Len Shackleton: our clown, our genius … and more golden memories



Close season seems a good time to be dipping gratefully into the archive. Here is a gem you may have missed, or rather the story surrounding it and the additional reminiscences it inspired. There are one or two links to follow but it is worth the effort …

It is not often that comments keep trickling in long after a posting has all but been forgotten, buried in the archives and popping up again only when someone does a specific Google search.

But there will be no surprise that it has happened with an article that appeared here last year, since the article was about Len Shackleton and was published not before the 10th anniversary of his death. The reason for returning to the Shack theme is simple: among the comments that were posted were three or four that added superbly to the fund of knowledge we have about one of the most gifted and also most eccentric players to grace the English game, better still in Sunderland colours.

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Len Shackleton: a clown, maybe, but a genius too

Two months from now, we will reach the 10th anniversary of the death of Len Shackleton, one of the greatest players – and arguably the most charismatic – to wear the red and white stripes of Sunderland AFC.

Salut! Sunderland thanks Mark Walton, at the Blackcats list, for a link to a superb BBC 5 Live documentary presented by Jimmy Armfield a few years before Shack’s death.

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