The article is a few months old, but as a Saltdean boy myself it's a good read. Seems he turned the Albion down because he didn't like the way the club was run, which is totally understandable.
Any other former Saltdean Tigers out there? I remember playing for Jim Martin's team in the early 80s.
Up from the Downs
Jamie Jackson
Sunday May 16, 2004
The Observer
Saltdean United, turnover £40,000, average attendance 43 last season, play in the Sussex County League Division Two. Their ground, Hill Park, is four miles out of Brighton in Coombe Vale, on the Sussex Downs. To reach it you drive along Saltdean Vale, turn down a dirt path, pass a listed farm building, caravan park and dilapidated greenhouses and park by the bushes. Clubhouse, toilets and changing rooms to the right, council-owned pitch on the left. A skeletal metal framework - it looks like an abandoned players' tunnel - stands on the clubhouse side of the pitch; opposite, a small stand, backed by a steep, open bank, offers the notion of shelter when the wind and rain arrive on cold winter afternoons.
Today, though, is a glorious Saturday in late April. The 'Tigers' are playing Broadbridge Heath; the surrounding Downs are green and inviting. The talk among the few spectators is of the FA Cup. Not Saltdean's 4-0 defeat at home to Cray Wanderers back in the extra preliminary round last August (attendance 104), but the final. Why? Because if you happened to be here a few seasons ago you would have seen Paul Ifill, a teenage centre-forward, playing for Saltdean. On Saturday you can catch him if you are near a television or have a ticket to the Millennium Stadium.
Ifill will be playing on the right of Millwall's midfield, trying to outsmart Manchester United in the FA Cup final. 'It's funny because when Paul was 12 I took him to Wembley and he said, "Dad, I'd like to play here one day." And in his first season at Millwall [1998-99] he did, in the LDV Vans Trophy. Now I have to pinch myself. I just can't believe he'll be playing at the Millennium Stadium. It's like a fairytale.'
So says Everton Ifill, Paul's father and one-time Saltdean team-mate, describing what has happened to his son since he left Hill Park in 1997 and signed for the south London club. Six-foot-two, like his son, but a much more imposing 14 stone 'when I was playing', Everton Ifill, air conditioning engineer by trade, is also a mobile DJ, karate black belt and formerly a bruising centre-forward no one wanted to mark when he played for, among others, Maidenhead and Windsor and Eton. In the 1980s he also played for Saltdean, introducing his son to the club as youngster.
'My dream was always to play with Paul in the same team and we managed it.' Ifill was 16, his father 43. ' I played centre-forward, Paul was on the wing. We both scored; he put over a cross for my goal.' At 16, Ifill was playing county league football for Saltdean, picking up £25 a week and going to college with a vague idea of becoming a geography teacher. He had had his stab higher up, in youth games and trials at Brighton, Watford and most notably West Ham, where the talent spotters were more interested in a player named Joe Cole. When he finally signed for Millwall after two years of county football, Ifill started brightly. Soon into the first team, that Wembley final (Millwall lost 1-0 to Wigan): then it looked finished before it had begun. A series of specialists were unable to diagnose a recurring injury and Ifill believed his career was over.
Ifill was born in 1979 in Brighton and attended schools in Rottingdean, the neighbouring village to Saltdean. His sister, Samantha, remembers 'sitting and watching him play in the freezing cold at Saltdean'. A brief period on Brighton's books ended when Ifill told his father he did not like how they did things. Then there were a couple of years at Watford. 'I scored a lot of goals for the youth team. But they got a new youth development officer and I wasn't in his plans.' This was in 1995. Ifill enrolled at sixth-form college in Brighton and took PE, geography and sociology. And went back to playing for Saltdean's youth team. 'I'd pretty well given up on playing the game professionally,' he says. Everton, too, felt his son's chance had gone.
Gerry Green, 49, comes from just outside Glasgow. He was on Partick Thistle's books as a teenager with Alan Hansen and now coaches football in America during the summer. He was with Saltdean for 16 years, the last four as manager. As Saltdean take on Broadbridge on their bare and cracked pitch, Green, tattooed and shaven-headed, sits in the sun with a pint of cider and a cigarette and recalls Paul Ifill's debut for the first team.
