The Wands of Grassmeade 1967-1973. Part 5: Strikers

In this concluding part of my mini series on players who took to the pitch at Grassmeade in the colours of Cray Wanderers during the six years that I watched them play there, I now concentrate on the plethora of strikers that the club managed to keep hold of for an average of two seasons.

The Wands were very fortunate back then, as they have always been, to have a constant supply of reasonably accurate front men. The number 9 shirt has been worn with pride by so many goalgetters and long may that continue. There is a saying that the first thing you ever witness in something can't ever be beaten. In a sense, that may be true, and in a Cray Wanderers sense the jury is still out.

I was spoilt when I first started watching Cray at Grassmeade. We had Barry Diggins. No other club had him... until towards the end of the 1967-68 season we all heard that he was on his way to Brentwood Town — then quite an accomplished Southern League side. Yep, he'd been pickpocketed from us after only two seasons of him being a natural at grabbing goals galore for the team. In his two seasons with the Wands, Diggins made 91 appearances and scored 66 goals, a veritable prolific scorer; that's roughly a 72.53% hit rate! Barry did return briefly to Grassmeade in 1972, to appear for Jimmy Paris' makeshift team, when he managed to grab one more goal during two appearances; again, an impressive strike rate of 50%.

Barry Diggins was replaced by Alan Walker, much later to become involved with Cray Wanderers in a different position in the 1980s at Oxford Road. During his time wearing the number 9 shirt, Walker scored 7 goals in 38 appearances. Then along came Graham Waghorne at the end of the 1968-69 season to blow us all away with his goalscoring ability...

Waghorne was a goalscoring phenomenon. In his 88 appearances for the club, he netted 42 times, including the absolute clincher goal at Bletchley Town in 1971 that earned the Wands a 1-1 draw and a 5-2 aggregate win in the Metropolitan League Cup Final. That's a hit rate of 47.73%. Not quite in the same league as Barry Diggins but, had the mass walkout of players not occurred in 1972 of which he was a part, I am sure that his goalscoring rate would have improved to challenge that of Diggins.

Other strikers between 1968 and 1972 included Dave Le Grice, Keith Wellham, Norman Lawrence and the infamous John Parry. Why infamous? Well, during the first half of a game in the amber kit of Cray Wanderers during the 1970-71 season, Parry took exception to a linesman's flag for a foul he allegedly committed on the visiting goalkeeper. Parry seemed to see red and lashed out at everybody within hitting distance — including the lino, who he floored with an uppercut to the jaw. The referee had no option but to send him off and he subsequently received a sine die ban from the Kent County FA. 

This ban must have been rescinded because Parry popped up again the following season and scored 12 goals in the 20 games he played for Cray before the walk out. Overall, John Parry had scored 12 goals in 28 appearances for the Wands, which was a strike rate of 42.86% which was not too far off Graham Waghorne's efforts and, who knows, Parry could possibly have equalled or even surpassed Waghorne's appearances to goals scored ratio had he not walked out on the club with the rest of the players in January 1972.

Apart from Barry Diggins' couple of appearances for Jimmy Paris' side in 1972, we were introduced to Harry Richardson for two of those makeshift team games. Big 'H', as some of us had already got to know him by, didn't manage to score but did come close on a couple of occasions I can recall. Later, of course, 'H' became the successful manager of the Wands at Oxford Road in around 1979. I had got to know 'H' quite well from my time as one of Jimmy Paris' makeshift squad and I would definitely describe him as being the gentlest of giants.

And, as I now come towards the conclusion of my mini series, like the other instalments this will also finish with the arrival of John Biddle and the 279 Chislehurst players to Grassmeade. The two main strikers were John Duffy and Terry Smart and, between them during the 1972-73 season, they amassed 34 goals, of which 16 were scored by Duffy and 18 by Smart. No other 'new' Wands players got anywhere near those targets.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this short series written over 5 parts. I know that I have enjoyed recollecting the Wands from such a long time ago, although it scares me to think that it only seems like yesterday to me when I was watching all those players. How time flies...