Why Dixie Dean is a modern-day great

May 5 2008 by Chris Beesley, Liverpool Daily Post

TODAY is the 80th Anniversary of Dixie Dean reaching his record-breaking 60-goal landmark for a single season.Christopher Beesley examines how he was able to get to such a total at that particular time and how he compares to the leading forwards of other eras.

IN an age when an increasing number of players and even fans are unable to remember football before the formation of the Premier League and 1992 having become ‘year zero’ when it comes to the modern game, it can be easy to dismiss Dixie Dean’s goalscoring feats as ancient history and something of an irrelevance to the sport which is now watched by a global audience.

With even the greatest 21st century goalscorers struggling to average a goal a game and even ‘one-in-two’ strikers worth far more than their weight in gold, detractors will point to someone who averaged better than a goal-and-a-half a game over an entire season as not competing on a level playing field.

But the more you look into Dean’s achievement, the more staggering it becomes because all the prejudices the contemporary eye might cast towards goalscoring in the 1920s melt away.

With lightweight boots, kit and balls and advances in training techniques and players’ diets, today’s fast-paced game is undoubtedly very different to the battles in the mud with a lace ball that Dean endured some eight decades ago.

Yet one thing that remains the same is the dimensions of the goal posts and no other player at any time before or since has got within 11 goals of Dean in English football’s top flight and intriguingly he was a fellow native of Birkenhead – Tom ‘Pongo’ Waring, who struck 49 times for Aston Villa in 1930/31, the only season that Dean spent outside the top flight with Everton.

So the idea that 60 might just have been ‘par for the course’ in the days of huge baggy shorts and Brylcreem is actually way of the mark.

Although he maintained a continually impressive scoring ratio throughout his 13-year spell at Goodison Park and his 383 goals for Everton in 433 appearances remains a single-club record in England, Dean himself was unable to get anywhere near to his magical 60 figure – surely the safest record in football – in his subsequent seasons.

His best League total post-1928 was the 45 he plundered in Everton’s 1932 title-winning campaign.

Comparing players and particularly goalscorers from different eras is a tricky task which is never an exact science but one put-down often thrown at Dean is that in an age of lax defences there were far more goals in the game and it was supposedly ‘easy’ to score.

It can’t be disputed that football was considerably more ‘attack-minded’ in the 1920s and marking was not as tight – although Dean, who underwent more than a dozen operations including the removal of a testicle, was never short of physical attention from opposition defenders who adopted a whole manner of ploys to try and stop him.

So with far more goals being scored generally, perhaps more than just the leading scorer’s total needs to be taken into consideration when assessing ‘greatness.’

Thankfully, a diligent gentleman called Trevor Powell, someone with far more patience and time on his hands than myself, has compiled a list of English football’s leading scorers and rates their achievements as a percentage of the total number of goals scored in the division that season.

So if twice as many goals were scored back then, a forward would need to score double the number of goals to ensue parity with a contemporary frontman.

Even using this method, Dean remains head and shoulders above his peers with his 60 goals out of the 1765 netted in 1927/28, the only time a player has had an individual share of more than 3% of the overall total.

Dean’s figure put him at 3.4% while under this system, modern hero Alan Shearer, perhaps the nearest modern equivalent to Dean in playing style, comes next best with his 34 goals in Blackburn solitary Premier League triumph of 1995 giving him a 2.85% share of the 1195 goals that year.

Just behind him is Manchester City’s Francis Lee whose 33 goals in 1972 give him a 2.84% total and he is followed by Clive Allen (33 goals for Tottenham in 1987, 2.72%) and Thierry Henry (30 goals for Arsenal in 2004, 2.69%), a percentage with matches Waring’s 49 goals in 1931.

Dean’s total is also remarkable because it was set in the top flight and even lower division goalscorers have been able to match it against lesser opposition in the lower reaches of the Football League.

Of course the closest anyone has ever got to matching it is George Camsell’s 59 goals for Middlesbrough in the Second Division (now Championship) which had only been set the previous season in 1926/27 while the 50-goal barrier has only been broken on just three other occasions with both Joe Payne and Ted Hartson hitting 55 for Luton Town and Mansfield Town respectively in Division Three South and North in 1936/37 and Terry Bly netting 52 for Peterborough in Division Four in 1960/61.

The main reason why leading marksmen were able to plunder so many goals in the late 1920s and 1930s is mostly down to a relaxation in the offside law.

With canny defenders like Newcastle’s Billy McCracken having become masters of adopting the ‘offside trap’ to thwart opposition forwards, the game’s officials relaxed the offside law in 1925 ensuring that there only needed to be two players between the attacking player and the ball instead of three.

Scoring rose dramatically from 4,700 goals in the Football League in 1924/25 season to 6,373 the following year (both over 1,848 matches). Predators like Camsell and Dean needed no invitation to make hay while the sun shined but gradually, the centre-forward’s task became more difficult again as sides like Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal withdrew the centre-half from a midfield to defensive position.

It would be foolish to suggest that Dean would come close to scoring 60 League goals in as season if he were in his prime today but the real question is would any of our modern strikers get near to his figure if they’d been around in 1928. History shows us that there lies the far greater doubt.

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