long service at Kenilworth Road after a persistent leg injury made it impossible for him to continue, and Luton therefore needed a goalkeeper capable of becoming his long-term replacement. Read arrived with that responsibility waiting for him, but before he could begin challenging for the position, the club discovered that their new signing had brought a broken bone in his foot with him, an injury that had escaped detection until the deal could no longer be reversed.
Because Read was unable to play, Colin Tinsley took possession of the goalkeeper’s jersey and performed well enough to make an immediate change difficult to justify, and by the time the newcomer had recovered from his damaged foot, the position for which he had been signed was no longer vacant. Yet Martin had not forgotten the tall forward who had beaten Jennings, and when injuries elsewhere created an attacking shortage, the manager reached back to that reserve match for an answer and selected Read up front in a League Cup tie against Brighton and Hove Albion. It was an extraordinary way for a goalkeeper to enter Luton’s senior side, but Read had already shown that he could compete in attack, and rather than complain that he had been denied an opportunity between the posts, he accepted the shirt that was available and set about making himself useful.
Martin retained the idea for a league visit to Rochdale, pairing Read with John O’Rourke and reasoning that his height and strength could occupy defenders, challenge for high passes and create the space in which the recognised centre-forward might work, although the experiment nearly came apart when Read momentarily forgot his new position and punched away a ball that came towards him. The reaction was entirely natural for somebody who had spent years training as a goalkeeper but completely illegal for a centre-forward, and although the mistake could have shaken him, Read recovered, O’Rourke opened the scoring and the converted keeper added Luton’s second after the hour, turning what had appeared to be a temporary answer to an injury problem into a serious attacking option.
Once Read had found the net, the goals arrived with a speed and regularity that nobody at Kenilworth Road could reasonably have expected, and during the 1965–66 campaign he scored twelve times in twenty league starts, a return that would have satisfied many specialist forwards who had spent their whole working lives learning how to escape defenders and finish chances. He was never going to resemble a small, elusive inside-forward who drifted between opponents and built attacks with delicate touches, but Luton did not ask him to become something he was not, because Read gave them a clear target, contested high balls, used his goalkeeper’s frame to unsettle centre-halves and, most importantly, put the ball in the net.
His understanding of goalkeepers may also have worked in his favour, for he knew the uncertainty caused by a bouncing ball, the difficulty of collecting crosses in a crowded penalty area and the split-second hesitation that could appear when a large forward came charging towards goal. The finest afternoon of his scoring spell arrived on 20 November 1965, when he struck a hat-trick against Notts County at Kenilworth Road, and the achievement was remarkable not because a goalkeeper had gone forward during the final moments of a desperate match, but because Read had been deliberately selected in attack and completed the most prized feat available to any goal scorer. His twelve goals were not a novelty added after other players had settled the important business, because they mattered to Luton, justified Martin’s judgement and transformed an £800 reserve goalkeeper with a broken foot into one of the most unusual forwards in the Football League.
But scoring form can disappear almost as quickly as it arrives, and Read’s productive spell eventually weakened, leaving Luton with a decision that was considerably less complicated than his remarkable figures might suggest, because he had always been a goalkeeper first and the club had originally bought him as Baynham’s possible successor. The moment had therefore come to return him to his own penalty area, and his first senior appearance in goal for Luton came at home to Stockport County, where the Hatters won 2–0 and Read kept a clean sheet on the day he finally occupied the position for which Martin had signed him.
PART TWO
Allan Brown’s arrival as manager brought further pressure, for the former Scotland international was determined to uncover a Scottish goalkeeper he could make his own, and a succession of challengers consequently appeared while Tony Read continued fighting for his position. Colin Tinsley, George Ramage, Ron Swan, Billy Taylor, Sandy Davie, Alan Starling and Keith Barber all entered the contest at different times, and some enjoyed opportunities in the first team, but Read repeatedly regained his place or performed well enough to make himself difficult to remove. That long list explains why his seven seasons at Kenilworth Road were never a comfortable procession of guaranteed selection, because each new goalkeeper represented a warning that the manager might prefer somebody else, yet Read kept training, kept competing and eventually accumulated 229 appearances in all competitions, including 203 in the Football League, while his twelve league goals remained alongside his name like a printing mistake that required the full story to make sense.
The greatest team success of Read’s time at Luton arrived in 1967–68, when the club won the Fourth Division championship and began its climb back through the Football League, and although promotion campaigns are often remembered through the goals of the leading forwards, Luton’s title was also built on stability, familiarity and the week-to-week dependability of players who rarely missed a match. Seven members of the side made at least forty league appearances during the season, an extraordinary level of continuity by modern standards, and that settled selection allowed the players to understand one another’s movements, strengths and weaknesses without needing constant instruction.
Read was part of that dependable core, and while the men at the other end supplied the goals that moved Luton towards the championship, his work gave the side the defensive security required to turn narrow leads into victories and difficult afternoons into valuable points. A goalkeeper’s best performances are not always obvious from a match report, particularly when a successful team controls long periods and restricts the opposition, but concentration becomes even more important when twenty quiet minutes are suddenly interrupted by a deflection, a high cross or a forward breaking beyond the defence. Read dealt with those demands throughout the campaign, and Luton finished above Barnsley, Hartlepools United and Crewe Alexandra, who took the other promotion positions, to claim the championship and leave the Fourth Division behind.
For Read, that winner’s medal represented a considerable change in fortune from the uncertain position he had occupied three years earlier, because he had arrived at Kenilworth Road with a broken foot, watched another goalkeeper claim the shirt and then moved into attack simply to obtain senior football, but he was now the goalkeeper of a championship-winning side and an established member of a settled team. Promotion raised the standard and increased the pressure, although Luton continued to build, and two seasons later another rise followed when Alec Stock’s side won promotion from the Third Division in 1969–70.
Read’s involvement in the second success was more frustrating, however, because Sandy Davie took over in goal and left him watching much of the campaign from the sidelines rather than controlling matches from his penalty area, which showed once again that the contest he had faced under Brown had never truly ended. A goalkeeper can appear completely secure one month and find himself excluded the next, because only one man can occupy the position and an understudy in good form may close the door for weeks, but Read continued working hard.
By the time Read approached his thirtieth birthday, he had fought his way back into the Luton side, but the physical cost of his years in senior football had become increasingly difficult to ignore, and a troublesome injury to his right knee began reducing both his comfort and his enthusiasm. There was interest from elsewhere, with Millwall and Cambridge United making enquiries, and Read could therefore have prolonged his playing days by accepting another contract and entering a new dressing room, but after making Luton his home he had no desire to finish as a temporary solution at another club.
In 1972 he chose to retire, seven years after arriving from Peterborough, and brought an end to a playing record with the Hatters that contained 229 appearances in all competitions, sixty-nine clean sheets, a Fourth Division championship, involvement in another promotion and those unforgettable twelve league goals. Retirement from playing did not immediately take Read away from Luton or the people who had watched him at Kenilworth Road, because he established a second-hand car business in Park Street and later became landlord of The Old Bell in Greenfield, and both occupations ensured that supporters could continue meeting a familiar figure from the club’s climb through the lower divisions.