Pierce’s Path Made Him A Favourite In Yorkshire, Too
By David Instone
Gary Pierce (centre) with Frank Munro and Phil Parkes.
It wasn’t only about the League Cup final as far as Gary Pierce’s first-team Wolves career was concerned. There was much more.
True as it is that everything was likely to be downhill after March 2, 1974, he still continued to give good value as cover, competition and intermittent replacement for Phil Parkes.
The famous Wembley heroics came mid-way through a nine-game cameo in the senior side, then, in the same way that the unlucky Lofty had been hurt on the practice pitches, the 1973 signing succumbed to a training-ground injury, too.
The more established man returned for the last eight games of the League Cup-winning season and kept his place for the first two months of 1974-75, then Pierce was in again for a shorter spell.
There was a substantial job-share element between the two across the three years book-ended by Parkes’s ever-present contribution to the ‘near-miss’ 1972-73 campaign and Pierce’s full house of appearances in the march to the 1976-77 Second Division title.
In my Wolves 1970s Scrapbook, I raised the question of whether Bill McGarry was undecided about who his better keeper was or whether he deliberately rotated to keep them on their toes and hungry. Well….the manager would surely have put up with half a dozen ropey performances from the former Huddersfield man in exchange for the absolute blinder we savoured beneath the twin towers.
All he touched that afternoon turned, almost literally, to gold. If it had been customary in the mid-1970s for a man of the match to be named, the decision would hardly have been a cliff-hanger.
In 90 spectacular minutes, he leapt, dived, fingertipped and cavorted his way to national prominence, a lucky charm apparently helping make his 23rd birthday an utterly life-changing experience.
Frank Munro swapped shirts with Denis Law. Gary Pierce (background) was happy merely to put on a gold and black cap.
Some of the post-match photographs show him in a gold and black cloth cap – given to him by Les Green, a Londoner and retired long-time Wolves’ academy scout who still lives in Tettenhall Wood. Les bought the item in the old North Bank souvenir shop and wore it on the club’s UEFA Cup trips to Academica Coimbra, Den Haag and Juventus in 1971-72. But he agreed to his good pal having it to keep his gloves in during the build-up to Wembley and hopefully bring him good fortune – something it started to do when he saved an Alex Stepney penalty in a 0-0 draw at Manchester United.
The two watched the highlights of the final at Gary’s Codsall home the following day as the unexpected hero and his then wife Jo contemplated the new-found fame. At Wembley and before, those black and gold tracksuits were a major talking point. It wasn’t long before the gift of black and gold Volkswagens for the players reflected the raising of the bar.
Pierce had gone from rags to riches quicker and more spectacularly than most. Born in Bury, he took his first steps in football across Greater Manchester at Mossley in the Cheshire League. The man who took a punt on him in the professional game was none other than Ian Greaves – then manager of Huddersfield and destined to take charge at Molineux around a decade later.
The £3,000 that transported the player to Leeds Road in 1971 was a record windfall for the non-Leaguers and did not come as a big surprise. Crystal Palace, Arsenal and Leicester had shown an interest in him even in his late teens.
At the time, though, Huddersfield were short of options after regular no 1 Terry Poole suffered a broken leg. Greaves sent his coach, Roy MacLaren – brother of 1960s Wolves keeper and coach Dave MacLaren – to watch him and received the seal of approval.
Pierce was handed his senior chance by the Terriers in a First Division game at Newcastle in August, 1971, impressing with a clean sheet in a 0-0 draw. The Huddersfield Examiner reported: “He can look back on an extremely satisfactory game and handled shots with the confidence of a goalkeeper with a ton of appearances behind him.”
His Leeds Road debut came the following Saturday in a 2-1 defeat against Chelsea and, after returning to the reserves, he resurfaced in the January in a 1-0 defeat against League champions Arsenal and another 0-0 draw against Newcastle. In the latter game, he was credited with making some important saves, notably from the in-form Malcolm Macdonald.
His first sustained run in the side came from March in Huddersfield’s dismal 1971-72 relegation season. A six-match cameo brought four draws and two defeats and he didn’t savour a first-team victory until a 2-0 Second Division win over Oxford several months later.
