Everton are heading to Seamus Coleman's previous club Sligo Rovers where Dixie Dean played late in his career
Everton’s announcement that they are returning to Seamus Coleman ’s previous team Sligo Rovers has brought back memories of the two clubs’ previous connection when the Blues’ most-celebrated player Dixie Dean was lured across the Irish Sea in a sensational transfer.
Paul Little sheds light on this curious tale though as he explores Dean’s time at Sligo Rovers in Pitch Publishing’s In the Shadow of Benbulben. The title comes from the large flat-topped rock, part of the Dartry Mountains, which dominates the landscape around the seaport on Connacht’s wild Atlantic coastline where Everton’s record goalscorer briefly went to play in 1939.
Affectionately known by their supporters as the ‘Bit O’Red’, Sligo’s team had only been formed in 1928 – the year of Dean’s record-breaking 60-goal season but at the time they were an ambitious outfit eager to acquire a big name from England to spearhead their attack. While Dean himself made no bones of the financial incentives that facilitated the audacious swoop, back in devoutly Catholic Ireland, local newspaper the Sligo Champion hinted at possible divine intervention, proclaiming: “Given the enormity of what they had pulled off, the club’s committee members would have been forgiven for wondering if some greater power was at work.
“William Ralph Dixie Dean is not on the morning train from Dublin. And one can only imagine the disappointment, the shock, as the train empties and the platform clears and the biggest star ever to come to Sligo doesn’t in fact come to Sligo. “Perhaps the report in the Irish Independent the previous Tuesday, stating that Dean had only agreed to help find players for the club and that he had ‘definitely declined to make a personal appearance’, was true after all?
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