Colin Arthur Garwood, born 29 June 1949, Heacham, England.
PART ONE
Colin Garwood signed for Peterborough United’s youth ranks in 1966 as a raw teenager with an eye for the box, and although the road from schoolboy hopeful to first-team regular is rarely a straight one, Garwood made the step up with a minimum of fuss, breaking into the senior side within two years. His league debut arrived in 1968 in a match that gave an early hint of the goalmouth chaos he would come to enjoy throughout his playing days, a 3-3 draw with Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic, and from that afternoon onward London Road had a young striker worth watching, one who seemed to understand instinctively where a chance was likely to fall even before the ball had been played into the eighteen-yard area.
Over the following three seasons Garwood built a reputation as a sharp, direct forward who did not need many chances to find the net, and by the time his spell at Peterborough came to a close he had scored 31 goals in 73 games in all competitions, a return that marked him out as one of the better young strikers outside the top two divisions. Not that Peterborough were a struggling side desperate to offload him; rather, they were a club with a proud lower-division scoring tradition, and Garwood’s ability to add to that heritage while still barely out of his teenage years said a great deal about his temperament as much as his technique.
Word travels quickly in football circles when a player is banging in goals at that sort of rate, and it was Oldham Athletic manager Jimmy Frizzell who paid £10,000 to bring him to Boundary Park in 1971. A £10,000 fee was no small sum for a Fourth Division club in the early 1970s, and the decision to spend that kind of money on an unproven young striker from a rival lower-division side said much about how highly Frizzell rated the raw material he had spotted; it was, in effect, a statement of intent from a manager determined to build something lasting rather than merely to survive from one season to the next. Frizzell’s own managerial path had begun in March 1970, when he succeeded Jack Rowley, under whom he had previously served as a coach, and took the reins at a club then languishing near the foot of Division Four with the grim possibility of having to apply for re-election to the Football League hanging over Boundary Park.
Rather than folding under that pressure, Frizzell steadied the ship at once, guiding his new side to nine wins and six draws across the remaining 22 fixtures of that campaign and securing a comfortable mid-table finish that few had thought possible only weeks earlier. The following season Oldham pushed on again and gained promotion to the Third Division, and it was into this rising, increasingly confident dressing room that Garwood arrived in the summer of 1971, ready to add firepower to a team already building serious momentum.
At Boundary Park he found himself among good company, lining up alongside forwards and defenders such as Andy Lochhead, Ronnie Blair, George Jones and Maurice Whittle, and together this group would go on to write one of the club’s happier chapters, forming a side capable of mixing steady defensive organisation with a genuine cutting edge up front. That chapter reached its high point in the 1973-74 season, when Oldham Athletic won the Third Division championship outright, and Garwood, scoring goals with real consistency throughout the campaign, was central to the achievement, a fact the supporters who filled Boundary Park week after week were never slow to acknowledge.
PART TWO
The 1973-74 campaign did not begin with any great fireworks, and anyone glancing at the opening results would have struggled to predict the title triumph that lay ahead. Oldham drew 0-0 to Halifax Town in their first match in front of a home crowd of 4,800 at the Shay on 25 August, followed that with a 1-1 stalemate against Port Vale, managed by Gordon Lee, back at Boundary Park on 1 September, and only started to find their feet with a close but confidence-boosting 1-0 victory over Watford at Vicarage Road the following week. With September well underway, home victories against Southend United and Plymouth Argyle were followed by a fine 2-1 triumph over recently relegated Brighton and Hove Albion at the Goldstone Ground, results that steadied the early-season nerves. October brought Oldham’s first league defeat of the campaign, a narrow 1-0 loss against Brighton at Boundary Park, though the setback did little lasting damage, and Jimmy Frizzell´s team responded with two more wins and three draws to keep their promotion push on course.
