However, he put no obstacles in the way of his son's football progress. My three brothers - all dead now - were athletes, and I suppose the love of good, hearty games ran in our blood. Soon the village knew about it. We'd play with anything: cans, rag balls, we'd even get a pig's bladder from the butchers and if you could control that, you were a ruddy genius. The excellent country air, and the rural life we led, gave us plenty of strength and fitted us for out-door sports.It wasn't long before I was playing football at school with the other lads; but football in those days was very different to what it is now or ever will be again. Some of the boys seemed to know one another. In one game I happened to score five goals. Here I might warn against a most common error. I was never very tall, and at nine years of age I was pretty skinny, too. People tell me that the modern boy would not lower himself to such common games, that he is more interested in going to the pictures or watching television.For the sake of football I hope those people are wrong.So lads, stop reading now. Of course, that was not a conscious thought at the time, but looking back, those kickabout games on the waste ground did prepare us for life.Back alley football is only a substitute for the real thing. Still more, the untrained man blunders about the football field, throwing himself blindly into danger, and proving a frequent source of accident to himself and others. I was only 13, so in the physical stakes I was quite some way behind lads of 14 and 15. As a youngster in Bolton I played whenever I could, sometimes with a tennis ball, sometimes with a rag ball, and, on special occasions, with a real live football.The first person to spot that I had any talent out of the ordinary was my grandfather, James Hugh Riley. So he kept me behind after school, took me on to the field, and made me practise left-foot shooting. This was especially true of coalmining areas. Looking back now, I cannot remember any time when I was not certain that one day, somewhere, I would earn my living on the football field...Football filled my every waking hour. In my mind, this basic field was Deepdale and I was the inside-left, Alex James. Why, everybody in Bellshill, knew what players they were! "Not so bad. So I was immediately put into the forward line where I remained for the rest of my playing days.Then I had ambitions of becoming a centre-half, but I was too small for the position. My reasoning behind this is quite simple. I was of the mind that to be picked for England Schoolboys was something that happened to other boys, not me.I felt I was making good progress. Four years later England played their first game against Scotland in Newcastle. It isn't quite that; and, in any case, in junior football, it isn't a bad idea for a boy to have a go at centre-half and to regard it as a position in which he has to be the complete footballer...When I first played in the team of St. Mary's School, Tyne Dock, South Shields, I was only nine. schoolboy international Gary Hargreaves in an early episode of Grange Hill, when Hargreaves had been acting all cocky with his mates. It was as if I had been born to it.
I made my way to the players' entrance and there was my father in his belted overcoat, clutching a brown paper bag in which he had his sandwich tin. We played in a school league, and I am afraid we were usually somewhere near the wrong end of the table...Mr. Young re-formed an old club known as St. Andrews, and called it South Shields Ex-Schoolboys Club... We had the advantage of having played together at school and were all pals, so we soon became a pretty hot combination. I must have been doing something right on the wing for later that year, I was selected to play for the North against the South in an England Schoolboy trial.Even to this day, the lads picked for England Schoolboys tend to be the ones who have physically matured quicker than others. At that time Robert was 35 and may have been involved in war-work for a couple of years because the license reverted to him shortly after peace was restored.
England national under-16 football team, also known as England under-16s or England U16(s), represents England in association football at an under-16 age level and is controlled by the Football Association, the governing body for football in England A number of the other players seemed to know how to go on, but I simply hadn't a clue and was full of anxiety in case I made a dreadful faux pas. Lee was a meticulous sports master. Probably he did not want a serious injury to blight Raich's life in the way his own had been affected.In August 1916 the license for the Ocean Queen switched to Clara. The club had long been one of the most successful in the country with five league championships. The custom at the Ocean Queen was sufficient to protect the Carters from the worst of the recession and young Raich remained determined to make his mark in sport.