Steven Edward Phillips, born 4 August 1954, London, England.
PART ONE
Steve Phillips entered professional football through Birmingham City at a time when the club were trying to fight their way out of the Second Division and back among the country’s leading sides, but although he was still a small and slightly built teenager, his quick feet, lively movement and eye for an opening marked him out early. Having joined Birmingham as an apprentice, Phillips signed professional forms in August 1971 and made his first-team debut later that month, going on as a substitute as City beat Carlisle United 3–2, and at 17 years and 17 days he became, at that time, the second-youngest player ever to represent the club.
It was a striking beginning for a forward who stood only around five feet six inches tall, yet the difficult part was not getting into the side but remaining there, because Phillips started six more matches before losing his place, and when manager Freddie Goodwin brought Bob Hatton from Carlisle United to St Andrew’s in October, the newcomer’s strength and goals made the teenager’s route back considerably harder. Birmingham were assembling a formidable attacking line in which Hatton, Bob Latchford and another outstanding youngster, Trevor Francis, offered a mixture of power, pace and finishing, so Phillips found himself learning his trade on the fringes while the senior side pushed successfully towards promotion.
Birmingham returned to the First Division at the end of the 1971–72 season, finishing as Second Division runners-up behind Norwich City, but that success did little to improve Phillips’s immediate prospects because Hatton, Latchford and Francis had become Goodwin’s preferred attacking combination, and the higher standard placed even greater value on settled players who could be trusted in demanding matches. Phillips therefore spent long periods outside the first team, though his ability was recognised beyond St Andrew’s when England youth manager Tony Waiters selected him for the UEFA Youth Tournament held in Italy in April 1973, and the episode revealed both the difficult edge in the young forward’s character and the talent which made Waiters prepared to handle it.
The Football Association reportedly advised the manager to reconsider his selection because Phillips might prove disruptive, but Waiters kept him in the party, and although the player reacted badly when he was left out of the starting side and came close to being sent home, he remained with the squad as England defeated Iceland and Switzerland, drew with Belgium and then beat hosts Italy in the semi-final. England faced East Germany in the final at the Stadio Comunale in Lignano Sabbiadoro on 19 April, and with the match level Phillips came from the bench and scored the decisive goal in a 3–2 victory after extra time, turning a troubled tournament into a notable personal success and giving England the European youth title. He won four youth caps altogether, but senior club football remained much less accommodating.
Phillips continued trying to force his way into Birmingham’s side during the 1973–74 season, and in February 1974 he finally scored his first Football League goal, although it arrived during a 4–2 First Division defeat against Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane and could not produce the result he wanted. Opportunities stayed limited, for Birmingham possessed established forwards and were fighting to preserve their top-flight place, so Phillips needed regular football elsewhere rather than another season spent waiting for an occasional vacancy, and a loan spell with Torquay United during 1974–75 gave him six Fourth Division appearances without a goal.
PART TWO
By October 1975, after four years in which Phillips had made only 20 league appearances and scored once for Birmingham, a permanent departure had become the sensible answer, and Northampton Town paid £5,000 to take him to the County Ground. The move dropped Phillips into the Fourth Division, but it allowed him to play far more often, and he joined a Northampton side which went on to finish second behind Lincoln City in 1975–76 and win promotion after scoring 82 league goals. Phillips was not yet the prolific marksman he would become, and his first stay with the Cobblers produced nine goals in 51 league appearances, but the regular matches helped him develop the positional sense, resilience and sharpness that could never have been acquired while watching Birmingham’s senior forwards from the stand. Northampton struggled after moving into the Third Division, however, and in February 1977 Phillips left for Brentford, where the most productive years of his playing life were about to begin.
Brentford were near the wrong end of the Fourth Division when Phillips arrived at Griffin Park, but under Bill Dodgin Junior they were beginning to construct an entertaining attacking side, and the newcomer played all of the final 19 matches of the 1976–77 season, scoring seven goals as the Bees gathered 39 points from the 57 available and climbed to fifteenth place. That closing run gave a clear indication of what Phillips could offer when a manager trusted him, and during his first complete season he became the central figure in one of Brentford’s great promotion campaigns, working alongside the tall Scottish centre-forward Andrew McCulloch and benefiting from Dodgin’s willingness to play open, positive football.
