Wolves striker Steve Bull for England - it could never happen now

Third Division player… picked for England… scores on debut.

You can almost see that storyline screwed up and sailing into the wastepaper bin during a brainstorming session at Roy of the Rovers comic. But in 1989 it really happened to a crop-haired goalbasher from Tipton by the name of Stephen George Bull.

Bully’s rise was faster than meteoric. Aged twenty, he was still working gruelling thirteen-hour warehouse shifts, seven days a week. “When I see footballers who don’t give their all I feel like telling them to get down a factory and see how they like it. It might buck their ideas up a bit,” he told Shoot! magazine.

His manager at Tipton Town recommended Bull to West Brom, where he made just six appearances and scored three goals. Despite a 1:2 scoring ratio, Ron Saunders offloaded Bull after fifteen months – big mistake, and it gets worse – to bitter local rivals Wolves for a bargain £35,000.

Bull scored nineteen goals in his first season, even though he didn’t arrive until November – and then he really got his shooting boots on in 1987-88, scoring an incredible 52 goals in all competitions as Wolves romped to the Division Four title. Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke he then scored another fifty the next season as Wolves topped the Third.

The England set-up was alerted to this emerging goal machine and Bull was fast-tracked through the England Under-21 side, despite being over-age.

On Saturday 27 May 1989, England played Scotland at Hampden Park. They were 1-0 up through a Chris Waddle header when John Fashanu limped off before half-time, replaced by the bristling debutant. The man who had spent his season terrorising defences from Exeter to Darlington now did the same in front of 63,000 Scotsmen on the international stage.

With ten minutes remaining, Gary Stevens launched a long ball forward, Bull leapt up for an aerial challenge and the ball skidded off his back. In a split second he’d turned and fired a blistering shot past Jim Leighton in the Scots goal. As the tartan masses hit the exits, Bull was congratulated by Bryan Robson, Chris Waddle and Paul Gascoigne. He must have thought he was going to wake up back in that warehouse at any minute.

As it turned out, Bull’s international career was short-lived, his fourteenth and final cap coming against Poland in October 1990. He paid the price for his loyalty, sticking with Wolves who had stalled in Division Two.

Bully wasn’t the first Third Division player to pull on an England shirt – Tommy Lawton of Notts County did it in 1947-48; Coventry’s Reg Matthews got five caps in the mid Fifties; Crystal Palace’s Johnny Byrne played one game in the early Sixties, and Peter Taylor, also of Palace, got four caps in
1975-76 – but in the days when oversize Premier squads Hoover up all the available talent, he’ll almost certainly be the last.

This article is taken from the from the wonderful book Got, Not Got – The A-Z of lost football culture, treasures and pleasures by Derek Hammond & Gary Silke. More of the same can be found on their equally superb blog.

Tags: Premier League, Steve Bull, Wolves