More Wilbur Cush, the talk of Sweden: Leeds at the World Cup
A Swedish fan suggested Northern Ireland get themselves ready for West Germany in training: 'To prepare yourselves for it you should collect many small boys with cow bells, cow horns and other instruments to keep up a steady racket.'
New books!
I've got two new books available:
Season 2025/26 collects all my writing from last season into one large format softback book, with photos by the brilliant Lee Brown. This is available for pre-order, and buying it now helps me order the right amount from the printers, so please don't delay!
Europe, 2000/01 brings the articles I wrote this year on the 25th anniversary of every Champions League match together in a pocket paperback format, 164 pages of (mostly) great memories. This is available now!
If you order both, you'll automatically get a £2 discount at the checkout.
Leedsista is entirely written by me, a human person, and entirely funded by people like you, Leeds fans, who think decent non-AI, non-clickbait writing about their football team is worth £3 a month to read or £5 a month to listen to the podcast version.
If you enjoy reading what I write, I hope you'll consider becoming a paying member to help keep it getting written.
Find out what you can get with a 30 day free trial:
We can't just leave Wilbur Cush where we left him, happy though he was on 10th June 1958 as Leeds United and Northern Ireland's first goalscorer at a World Cup, his header defeating Czechoslovakia on its own, the 'Pocket Hercules' crowning a superb year, of honours with Glenavon and Leeds and getting engaged to part-time model Joyce, by becoming the 'talk of Sweden' and celebrating his 30th birthday, which people thought was his 29th. I won't tell them if you won't.
We can't leave him there because his and Northern Ireland's good run in Sweden didn't end there. Admittedly their second game, against Argentina, didn't yield a successful result. But then, Argentina had been preparing diligently for the World Cup for three years, training a group of thirty players from which they chose their tournament 22. Northern Ireland, by comparison, had capped their squad at seventeen because those were all the good players they could find. A 3-1 defeat, in those circumstances, didn't look so bad.
And the football Northern Ireland played looked great, to the delight of local fans in Halmstad who had adopted the side as their own. They outplayed Argentina for the first half-an-hour, and it had only taken four minutes for Peter McParland to head them ahead from a Wilbur Cush cross. Firm in defence, in control of their individually skilful opponents, Northern Ireland kept snapping the ball to their wingers where combinations between Cush and Billy Bingham were as impressive as they'd been against the Czechs. The team's play, according to the Belfast Telegraph, was better than anything they'd done in years.
Then they changed it, and that was the mystery. Cush was pushed upfront with Fay Coyle and they went 'kick and rush' against Argentina's two big, experienced centre-backs. Argentina sensed their opportunity and started putting their quality to use. There was no doubt for anyone watching that every Argentina player was better than their rival from Northern Ireland, but mingled admiration and dismay that the Irish hadn't kept making that as irrelevant as they had in the opening stages.
To qualify from their group, Northern Ireland now needed a result against West Germany, the reigning World Champions, determined to hold that status. The big problem in the build-up was who to play in attack, with Billy Simpson injured and neither Derek Dougan or Fay Coyle impressing so far. The job went to Tommy Casey, a wing-half, who wasn't massively enthused about it.
The other problem was the enthusiasm of the 10,000 fans travelling from West Germany for the game in Malmö. A Swedish fan suggested Northern Ireland get themselves ready for it in training: 'To prepare yourselves for it you should collect many small boys with cow bells, cow horns and other instruments to keep up a steady racket.'
To keep reading, please become a More to Read or More Listening member
Leedsista is supported by Leeds fans who think decent writing about their football team is worth £3 a month to read, or £5 a month for a podcast version.
Try free for 30 days.