Liverpool is crowned Premier League champions

This isn’t the first time Liverpool have won the league while watching on from the sidelines. In 1947, they beat fellow challengers Wolves in their final game of a weather-hit season. They were top, but had to wait a fortnight for Stoke City to finish their campaign.

If Stoke won at Sheffield United, they’d be champions. But they’d preposterously sold star man Stanley Matthews during the run-in (!) and lost, so the title was Liverpool’s. They were told the news midway through a local-cup kickabout with Everton.

Here we remember Albert Stubbins, goalscorer and Sgt Pepper cover star, whose winner against Wolves secured the prize.

On the sleeve of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is the image of a footballer: Albert Stubbins in his Liverpool heyday, red shirt, red hair. He was a hero to thousands of Liverpool fans and, intriguingly, to fans of his original club, Newcastle United. Indeed, it might be said that Stubbins’s fame has actually increased on Tyneside since his retirement, long ago.

Stubbins, who has died aged 82, was a Geordie, born at Wallsend. His parents took him to the United States for two years just after his birth. They went back there at the beginning of the depression and Stubbins spent a number of years in the US.

At the start of his sports career he signed amateur forms for Sunderland, but on the peculiar understanding that if Newcastle United showed an interest in making him a professional, he could leave. This happened in April 1937. Trained as a draughtsman, he scored prolifically for Newcastle during the war, when official competitions were suspended.

Powerfully built, standing 5 foot 11 inches tall and weighing 12 stone 10 pounds, he was his era’s complete centre-forward: fast, strong, technically competent, adept, as they used to say, at holding his line together, formidable in the air. In keeping with his genial character, he never went selfishly in search of goals, though in those war years he was the country’s top scorer. In the 1945-46 transitional season, before League football was restarted, he scored no fewer than 39 goals in the Northern League for Newcastle. Always robust, but never unfair.

The second-highest Newcastle scorer was a young outside-right called Jackie Milburn, with just 14 goals. Milburn, moving to centre-forward, would, as “Wor Jackie”, become a greater icon on Tyneside than Stubbins, but many fans and journalists believe that Stubbins was a still better centre-forward. Despite all Stubbins’s goals, Newcastle finished only in sixth position in the Northern League that season.

It was also the season in which Stubbins made his only appearance for the English international team. It came in an ill-starred game on October 20 1945, against Wales at West Bromwich. The Welsh, famous for being able to rise above themselves, won 1-0. Stubbins never had another England chance and since this was a so-called “victory international”, he did not ever win a full cap.

In September 1946, Newcastle transferred him to Liverpool for a then huge fee of £13,000. Playing alongside a shrewd inside-right in the form of Jack Balmer, he finished as joint top scorer in the league; they got 24 goals each.

Liverpool narrowly won the championship, although probably would not have done so had the season not been prolonged by appalling winter weather. Wolverhampton Wanderers seemed to be running away with the championship, but in their and Liverpool’s last game at Molineux, the Merseysiders won 2-1, Stubbins scoring their second goal. The title, however, was still to be secured, and if Stoke City won their final game, the following fortnight, it was theirs on goal average. But though they had gone 11 league games undefeated, Stoke lost 2-1 at Sheffield United.

Stubbins continued to flourish in the 1947-48 season. I remember him side-footing two goals against the eventual league champions, Arsenal, on Boxing Day 1947, exploiting passes from the right wing by Billy Liddell, the Scottish winger with whom he combined so successfully. Liverpool won 2-1; I watched it as an Arsenal fan. “Sorry I spoiled your Boxing Day!” was the message Stubbins sent me, 50 years later.

Liverpool were unquestionably lucky to get him. He had asked Newcastle for a transfer, and at least 18 clubs had made inquiries. Liverpool, using a recognised centre-half, Bill Jones, at centre-forward, had just been thrashed by Manchester United in an early 1946-47 league game when they beat all opposition to Stubbins’s transfer.

After his 24 goals in 36 games when the league was won, he added another 26 in 40 matches the next season. Then something seemed to go wrong. He became unhappy at Anfield, and asked for, but did not get, a transfer. He played five more seasons for Liverpool, yet scored only 27 more goals in the First Division.

He did help the club to reach the 1950 FA Cup Final against Arsenal, when at Wembley he led the attack, though not fully recovered from an injury. The last of his first-team appearances was at Stoke on January 3 1953. In 1960, he briefly became manager of the semi-professional New York Americans. He then returned to the north-east, where he became a popular sports writer. In the late 1990s, the local branch of the Football Writers’ Association gave him a gala dinner.