'I had no centre-forwards but I knew this kid was coming through,' he says. 'So I phoned Everton and I said, "Is there any chance of Paul playing on Saturday?" Green cracks a wicked grin. 'You know what it's like,' he points to the game. 'They'll kick their granny out there. So Everton said, "Well I'm not really sure..." I said, "You let me give him 20 minutes, and if somebody's giving him a battering I'll take him off." 'Everton went, "All right then", and of course Paul scored. I asked Everton, "OK for Saturday?" and he nodded. Paul scored two more then and he never looked back.' Ifill would score 21 goals in 31 matches in his time at the club in the mid-1990s. Impressive, but hardly fulfilling his potential. 'He had bags of scope, there was always more in the locker,' Green recalls. 'He had pace and attitude. He was bright, alert, he played the right ball and he'd run at people.'
Green was not the only one who noticed. Dennis Burnett lives just up the road from Hill Park and helped to coach the youth and senior teams at Saltdean. Burnett played for West Ham under Ron Greenwood in the 1960s when Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters were at Upton Park. He moved to Millwall and played more than 300 games for the Lions. 'You give lads things to do in training and he [Ifill] was always up for doing them again, even if he missed. I thought he had a chance.' Everyone says Ifill's qualities are two good feet, skill and determination. When Burnett used his contacts to get Ifill trials, this temperament was crucial.
'Paul was in his final year as a youth player. I phoned West Ham, then took the day off and drove him up to Bishop's Stortford. West Ham had a very tough youth team and Paul didn't know anybody, but after the first half West Ham were winning 3-0. Paul scored the first two and made the third. But he was left out for the second half. 'I said to these West Ham people, "You make me laugh. Who's running the game? All you're talking about is Joe Cole, who's done a bit of magic on the halfway line." ' Three weeks later, though, Ifill was invited to West Ham's training ground. 'I took a day off work again and West Ham don't offer me a penny. People like Frank Lampard Junior and Iain Dowie were there after training. In all there must've been 200 watching.
'Paul's playing centre-forward. They clear the ball out of defence and it goes to him on the halfway line. He kills it with his right foot and nutmegs the centre-half, runs through and smashes the ball into the far corner from 22 yards. Everyone claps.' But nothing came of it. For whatever reason, Ifill did not impress West Ham. Burnett feels it was because 'it demeans their own scouting system'. Burnett, though, did not give up and called Jeff Burnidge, an old friend and Millwall director. Everton Ifill recalls the trial. 'It was a reserve game against Crystal Palace. They put Paul up front and at half-time Geoff asked me how I thought he'd done. I was really sad for him because he was out of his class. I said, "No chance." And Geoff said, "Don't worry about it. We knew it'd be hard, we just wanted to see if he'd get up. And he got up every single time. We can do the rest within six months." '
Ifill went back to Saltdean and Millwall watched him three or four times, including his final game in county football when he scored in the 2-1 defeat by St Leonard's in the 1997 Sussex Senior Cup final. The goalkeeper he beat that day was Sasa Ilic, who would play Premiership football for Charlton soon afterwards and is now at Sheffield United. 'It was a stroke of luck, really,' says Ifill in his understated way. Watford had come to nothing, West Ham had come to nothing and he was 'just playing at Saltdean for fun, happy to play at whatever level'. Millwall liked him and Ifill was in at last.
But there were more problems. Having been plagued by injuries during his one-year probationary deal, he was given a month by the then Millwall manager, Billy Bonds, to prove his fitness. 'I managed to score a few goals, struggled through and he took me into his office for the final decision. He gave me the benefit of the doubt and said, "Sign the deal or get out." ' It was a narrow escape for Ifill and there was worse around the corner. Having settled into the first team, he was again injured. This time it might have ended his career. 'A couple of years back I had a pelvic injury,' says Ifill. 'I didn't know that my pelvis was out of place and the doctors didn't know it was pressing on a nerve. I couldn't sprint, which was my game. I went to see a number of different specialists. Nothing doing. I was out for three months. I kept getting back to nearly being able to sprint and then it would go again. I thought I was never going to recover.'
