John Rudge had been outside Brunton Park for not much more than a minute when he was recognised. A Carlisle United supporter wanted Rudge to know that he remembered a goal he’d scored for the Blues against Bolton Wanderers.
It happened in 1968. Different times – but clearly not forgotten. “I was surprised how many people came up to me and talked about the games they could recall,” says Rudge, who reacquainted himself with United on New Year’s Day when Port Vale, the club where he is president, took on the Cumbrians.
“One of the blokes said, ‘I remember when you scored a hat-trick against Bolton too’. After all those years – 50-odd years – it’s great for people to remember.”
Rudge was a familiar sight on January 1 in his flat cap and overcoat. It was the uniform of his legendary managerial spell with Port Vale. His Carlisle connections, though, go much further back and link Rudge to a period of exciting progress and dramatic impact at Brunton Park.
Most dramatically, from an individual point of view, was that goal against Bolton on January 20, 1968: a rip-snorting shot from 30 yards which the Evening News & Star likened to Bobby Charlton at his potent best.
It is one of Rudge’s fondest and most amused memories as he drifts back through time. “Oh yeah, I can remember it,” he says. “I’m just over the halfway line, and Dick Young [United’s trainer] is saying to the subs, ‘He ain’t thinking about shooting from there, is he?!’”
“And all of a sudden it goes in the net, right in the top corner, past Eddie Hopkinson the goalkeeper. And Dick goes, ‘Oh…er…brilliant goal, John’. They were all creased up with laughter, the lads on the bench.”
Another iconic day in the blue shirt was at Newcastle United when Carlisle produced arguably their finest FA Cup result of all: a 1-0 win at St James’ Park, 56 years ago this weekend.
Carlisle were Division Two aspirants; Newcastle a high-reaching Division One team who only a year later would win the Fairs Cup in Europe.
“It was a great day, that was,” says Rudge. “It was the biggest crowd I ever played in front of, about 55,000 [56,550 was the recorded attendance]. We managed to beat them and it was a great cup upset. Newcastle were one of the top sides in the league, and for us to go over there and win was quite something.
“You could hear the crowd building up in the dressing room, and you were thinking, ‘Cor, blimey – all those people watching us here’. It was an occasion we all relished, really. You were nervous going out in front of that sort of crowd but once the game started, you just got on with it.
“It was a great, great occasion for Carlisle. Tommy Murray got the winner. We played up front together against the likes of Bobby Moncur. You wouldn’t call us the biggest players in the world. But Tommy was small, quick and sharp, and he got the goal from a header. They had a penalty towards the end, but Rossie [Allan Ross] saved it [from Ollie Burton]. What a day…”
Rudge, 79, has had more cause than normal to reflect given that he recently completed his autobiography. He had started working on the book with the sports editor of The Sentinel in Stoke, Chris Harper, but parked the project when he joined Stoke City, Port Vale’s great Potteries rivals, as director of football in 2000.
More than 20 years later, he revived it with another Stoke author, Simon Lowe, Harper having sadly died in 2014, and ‘To Cap It All’ is raising funds for a supporter-led project to build a statue of Rudge at Vale Park this year.
It is a well-woven and entertaining story of a rich life in football, and one that carries deep respect. Sir Alex Ferguson, who writes a foreword, famously said that Port Vale’s fans should “get down on their knees and thank the Lord” for Rudge, while one of the book’s other forewords is by Robbie Williams, who calls him ‘Sir John’.
His Carlisle time gets a thorough revisiting in the book too, and in conversation his affection for those days pours from Rudge. He joined United for £4,000 from Huddersfield Town in December 1966, Alan Ashman’s Carlisle embarking on only their second season in the second tier. Rudge, from Wolverhampton, had progressed as a young player in Yorkshire, and had stayed in Denis Law’s former Huddersfield digs, but Cumbria offered first-team football.
“I hadn’t played that many games at Huddersfield,” he says. “The competition was stiff there and they had two or three very good players up front. Coming to Carlisle was a good step for me.
“In terms of playing, I was 22 by then and it was what I needed, and we had some decent players at the time, like Georgie McVitie, Tommy Murray and Welshie [Eric Welsh]. In terms of life, I’d just got married [to Del] and our first home was in the club house in Carlisle. It was £2 7s 6d per week in rent. That was par for the course back then, and a number of players lived very close to one another.
“It was a good club. The atmosphere was very good.”
Rudge also found Carlisle attractive because one of his Huddersfield contemporaries was now there, becoming a United great. “I spoke to Chris Balderstone before I signed, and he said, ‘Come up – we’ve got a good team’.”
“We were friends. Our relationship was very good. And he was an exceptionally good player, Baldy. Not the greatest with pace, but a very good passer of the ball.
“He was an exceptionally good golfer as well. We used to go to Scotland many times, playing golf – not that I was a great golfer. He was, though...
“And of course he was a brilliant cricketer. There was a stage where he’d play cricket in the afternoon then come and play football at the night. You couldn’t believe that. We used to go out together on a regular basis with our wives. It was a really sad day when he died [in 2000]. It was a shock, really. He wasn’t even 60.”
United, in Rudge’s first season, finished an impressive third in Division Two. The run-in saw a goal in Rudge’s second appearance, against his former employers Huddersfield, then further strikes against Portsmouth and Rotherham United, before a clinical hat-trick in a last-day 6-1 win against Bolton.
As line leader, Rudge adjusted to a proficient style of play in which Young, the trainer, was pivotal. “Dick used to be, ‘control, pass, move, control, pass, move’.
