It’s hard to believe I’m actually writing these words. John Sissons, the boy wonder of the sixties golden era is 80 this week.
The fair-haired teenager with that blistering pace on the West Ham left wing, the kid I watched kicking a tennis ball around our school playground. I was about 12 and he was the 15 year-old who had just been selected to play for England Schoolboys.We were hardly friends obviously, he was the king of our school - Mellow Lane Comprehensive, when Hayes was in Middlesex and is now absorbed into west London. I doubt he even acknowledged me then, although I do recall standing in front of him once and explaining the virtues of him joining my club. Yes, embarrassing.
Some things are frozen in time. To my generation of West Ham fans he will always be the boy who made his debut at 17, had won FA Cup and European Cup Winners Cup medals in 1964 and ’65, figured in two European campaigns, played in a losing League Cup final and notched up 125 first team appearances before his 20th birthday.
He’s one of only seven players who have won FA Cup and European winners medals while playing for West Ham. Jim Standen, Jack Burkett, Ronnie Boyce, Ken Brown, Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst are the others. True legends all, for me our greatest players regardless of who has followed them. Not even Martin Peters or Johnny Byrne played in both those finals.
It got me thinking about how young players progress into first team football. Or not, as is the case at West Ham. We have Freddie Potts, George Earthy, Ollie Scarles, Callum Marshall and Kaelan Casey all in their twenties while Lewis Orford is 19, trained with England seniors last month and now sitting on the bench on loan at Stevenage. None of these young men have made any sort of breakthrough.
Why? Was Sissons just so good he got his breaks much earlier? It’s hard, if not impossible to compare different generations. The game is different, different rules for goalkeepers, offsides, and I will accept that players now are fitter, bigger and probably quicker than the kids from the sixties.
But Sissons was a virtual veteran by the time he was 20 and my view on all this is that managers are now reluctant to blood youngsters. The terrible price of failure in the Premier League is responsible.
David Moyes and Graham Potter have both gone for experience over young. Maybe Nuno Espirito Santo will be the same, but relegation is cruel these days. With £2m per place in the Premier League, you can’t even throw the kids into the final games of the season like clubs of old.
Clubs now are virtually forced to sell their best players when they get relegated, there is a catastrophic penalty for falling out of the top flight and managers are reluctant to risk kids these days.
Our youngsters have been pretty much overlooked this season (although it was nice to see Magassa and Potts involved at Everton). Are they just not good enough, or did Potter this term just not think they could cope with the mental and physical pressures of the Premier League?
I noticed this week the media making a fuss about the progress of Arsenal’s 19 year-old, Myles Lewis-Skelly, who “has already achieved so much.” A goal and man of the match on his England debut, 43 Arsenal appearances, a first pro contract at 17 and a goal against Manchester City last week.
All very good. But compare to Sissons’ record at 19 and what he had achieved by then? It’s an impossible comparison but you can bet our youngsters would have loved to be in Sissons’ position.
He got his big break just days after our first team had managed to lost 8-2 at home to Blackburn on Boxing Day in 1964. Drink, you suspected, had been taken, and it was the funniest game I can recall.
A week later Ron Greenwood put Sissons, who had one game the previous season, into the FA Cup third round tie with Charlton at just 18. He scored and the rest is history. He scored again in the quarter final with Burnley and then became the then youngest Cup Final goalscorer in the victory over Preston at 18 years and 215 days.
But greater glory was to come. The following season Sissons played 51 matches and figured throughout the Cup Winners Cup campaign. He scored crucial goals in that run, in particular in a brutal game in Prague and then an equally ferocious matches in Zaragoza, the second half goal that ensured a draw and a 4-3 aggregate victory that took West Ham to another Wembley final against TSV Munich.
There was no TV then. I recall me and dad pacing the kitchen floor listening to the crackly radio commentary from Spain. Could any of our young starlets have played in European cup ties like that when they were 18? Probably not.
Sissons had a stunning few seasons, I recall a 32 minute hat-trick against Leeds United in a 7-0 League Cup victory nobody there will ever forget. Least of all Don Revie who vowed in the dressing room never to allow West Ham to do that to us again. He was true to his word!
Sissons never got a full international cap, more so because Alf Ramsey had three hugely experienced wingers in his squad for the World Cup finals, Terry Paine, John Connolly and Ian Callaghan.
Paine and Connolly played in group matches, but by the quarter final with Argentina, Hurst was in the side by then, as was Peters on the left of midfield and Ramsey had abandoned wingers completely, 4-4-2 was preferred by then and I doubt Sissons ever got mentioned for England again.
And did he eventually face burn-out, so much before his twenties and so many games. Injuries, loss of form and general fatigue set in and he was sold to Sheffield Wednesday in 1970 after 53 goals and 266 games for West Ham.
Sissons played 115 games for the Yorkshire club, moved to Norwich to be reunited with former team mate John Bond - now a manager. But that never worked, nor did a one-season spell at Chelsea before he moved to Tampa Bay and then Cape Town, where Byrne was manager.
His English career ended before he was 30. Was than burn-out? Either way he had played right through West Ham’s greatest decade. The boy I idolised at school and followed every step of the way through his West Ham career.
And now he’s 80, living in South Africa where he moved to when his playing days were coming to an end. For obvious reasons he’s the one player that resonates more than any other of the many years I’ve been supporting the club.
I’m not sure he gets the credit for his part in those glittering years of the 1960s, over-shadowed by the Moore, Hurst, Peters trilogy from the 1966 World Cup winning side. But his achievements as a teenager were spectacular.
His season with England Schools saw him set a then record goals haul, 11 in seven matches, culminating with a double in an 8-1 victory over Scotland in front of 100,000 at Wembley, when schools football was big news. We took three coaches to Wembley to see him play.
Spotted by Charlie Faulkner playing for Middlesex schools and signed as an apprentice along with team mate Peter Bennett, who went to our big rival school, Abbotsfield in Hillingdon.
Sissons helped win the FA Youth Cup in 1963, beating Liverpool in the final. There was another Wembley appearance that year when England Youth won the ‘little’ World Cup, Sissons scoring in the 4-0 final success over Northern Ireland, who had Pat Jennings in goal.
And Sissons figured in another European age group triumph, the 1964 UEFA Under 18 tournament, netting in a final 4-0 win over Spain in Amsterdam.
What was to follow for Sissons and West Ham was the two cup final wins and a shared Charity Shield success against Liverpool at Anfield. All this in a remarkable seven-year spell for club and country, including 10 Under 23 caps.
John steps into his eighties this week, my recollections of those school days and West Ham glory still crystal clear. Happy birthday John Sissons, thanks for the memories.
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