Ifill was eventually recommended to a Harley Street spinal specialist, Antoni Jakubowski. His diagnosis saved Ifill's career because he X-rayed him standing up. 'It didn't show up on a non-weight-bearing X-ray, which makes all the sense in the world because these guys are on their feet all day,' says Jakubowski. Referred pain coming from the back is the cause of a lot of misdiagnosed footballer's injuries, he says. 'There was a little joint disruption in Paul's lower back. It's very common in footballers and a lot of them are misdiagnosed.' Ifill is grateful. He knows Jakubowski saved his career. 'A lot of people couldn't work out what was wrong. He manipulated me and I could sprint again and I've been fine since.'
Ifill has gone on to play more than 240 games for the Lions and a fortnight ago was called up for Barbados, where his father is from. But he has not forgotten Saltdean. On the wall of the Tiger bar in the clubhouse is a signed and framed No 7 shirt. Last season he was the reluctant guest presenter of their end-of-season awards. 'I won't have to say anything will I?' he asked.
Four seasons ago, Manchester United decided against defending the FA Cup that had been part of their 1999 Treble to play the now defunct World Club Championship. The romance of the oldest competition in the world seemed dead. But Ifill's journey from the bruising, apparently dead-end road of county football to face Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Co shows that the Cup can still conjure a story. 'I remember when I played once against Chichester and Bobby Stokes [scorer of Southampton's winner against Manchester United in the 1976 FA Cup final] was playing for them,' says Everton Ifill. 'Everyone was looking at him and talking about his goal and this was 15 years after he'd done it.' This year's Saltdean vintage, like the majority of footballing neutrals around the world, would like to see Millwall pull off one of the classic cup shocks. Ian Taylor [Moor Green and Aston Villa], Stuart Pearce [Wealdstone and Nottingham Forest] and Ian Wright [Greenwich Borough and Crystal Palace] are among those who played non-League football and in FA Cup finals. All were on the losing side, although Pearce and Wright scored - the latter twice in Crystal Palace's 1990 defeat against Millwall's opponents on Saturday, Manchester United.
If Millwall were somehow to win and Paul Ifill score the winner, the lad who was playing with his father just a few seasons ago would complete one of the FA Cup's more unlikely stories. Even more unlikely than Bobby Stokes
Any other former Saltdean Tigers out there? I remember playing for Jim Martin's team in the early 80s.
Up from the Downs
Jamie Jackson
Sunday May 16, 2004
The Observer
Saltdean United, turnover £40,000, average attendance 43 last season, play in the Sussex County League Division Two. Their ground, Hill Park, is four miles out of Brighton in Coombe Vale, on the Sussex Downs. To reach it you drive along Saltdean Vale, turn down a dirt path, pass a listed farm building, caravan park and dilapidated greenhouses and park by the bushes. Clubhouse, toilets and changing rooms to the right, council-owned pitch on the left. A skeletal metal framework - it looks like an abandoned players' tunnel - stands on the clubhouse side of the pitch; opposite, a small stand, backed by a steep, open bank, offers the notion of shelter when the wind and rain arrive on cold winter afternoons.
Today, though, is a glorious Saturday in late April. The 'Tigers' are playing Broadbridge Heath; the surrounding Downs are green and inviting. The talk among the few spectators is of the FA Cup. Not Saltdean's 4-0 defeat at home to Cray Wanderers back in the extra preliminary round last August (attendance 104), but the final. Why? Because if you happened to be here a few seasons ago you would have seen Paul Ifill, a teenage centre-forward, playing for Saltdean. On Saturday you can catch him if you are near a television or have a ticket to the Millennium Stadium.
Ifill will be playing on the right of Millwall's midfield, trying to outsmart Manchester United in the FA Cup final. 'It's funny because when Paul was 12 I took him to Wembley and he said, "Dad, I'd like to play here one day." And in his first season at Millwall [1998-99] he did, in the LDV Vans Trophy. Now I have to pinch myself. I just can't believe he'll be playing at the Millennium Stadium. It's like a fairytale.'
So says Everton Ifill, Paul's father and one-time Saltdean team-mate, describing what has happened to his son since he left Hill Park in 1997 and signed for the south London club. Six-foot-two, like his son, but a much more imposing 14 stone 'when I was playing', Everton Ifill, air conditioning engineer by trade, is also a mobile DJ, karate black belt and formerly a bruising centre-forward no one wanted to mark when he played for, among others, Maidenhead and Windsor and Eton. In the 1980s he also played for Saltdean, introducing his son to the club as youngster.