Phillips scored seven times in the opening ten league matches of 1977–78, and although injuries and suspensions checked Brentford’s momentum around Christmas, the side recovered after the turn of the year, while the sale of Gordon Sweetzer to Cambridge United in March allowed Phillips to move from midfield into a freer attacking role. The decision transformed the run-in, because he scored 16 goals in the final 15 matches as Brentford secured fourth place and promotion to the Third Division with two games remaining, and his 32 league goals made him the leading scorer in the entire Football League. He also scored three times in the FA Cup and once in the League Cup, giving him 36 in all competitions, while Phillips and McCulloch contributed 58 league goals between them, an extraordinary total which explained why the Bees could score 86 times in 46 Fourth Division matches. Brentford’s own account records how completely Phillips repaid the confidence placed in him.
Promotion required Phillips to prove that his scoring could survive at a higher level, and he did so as Brentford established themselves in the Third Division, where opponents were stronger, space was tighter and the little forward could no longer expect the same number of chances. Even so, his close control and intelligent movement continued to bring goals, while his durability was every bit as important, because he started 157 consecutive league matches for the club and rarely allowed the physical demands of lower-division football to keep him out. Brentford finished tenth in 1978–79 and ninth in 1979–80, respectable positions for a side which had recently been playing in the Fourth Division, and although another promotion challenge did not materialise, Phillips remained one of the side’s most reliable attackers.
By the time he left Griffin Park in August 1980, he had scored 69 goals in 167 appearances in all competitions, including 65 in 157 league matches, and his contribution was formally recognised when he entered the club’s Hall of Fame in 2019. Brentford confirmed those figures when announcing his induction, but the numbers alone do not fully explain his popularity, because supporters had watched a footballer who had been denied regular action at Birmingham become the sharpest scorer in the country during the 1977–78 promotion season. Northampton Town wanted him back and paid £40,000, eight times the amount they had spent on him five years earlier, which showed how far his standing had risen.
PART THREE
Phillips returned to the County Ground in August 1980 as a proven goalscorer rather than the young player who had left in 1977, and during 1980–81 he scored with enough regularity to earn selection in the PFA Fourth Division Team of the Year, even though Northampton could finish only tenth. His second spell produced 29 goals from 75 league appearances, taking his combined Northampton total to 38 in 126, but after 18 months another transfer followed when Southend United signed him in March 1982. The timing produced one of the more unusual statistical details of his playing days, because Phillips had already appeared in 30 league matches for Northampton during 1981–82 and then played another 18 for Southend, meaning that he completed 48 league fixtures during a season in which each club’s normal programme consisted of 46.
He had stepped back into the Third Division, and after helping Southend finish seventh in his opening weeks, Phillips became their leading scorer in each of his first three complete seasons, maintaining his output even as the club’s results changed sharply. Southend finished fifteenth in 1982–83, dropped into the Fourth Division after ending 1983–84 in twenty-second place, and then came seventeenth in 1984–85, but Phillips continued supplying goals throughout that unsettled period, and the supporters chose him as their Player of the Season in 1984–85. He eventually left Roots Hall having scored 66 goals in 158 league appearances and 72 in 182 matches in all competitions, figures which place him among Southend’s most productive forwards of the period.
In January 1986 Phillips returned to Torquay United, more than a decade after his first loan spell at Plainmoor, and this time he found the net regularly, scoring 11 goals in 32 league appearances as the Devon club finished near the bottom of the Fourth Division. He then joined Peterborough United in 1986 and made his debut on 8 November, but although he was now in his thirties and had already accumulated hundreds of senior matches, his appetite for playing and scoring had not disappeared, and he contributed 16 goals from 48 league appearances for the Posh. Peterborough also allowed him to go out on loan as his time there moved towards its close, so in 1987 he appeared six times and scored once for Exeter City, while a further temporary move to Chesterfield in 1988 brought two goals from nine league matches.
Phillips subsequently moved into non-League football with Stamford, leaving the Football League with an exact total of 200 goals from 562 appearances, and there was something fitting about the roundness of that final figure because it had been assembled through persistence rather than an easy rise. Only one of those goals had come for Birmingham City, where Hatton, Latchford and Francis had blocked his way, but he had responded by scoring nine in his first Northampton spell, 65 for Brentford, 29 after returning to Northampton, 66 for Southend, 11 for Torquay, 16 for Peterborough and four during his two later loans.
After finally hanging up his boots, Steve Phillips moved into the licensed trade, and in 1999 he opened Inchy’s Bar in Benalmádena on Spain’s Costa del Sol, using the nickname by which he had been known during his playing days, before returning to England and running pubs there. He later worked as sponsorship manager at Wellingborough Town, which kept him connected to the game at a more local level, while invitations back to his former clubs showed that the goals had not been forgotten, particularly at Brentford and Southend, where his most sustained scoring was achieved.