November continued in similarly workmanlike fashion: a 3-0 victory over Shrewsbury Town at Boundary Park was followed by a trip to Edgar Street, where the Latics came away with a thrilling 4-3 win. On 17 November, Garwood was on the scoresheet in a 1-1 draw with runaway league leaders Bristol Rovers at Boundary Park, a result that kept Oldham firmly in touch with the pace-setters even as Rovers threatened to pull clear at the top. December, however, told a different story, and the month brought Oldham’s first away league defeat of the season, a 2-1 loss at Huddersfield Town’s Leeds Road on 8 December. Worse followed over the festive period: a 3-2 Boxing Day defeat to local rivals Blackburn Rovers was compounded three days later by a 3-0 loss to Watford.
New Year’s Day brought no relief, with a 3-0 defeat to Port Vale at Vale Park in Burslem sending Oldham tumbling to 17th in the table just as 1974 got underway, and for a few uneasy weeks it looked as though the promotion challenge might be slipping away entirely. But football has a habit of turning on its head just when things look bleakest, and so it proved here. A 2-1 win over Wrexham at the Racecourse Ground on 12 January kick-started a remarkable run of results, and Oldham went unbeaten in the league for ten consecutive matches, a sequence that set them up perfectly for a run at the sides above them: leaders Bristol Rovers, along with high-flying Bournemouth, York City and Chesterfield.
On 2 February Garwood hit a hat-trick as Oldham beat Bournemouth 3-0 at Dean Court, a result that announced in emphatic terms that the Blues meant business, and two days later the prolific marksman was on target again when Oldham overcame 2-0 Tranmere Rovers at Prenton Park in Birkenhead, opening the scoring in a tidy performance. Further wins followed: a 2-0 victory over Aldershot at Boundary Park on 23 February, and then, the following week, a 1-0 win at Ewood Park against Blackburn Rovers that avenged the earlier Boxing Day loss.
On the 5th, Oldham demolished Cambridge United 6-1 at Boundary Park, with Garwood among the scorers, and four days later he struck again as Athletic edged out Walsall 2-1, also at home. Not every result went their way, of course, and a trip to Saltergate on 16 March ended in a deserved 1-0 defeat against Chesterfield, a reminder that the promotion race was far from decided. Oldham responded in style, however, putting four goals past Bournemouth in a 4-2 home win in which Garwood claimed a brace, and rounding off the month with a 2-0 victory at Gay Meadow against Shrewsbury Town. Into April, and Oldham continued to press their advantage: a 3-1 win over Grimsby Town at Boundary Park on 2 April brought another goal for Garwood, while Bristol Rovers, having finally seen their long unbeaten league run come to an end, began to falter, and Bournemouth’s challenge fell away too, leaving Oldham and York City locked in a battle for the automatic promotion places.
Easter week proved decisive. On Good Friday, 12 April, in front of a crowd of more than 12,000 at Boundary Park, Oldham thrashed Southport 6-0, with Garwood claiming another hat-trick to underline just what a rich vein of scoring form he had found, before the Latics travelled to Eastville the following day for a genuine top-of-the-table clash against Bristol Rovers. More than 18,000 spectators packed in to watch, and it was Garwood who settled the contest with the winning goal in a 2-1 victory that struck a heavy blow against the league leaders’ title hopes. On Easter Monday, around 10,000 fans were present at Haig Avenue to see Oldham complete the double over Southport with a 2-0 win, Garwood opening the scoring once again.
Throughout this remarkable spring, the pattern that had begun to define Garwood’s football was plain for anyone paying attention: he was not a striker who relied on one moment of brilliance across ninety minutes but rather one who kept probing, kept moving, and kept presenting himself for the half-chances that better sides so often waste, and it was this relentlessness, as much as any single moment of technique, that made him such a difficult opponent for tiring defences in the closing weeks of a long campaign. Team-mates and opposing defenders alike came to recognise that a Garwood chance, however half-formed it looked at first glance, had an uncomfortable habit of ending up in the net, and it was precisely this quality that Oldham needed as April wore on and the promotion picture tightened.