'My dream was always to play with Paul in the same team and we managed it.' Ifill was 16, his father 43. ' I played centre-forward, Paul was on the wing. We both scored; he put over a cross for my goal.' At 16, Ifill was playing county league football for Saltdean, picking up £25 a week and going to college with a vague idea of becoming a geography teacher. He had had his stab higher up, in youth games and trials at Brighton, Watford and most notably West Ham, where the talent spotters were more interested in a player named Joe Cole. When he finally signed for Millwall after two years of county football, Ifill started brightly. Soon into the first team, that Wembley final (Millwall lost 1-0 to Wigan): then it looked finished before it had begun. A series of specialists were unable to diagnose a recurring injury and Ifill believed his career was over.
Ifill was born in 1979 in Brighton and attended schools in Rottingdean, the neighbouring village to Saltdean. His sister, Samantha, remembers 'sitting and watching him play in the freezing cold at Saltdean'. A brief period on Brighton's books ended when Ifill told his father he did not like how they did things. Then there were a couple of years at Watford. 'I scored a lot of goals for the youth team. But they got a new youth development officer and I wasn't in his plans.' This was in 1995. Ifill enrolled at sixth-form college in Brighton and took PE, geography and sociology. And went back to playing for Saltdean's youth team. 'I'd pretty well given up on playing the game professionally,' he says. Everton, too, felt his son's chance had gone.
Gerry Green, 49, comes from just outside Glasgow. He was on Partick Thistle's books as a teenager with Alan Hansen and now coaches football in America during the summer. He was with Saltdean for 16 years, the last four as manager. As Saltdean take on Broadbridge on their bare and cracked pitch, Green, tattooed and shaven-headed, sits in the sun with a pint of cider and a cigarette and recalls Paul Ifill's debut for the first team.
'I had no centre-forwards but I knew this kid was coming through,' he says. 'So I phoned Everton and I said, "Is there any chance of Paul playing on Saturday?" Green cracks a wicked grin. 'You know what it's like,' he points to the game. 'They'll kick their granny out there. So Everton said, "Well I'm not really sure..." I said, "You let me give him 20 minutes, and if somebody's giving him a battering I'll take him off." 'Everton went, "All right then", and of course Paul scored. I asked Everton, "OK for Saturday?" and he nodded. Paul scored two more then and he never looked back.' Ifill would score 21 goals in 31 matches in his time at the club in the mid-1990s. Impressive, but hardly fulfilling his potential. 'He had bags of scope, there was always more in the locker,' Green recalls. 'He had pace and attitude. He was bright, alert, he played the right ball and he'd run at people.'
Green was not the only one who noticed. Dennis Burnett lives just up the road from Hill Park and helped to coach the youth and senior teams at Saltdean. Burnett played for West Ham under Ron Greenwood in the 1960s when Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters were at Upton Park. He moved to Millwall and played more than 300 games for the Lions. 'You give lads things to do in training and he [Ifill] was always up for doing them again, even if he missed. I thought he had a chance.' Everyone says Ifill's qualities are two good feet, skill and determination. When Burnett used his contacts to get Ifill trials, this temperament was crucial.
'Paul was in his final year as a youth player. I phoned West Ham, then took the day off and drove him up to Bishop's Stortford. West Ham had a very tough youth team and Paul didn't know anybody, but after the first half West Ham were winning 3-0. Paul scored the first two and made the third. But he was left out for the second half. 'I said to these West Ham people, "You make me laugh. Who's running the game? All you're talking about is Joe Cole, who's done a bit of magic on the halfway line." ' Three weeks later, though, Ifill was invited to West Ham's training ground. 'I took a day off work again and West Ham don't offer me a penny. People like Frank Lampard Junior and Iain Dowie were there after training. In all there must've been 200 watching.