By then, he had been introduced to the League Cup, in a narrow defeat at Tottenham, but ran into problems in a 1-1 League draw at Swindon. After saving a penalty, he protested about the referee’s decision to order a retake and was bizarrely booked and sent off in quick succession.
Pierce received a three-match ban and played only one more game for the club before joining Wolves in July, 1973 for just over £40,000.
By huge coincidence, his debut came three weeks into the new season at Newcastle, the venue at which he had been blooded by Huddersfield. He was outstanding at St James’ Park and kept the home side out for 85 minutes until conceding two match-winning goals. It was the first of eight successive appearances that included the home and away wins against Belenenses in the UEFA Cup.
Parkes was back before the end of October, though, and that was that until the freak injury that, after playing in every round of the League Cup from Halifax to Norwich, spelled heartbreak for the local boy.
Pierce stepped back in for the February 2 home draw against Stoke that might also have cost Frank Munro his Wembley place and stayed in until his friendly rival returned on March 30. That was for the draw at, of all places, Manchester City.
Pierce throws himself bravely into the firing line at Bolton in 1977 – the game in which he was carried off injured following a collision with Sam Allardyce.
It’s ironic given the in-and-out existence the two men experienced for three seasons that Pierce should then play throughout Wolves’ Second Division title triumph under Sammy Chung. Or at least until he was carried off hurt in the final minutes of the last game. There being no goalkeeper substitutes in League games in those days, Lofty was not on the bench at Bolton and Bobby Gould put the keeper’s jersey on amid the preservation of a 1-0 lead.
And a new problem surfaced the other side of the summer break, with Pierce suffering a wrist injury in a pre-season Superstars event at Bristol City – by further coincidence, the venue for Wolves’ opening game of 1977-78 not long after.
A bigger obstacle to his progress came a few weeks later – in the shape of new signing Paul Bradshaw, the man who kept a clean sheet in Wolves’ second League Cup glory.
Only once more apiece did first-team opportunity knock for his two predecessors, in Pierce’s case for a three-game run in the autumn of 1978 in the final weeks of Chung’s reign.
He faced Arsenal, Middlesbrough and Manchester United, amid contrasting fortunes, to take his final appearance tally for the club to 111, his total of League outings remaining frustratingly in double figures at 98.
Pierce remained at Molineux until 1979 before moving to Third Division Barnsley, where he played more than 80 games across four seasons under Allan Clarke and then Norman Hunter – most of them behind the red wall that was Mick McCarthy and Ian ‘Taff’ Evans.
He was a room-mate of the Republic of Ireland favourite and became close enough pals with him to send a congratulatory message to Compton in 2009 after McCarthy’s Wolves side had won promotion back to the Premier League. He had also paid the manager a visit at the training ground only a few weeks earlier.
Blackpool then became Pierce’s final full-time professional club, a 27-game run in Sam Ellis’s side coming during a season in which the Seasiders used five different keepers. His last League match was a 3-2 defeat at Aldershot in May, 1984.
Stints in non-League followed at Accrington, Rossendale, Chorley and back at Mossley before he had a bash in management at Netherfield.
We have never been aware of Gary doing a lot outside the game since, although wikipedia mentions work as a delivery driver in addition to him drawing early on his player’s pension.
Gary at home in Bury 17 years ago.
When I called out of the blue on his home in Bury en route to covering a Burnley v Sheffield United game in April, 2008, I remember being struck by the disappointment of how little he had apparently been left with, materially at least.
But after his slow and somewhat bleary-eyed mid-afternoon answering of the door, he warmed up to give me a lovely hour’s company and reminiscences, the two of us having met at a book event and dinner a decade or so earlier.
He subsequently went off the radar for a few years but came to Molineux for Kenny Hibbitt’s book launch and the last of his occasional returns to Wolverhampton was just over a year ago for the 50-year League Cup stage celebration at the Grand Theatre.
He had his health problems for several years and his family life was sometimes chaotic. Summerbee, Bell, Lee, Law, Marsh? Gary had enough kids to fill a forward line of his own but the players loved his happy-go-lucky nature and will always be grateful for his outstanding contribution in March, 1974.