“A lot of the work we did was two-to-the-ball. Me and Chris Balderstone always used to be together. Training facilities were poor, and we used to do quite a bit of training on the car park on the concrete. As players, you always think you know best, and there’d be times when, after the same drill time and again, we’d go, ‘Bloody hell, Dick, what are we doing now?!’
“But he’d say, ‘Get on with it, Rudgey’. It soon registered how good a coach he was. I can assure you of that. When I went into management, I took a lot of his ideas and tried to illustrate that in my own play. I realised then that Dick knew more than I did…”
Rudge further realised Young’s wisdom when he started taking his own coaching qualifications at Carlisle, entailing visits to Lilleshall as well as work at some Cumbrian schools. This proved a wise early initiative in his career given how his playing days panned out, even with Carlisle.
“In my initial time, I scored a few goals, but my big problem was I was a bit injury-prone,” he says. “That was my problem for most of my career – it actually finished me off at the end.
“One newspaper guy at Bristol Rovers said I’d pull a muscle putting my tracksuit on. He wasn’t far wrong either. I wouldn’t say I was the strongest regarding my physique, but I used to be quick. Yet training was so different then. On Friday mornings we’d be doing sprints in spikes…and oh, my hamstring’s gone again. My injury problems did disrupt my football career immensely.”
Before injuries sidelined him, Rudge had the pleasure of a season, 1967/68, alongside Hugh McIlmoyle at centre-forward. United’s greatest player had returned for a second spell. “They paid a lot of money for him, I think,” says Rudge. “He was an outstanding player.”
The only issue, he says, came when it was discovered that McIlmoyle was earning more than anyone else at Brunton Park. They seem trifling figures now but not in the late 1960s. “We were on £27.50 a week, all of us, but when we found out [McIlmoyle] was on £35 a week there was a bit of an outburst. He was getting money for writing in the paper and that sort of thing. It didn’t go down too well at all.
“He was a great player, of course. And we did get bonuses – and a particularly good bonus when we went to Newcastle and beat them. But everybody was on the same, unlike how it is now. My wife was a hairdresser and she was getting more than me!”
It was a period of high crowds by United’s standards, too. “We were averaging about 12-13,000. That was always estimated, because of the population in Carlisle, to be as good as many other teams were getting relative to their areas. It was a good place to play.”
Life on the road was enjoyable too, but at times arduous. “I remember coming back from a 5-0 hiding at Crystal Palace, and the coach broke down at Shap. The M6 wasn’t open then, of course, and it took forever to get home. We got back in the small hours and the next day discovered the manager [Tim Ward] had got the sack.”
Ward, Ashman’s successor who was in charge on that famous day at Newcastle, had not been able to sustain the same progress and his departure preceded the end for Rudge at Carlisle.
“After the manager left, the directors picked the team and left three of us out. I was one of them – and they went something like 16 games without getting beat. So I couldn’t get in the team. I was sub, coming on now and then, but then I moved on.”
Rudge departed for the other end of England with Torquay United. “It was five degrees warmer,” he laughs. “Instead of scraping frost off the windows, we were getting the sunbed out in the garden.” After further moves to Bristol Rovers and AFC Bournemouth, injuries led to his retirement at 32.
So began the second phase of his footballing life, when a coaching spell at Torquay was followed by a switch to Port Vale where, after three years, he was appointed manager – going on to stay in the position for 15 years. At Vale Park, Rudge built and presided over some outstanding teams, and also harked back to Carlisle in how he operated.
United, he says, were well known for bartering for players on the fringes of other clubs and turning them into an outstanding collective. “That was a big part of their success, and I tried to emulate that at Port Vale. I sold £10m worth of players and it cost £5m.”
Rudge, after his enduring Valiants spell, took the director of football position at Stoke City through further eventful times, which included promotion to the Premier League under Tony Pulis. He was there from 2000 to 2013 yet, when he returned to Vale in an advisory role to manager Neil Aspin in 2017, his crossing and recrossing of the divide had not cost Rudge any of the respect which he had built. Two years later, he was appointed Port Vale’s president.
He now travels to games with the club’s respected owners, Carol and Kevin Shanahan, and has seen enough of the game to know a good leader of a club and a bad one. “With the Coates family at Stoke as well, I’m fortunate to have had good owners,” he says.
“I have to say, when I was at Carlisle, I was very impressed with the American owners [the Piatak family]. I was on the table and we had a meal before the game, and they were very hospitable, I’ll give them that.
“I can’t imagine how they can do it, managing the club over in America, coming over here, going back and forth…that’s difficult. But I hope they do well. I do always look at the results to see how Carlisle are doing. Being there was always a real good memory for me.”
Rudge jogged that memory further when, last April, he revisited his old haunts in the city. “It’s not long since my two daughters said to me, ‘We’d like to know where we used to live and grew up’. So we’ve done the rounds – we’ve been back to Huddersfield, then we went to Carlisle.
“We went to the house where we used to live. It had changed a little bit – there’s an extension on it now – but it was still recognisable. The staff at the club showed us round Brunton Park, too. It hadn’t changed a great deal – there’s the new stand [the East Stand], but much of it was the same.
“It was a nice aspect, to be able to look back at the place where I’d first come at 22. The truth is, I’ll always be very grateful for that time.”
‘To Cap It All’ by John Rudge with Simon Lowe is published by Pitch Publishing, priced £25. John’s royalties will go towards the £100,000 statue appeal. The book can be bought via tocapitall.co.uk.
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