Naptime Five Hundred #3: Alan Ball, and Alan Ball

God wants his Ball back.

That was a headline in the Sun today. Appropriately, it’s a deft touch, but it falls down on two counts for me: 1) I’m an atheist, and 2) I’m a Evertonian. So if God ever existed, He was Alan Ball. Dixie Dean was Everton’s first legend. But Alan Ball was Everton’s first God.

This is the third time God has wanted his ball back in the last quarter-century. Around the turn of millenium, Bally’s wife and daughter were both diagnosed with cancer: his daughter won the battle ; his wife lost. His dad, Alan Ball, Sr., died tragically in a smash in Cyprus in 1982. The culpable cabbie got a one-year ban, and Mrs Ball, Sr. was awarded a whopping twenty-five grand compo. Alan Ball Jr. sold his World-Cup winner’s medal in 2005 for the family. Yesterday, he suffered a heart attack whilst reportedly fighting a rekindled bonfire in his garden. If there is a God, he’s been a real tw*t to the Ball family.

Bally’s dad, the other Alan Ball, is less famous than his mercurial son, but he had a critical part to play in football. He didn’t exactly set the world aflame as an inside-forward (a position that has gone the same way as orange footballs on snowy pitches) in stints for Bolton, Southport, Brum City, Oldham and Rochdale “The Dale” AFC. Nor were his managerial years at Halifax and Preston the stuff of folklore. But he did an amazing thing. He got his son a job.

Three cheers for nepotism. When clubs wouldn’t give Bally a proper bite of the cherry on the grounds that he was too small and too ginger to play professional football, dad called in a favour at Blackpool. In that struggling, unfashionable line-up, he was noticed by Sir Alf Ramsay and adorned with a cap. And the rest is, as the Germans say, Geschichte.

I remember watching a documentary about Alan Ball (Junior), and the fondness with which he spoke about his ol’ fella. He related the tale of when Everton wanted to flog him to Arsenal (sniff) ; how gutted he was, having been so happy as one third of the Holy Trinity with Howard Kendall and Colin Harvey. He sought his dad’s advice because, he asserted, his dad always gave great advice. And not just the advice most people’s dads are good at – tips on stud walls and repointing.

“Son,” came his father’s words down the blower, “when you’re not wanted, you must go.”

He was right, Bally. His dad did give great advice.

And as the tributes fly in like Bally’s low cross for Hurst’s discredited 1966 World-Cup Final goal, let’s hope one shows restraint when it comes to using words like “enthusiastic”, “industrious” and “engine”. They don’t do the man credit. His skills were an inspiration to every midfielder that followed in the dainty steps of his white boots. A wonderful family man, and an icon for narky, helium-voiced short arses everywhere.

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