Quintin Jardine's blog

Just over fifty years ago, Motherwell, the football club with which I have been cursed from the day that my dad lifted me over the turnstile, had a side known then and now as the Ancell Babes. It was a top quality team in what was then a top quality league, not the rest home for continental wasters that it has become.  I have a gym mate in Gullane, Murray Ancell, who is the son of the manager who created it and whose name it bears to this day. A few weeks ago Murray asked me ‘Do you remember the night ‘Well beat the world club champions nine — three at Fir Park?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied ‘I was there; pissing wet Wednesday and Ian St John scored six goals.’ Ian St John was the star striker of the Babes side. ‘Sinjie’, as he was known on the terraces, was a prodigious talent who scored 80 goals in 113 games for Motherwell, and missed just as many. Three of his strikes made up what is still, I believe, the fastest hat-trick ever recorded in football, two and a half minutes against Hibs.

When he was transferred to Liverpool fifty years ago come May 2, aged 22, the fee of £37,500 was the highest ever received by Motherwell, and the highest ever paid by Liverpool. Once the deal was locked up, Bill Shankly, the driven man who built the modern Liverpool FC, confessed that he would have paid twice as much if necessary.

Yesterday, Shankly’s lineal descendant in the Liverpool family, Kenny Dalglish, paid one thousand times that amount for a striker. Andy Carroll is also aged 22, and scored 31 goals in 80 games for  Newcastle United, a 39% strike rate. He also comes with an off-field reputation that includes a criminal conviction and an impressive rap-sheet of tabloid headlines. The owners of Liverpool were able to cough up that sort of cash without blinking, and sign another player in a deal that brought their total spend up to £6om, because simultaneously they sold Fernando Torres, a sullen want-away Spaniard with a career strike rate of 47% who has done nothing more energetic this season than scratch his arse,  for a breath-taking £50m; Fifty Million Pounds. Torres is a top player, yes, and he has a World Cup Winner’s medal . . . although he did little to earn it . . . but still; Fifty Million Pounds.

Sinjie is probably playing golf somewhere today, weather permitting. Whatever he’s doing I’m sure that he will have a philosophical smile on his face as he contemplates the fee that Murray Ancell’s dad would have commanded for him, an established international centre-forward with a  71% strike rate, in the modern market.

World’s gone crazy.