'Paul's playing centre-forward. They clear the ball out of defence and it goes to him on the halfway line. He kills it with his right foot and nutmegs the centre-half, runs through and smashes the ball into the far corner from 22 yards. Everyone claps.' But nothing came of it. For whatever reason, Ifill did not impress West Ham. Burnett feels it was because 'it demeans their own scouting system'. Burnett, though, did not give up and called Jeff Burnidge, an old friend and Millwall director. Everton Ifill recalls the trial. 'It was a reserve game against Crystal Palace. They put Paul up front and at half-time Geoff asked me how I thought he'd done. I was really sad for him because he was out of his class. I said, "No chance." And Geoff said, "Don't worry about it. We knew it'd be hard, we just wanted to see if he'd get up. And he got up every single time. We can do the rest within six months." '
Ifill went back to Saltdean and Millwall watched him three or four times, including his final game in county football when he scored in the 2-1 defeat by St Leonard's in the 1997 Sussex Senior Cup final. The goalkeeper he beat that day was Sasa Ilic, who would play Premiership football for Charlton soon afterwards and is now at Sheffield United. 'It was a stroke of luck, really,' says Ifill in his understated way. Watford had come to nothing, West Ham had come to nothing and he was 'just playing at Saltdean for fun, happy to play at whatever level'. Millwall liked him and Ifill was in at last.
But there were more problems. Having been plagued by injuries during his one-year probationary deal, he was given a month by the then Millwall manager, Billy Bonds, to prove his fitness. 'I managed to score a few goals, struggled through and he took me into his office for the final decision. He gave me the benefit of the doubt and said, "Sign the deal or get out." ' It was a narrow escape for Ifill and there was worse around the corner. Having settled into the first team, he was again injured. This time it might have ended his career. 'A couple of years back I had a pelvic injury,' says Ifill. 'I didn't know that my pelvis was out of place and the doctors didn't know it was pressing on a nerve. I couldn't sprint, which was my game. I went to see a number of different specialists. Nothing doing. I was out for three months. I kept getting back to nearly being able to sprint and then it would go again. I thought I was never going to recover.'
Ifill was eventually recommended to a Harley Street spinal specialist, Antoni Jakubowski. His diagnosis saved Ifill's career because he X-rayed him standing up. 'It didn't show up on a non-weight-bearing X-ray, which makes all the sense in the world because these guys are on their feet all day,' says Jakubowski. Referred pain coming from the back is the cause of a lot of misdiagnosed footballer's injuries, he says. 'There was a little joint disruption in Paul's lower back. It's very common in footballers and a lot of them are misdiagnosed.' Ifill is grateful. He knows Jakubowski saved his career. 'A lot of people couldn't work out what was wrong. He manipulated me and I could sprint again and I've been fine since.'
Ifill has gone on to play more than 240 games for the Lions and a fortnight ago was called up for Barbados, where his father is from. But he has not forgotten Saltdean. On the wall of the Tiger bar in the clubhouse is a signed and framed No 7 shirt. Last season he was the reluctant guest presenter of their end-of-season awards. 'I won't have to say anything will I?' he asked.
Four seasons ago, Manchester United decided against defending the FA Cup that had been part of their 1999 Treble to play the now defunct World Club Championship. The romance of the oldest competition in the world seemed dead. But Ifill's journey from the bruising, apparently dead-end road of county football to face Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Co shows that the Cup can still conjure a story. 'I remember when I played once against Chichester and Bobby Stokes [scorer of Southampton's winner against Manchester United in the 1976 FA Cup final] was playing for them,' says Everton Ifill. 'Everyone was looking at him and talking about his goal and this was 15 years after he'd done it.' This year's Saltdean vintage, like the majority of footballing neutrals around the world, would like to see Millwall pull off one of the classic cup shocks. Ian Taylor [Moor Green and Aston Villa], Stuart Pearce [Wealdstone and Nottingham Forest] and Ian Wright [Greenwich Borough and Crystal Palace] are among those who played non-League football and in FA Cup finals. All were on the losing side, although Pearce and Wright scored - the latter twice in Crystal Palace's 1990 defeat against Millwall's opponents on Saturday, Manchester United.
If Millwall were somehow to win and Paul Ifill score the winner, the lad who was playing with his father just a few seasons ago would complete one of the FA Cup's more unlikely stories. Even more unlikely than Bobby Stokes
I used to play for Saltdean 