The promotion clincher followed on 20 April, when Oldham welcomed Huddersfield Town to Boundary Park and delivered an emphatic 6-0 victory in front of 16,000 spectators, a result that confirmed the club’s return to Division Two for the first time since 1954. There was a slight comedown four days later, as the Blues went down 2-1 at Grimsby Town’s Blundell Park, though Garwood did at least register the consolation goal, and a 1-1 draw followed at York City’s Bootham Crescent on 27 April in front of 15,000 on-lookers, a match in which York themselves secured promotion, even if the day’s biggest talking point elsewhere was the news that Manchester United had been relegated from the First Division.
Oldham had one further chance to seal the title outright on 30 April, but Charlton Athletic spoiled the party before a crowd of 18,000 people at Boundary Park with a 2-0 win, meaning the championship was not confirmed until a Friday evening a few days later, on 3 May, when a goalless draw at Plymouth Argyle´s Home Park was enough to make certain of top spot. In the end it was Oldham Athletic, Bristol Rovers and York City who went up as the three promoted sides that season. And for Garwood personally there was individual reward too, as he finished the campaign as Oldham’s leading league scorer with 16 goals, a fitting return for a player who had contributed so heavily to the title triumph.
PART THREE
Having scored 35 goals in 93 league appearances during his time at Boundary Park, Colin Garwood moved on to Huddersfield Town in 1974, joining a club he had faced so memorably only months earlier, and there was a certain neatness to the fact that the side he had helped humble on the way to the title were now the ones prepared to pay for his services. His stay at Leeds Road was comparatively brief, yielding eight goals from 28 league outings, a solid if unspectacular return in a Huddersfield side that itself finished some way below the promotion places that season.
But by 1975 he had moved again, this time to Colchester United, where he settled into a more extended spell and contributed 25 league goals across 87 appearances for the Essex club, showing once more that a change of surroundings did little to blunt his appetite for goals. From there Garwood joined Portsmouth, and it was at Fratton Park between 1978 and 1980 that he enjoyed one of the most productive spells of his time in the professional game, netting 34 goals in 71 league outings and confirming, well into his thirties by football’s usual standards, that his eye for goal had lost none of its sharpness, even as younger forwards around the divisions were beginning to attract the headlines he himself had once claimed.
In February 1980, Aldershot moved for Garwood, paying Portsmouth £54,000 for his services, a fee that stood as a club record for the Hampshire side at the time and which spoke to the continuing regard in which he was held around the lower divisions, even as he approached his thirty-first birthday. He went on to score 25 goals in 81 league games during his time at the Recreation Ground, adding still further to a scoring record that few journeymen strikers of the era could match, and doing so at a club where a record fee inevitably brought expectation, expectation he largely repaid with interest.
There is a certain symmetry, too, in the fact that the club prepared to make Garwood their record signing in 1980 was, like Oldham a decade earlier, one operating outside the game’s higher reaches, and it says something about the man that he never seemed to regard those lower divisions as an inconvenience to be endured on the way to somewhere grander, but rather as the stage on which he built an entire working life. He then rounded off his playing days with a spell at Boston United, stepping down through the divisions as the years finally caught up with him but never entirely losing the sharpness that had defined him since those early days at London Road. By the time he finally hung up his boots, Garwood had scored 157 goals from 426 games in the Football League, playing throughout as a striker whose instinct in front of goal never seemed to desert him, whichever level of the pyramid he found himself competing at, and whichever manager happened to be asking him to lead the line.
Few players who spend the majority of their playing days outside the top two divisions leave behind a scoring record as consistent as the one Garwood compiled across six different clubs. Through spells at Peterborough, Oldham, Huddersfield, Colchester, Portsmouth, Aldershot and Boston United, Garwood´s football career was a story of steady, unglamorous excellence, the sort that tabloid headlines rarely celebrate at the time but that record books remember long afterwards, tucked away in the small print where the true student of the lower divisions always knows to look.