Matt Kingsley: the story of Newcastle's first England international

The Popular Side was a Newcastle United print fanzine that ran for 14 issues between August 2014 and December 2016.  Here's an article I wrote for issue 5 in January 2015, during a season in which Alan Pardew found a way out of his eight-year contract,  John Carver almost found a way out of the Premier League, our big summer signings, Riviere, De Jong and Cabella,  scored a total of five goals, and Jack Colback was briefly touted as an England possible...



But for an ill-timed calf strain, Killingworth's Jack Colback might have lined up as the 36th Newcastle United player to be capped by England during September's double header with Norway and Switzerland, adding to a list that includes many of the most celebrated names in the club's history but remains bookended by Andy Carroll's November 2010 start in a Wembley loss to France and Matthew Kingsley's debut versus Wales on March 18th 1901.

A talented, charismatic but little-remembered figure, the Lancashire-born keeper made his only England appearance in a 6-0 British Championship victory that was the first of the 16 international fixtures to be played at St James' Park.   Rejecting a transfer to Everton, he had arrived on Tyneside from second division Darwen in the summer of 1898, having previously worked on the production line at a calico printworks near Bolton while turning out for amateur sides Edgworth and Turton.  "He had a distinctive playing style," writes Paul Joannou in his Who's Who of Newcastle United,  "continually swinging his arms around as he waited for the ball to come his way.  At 14 stone, he was heavier than most footballers and put his bulk to good use."

After displacing Charlie Watts in the United starting eleven, Kingsley played every minute of the 1898-99 season as the Magpies survived their maiden top-flight campaign and defeated three-time champions Sunderland in the first of the 139-league meetings between the two clubs.  "Every north-country devotee of the code was present either in person or in spirit," the local press enthused.  Over 25,000 fans, including an estimated 8,000 who'd travelled from Tyneside, packed Roker Park for a Christmas Eve fixture hailed as "one of the most remarkable games ever witnessed on a football field in the north of England."  The visitors fell a goal behind - "the crowd, or rather the Sunderland section of it, went delirious with joy" - but swiftly levelled through Willie Wardrope, took a halftime lead with a Jock Peddie goal, and then made sure of only a third league victory of the season when the two scorers combined for Peddie's second strike of the game.  "Fouls became frequent," the Manchester Guardian reported. Sunderland halved the deficit when a shot squirmed free of Kingsley's dive, "Newcastle afterwards confined themselves to a more defensive game, and indulged in a good deal of kicking out."

Kingsley's error was by no means characteristic, the keeper a virtual ever-present as United placed in the top six in four of his half-dozen seasons between the posts, finishing third in 1901-02 and denying their local rivals back-to-back titles with a 1-0 win on the final day of the following season.  More than league placings have altered dramatically since those days. "Goalkeepers were a different breed in the Edwardian years," Joannou writes, "far removed from the super-fit and athletic figures of the modern age."  The style of play was very bit as alien as the physiques: Kingsley was able to use his hands well outside the area he'd be confined to today - Leigh Roose, who kept goal for Wales in that first St James' international was known for regularly bouncing the ball halfway up the pitch before starting attacks with either a kick or long throw - and was allowed to move off his line when facing penalties, the kicker free to place the ball anywhere along a twelve-yard line which stretched from one touchline to the other until the 18-yard-box was introduced in 1901-02.  No-one bothered to hold on to crosses when opposition forwards could barge you into the goal net, "sometimes taking a defender along for good measure with one almighty shoulder-charge",  It was little easier for Kingsley and his contemporaries when the ball stayed on the floor:  St James' Park was still classed as common grazing land and had a surface described as "primitive" by visiting officials from Grimsby Town.

It was injury that eventually felled Newcastle's first England international, Kingsley ousted by Jim Lawrence as Frank Watt built a side which would lift the title three times and lose the same number of FA Cup finals in the following half decade. While Lawrence didn't relinquish the keeper's jersey until 1921, Kingsley moved on to West Ham United, then of the Western and Southern Leagues, in May 1904.  "A feisty character," the London club's official history records, the hefty Lancastrian almost provoked a riot when he hoofed ex-Hammer Herbert Lyon in the middle of a game with Brighton and Hove Albion. "(He) ran at Lyon and kicked him to the ground, and matters looked ugly for the international keeper, who was ordered off the ground by the referee, but the Brighton officials, with a posse of police, acted very promptly and escorted him from the playing arena before any violence was used," reported the Stratford Express.  Kingsley's West Ham career came to a full stop rather quicker than the correspondent's sentence, the club announcing his immediate release almost four years to the day since his sole England appearance.  After serving out a Football League suspension, the keeper wound down his career at QPR, Rochdale, Barrow and back at Edgworth, where the 1911 census records the 35-year-old living with his wife, two sons and a daughter - a fourth child had died on Tyneside in 1903 - while working as a nightwatchman at the same textile printers he'd left to sign for Newcastle.  Joining the Royal Engineers as a sapper in 1917, he was listed on the census as "a general labourer" in 1939.  Kingsley died in March 1960, 59 years after becoming the first Magpie to don an England shirt, but long since reduced to just a footnote in the history of the club.