RIP Jimmy Hill

[Sutekh]

Really sad news in Jimmy's passing, another from the classic years of the game and the much missed simpler media coverage gone

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/35141430

Believe he also was on Reading's books in the 1950s but was released after one game for the A team.

RIP Jim.

[Deadlock]

Sad news. I still remember being surprised when he shaved his beard off only to reveal his chin was the same shape.

[AthleticoSpizz]

Whilst I remember him playing a bit-part in Mary Millington movie.

[From Despair To Where?]

Remembered latterly as a doddery old pundit but in his day a innovator both as a players rep and a club chairman and one of the few administrators who can reasonably claim to have made the game better for their actions.

I will remember him fondly for laughing like a maniac in the background every time Lineker scored against Poland at Mexico 86.

[The Cube]

From "Striking For Soccer" by Jimmy Hill 1961:

Ted Drake, the then Reading manager, had watched me in one of the unit matches and passed on the message to Derek Ufton that if either he or I was interested in going to Reading when we had finished in the army, he would welcome us there. It was only when the Stock Exchange was having a very thin time when I left the army that I decided to take advantage of his offer. This, coupled with the fact that I still felt unfit and not quite ready to play, even as an amateur, made me seize the opportunity to travel to Reading. I figured that the full-time training I might get there for a week or so while I was on demob leave would toughen up my leg.

One morning I took the train to Reading, walked into the office at the Elm Park ground and said: "I am Jimmy Hill. Mr Drake once said that if I wanted to come for a trial he would welcome me and, although I didn't want to play a match so soon, he pushed me into a trial match on the next Tuesday morning. I must have impressed him slightly in this match for he suggested that I should stay on at Reading and play for them as an amateur. I did this for some six months, playing mostly in the third team and, towards the end, a match or two in the Combination side. At the end of this time, he broke the news to me that he didn't want to sign me as a professional. Up to this time I hadn't really wanted to be a professional player; I was merely using Reading to get myself fit so that I could take another job and play as an amateur on Saturday afternoons. But the fact that Mr Drake didn't think I was good enough seemed to inspire me. For the first time since my early days at school, the ambition to become a professional returned. When he said that the manager of a London club, who had seen me playing at Reading, would be interested in signing me, I got an introduction to Brentford and Mr Jack Gibbons, the manager. He offered me, when I met him, the magnificent contract of £7 a week in the winter and £5 in the summer to play as a professional for Brentford....A few weeks after the season started I was Brentford's centre-forward against Leicester City in a Second Division match.

I think this was 1948/49. "Third team" essentially means youth team. In a later autobiography Hill mentioned that whilst with Reading his digs were in Donkin Hill, Caversham.

Also means that this is now on the wrong board...