On Sunday December the first 2013, eight months after Johnny Paton's ninetieth birthday – by now he was the oldest surviving Chelsea player – the club invited him to watch a match against Southampton at Stamford Bridge. This edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint tells what happened next...
Johnny Paton was a Scot who played for the Glasgow club Celtic, but in 1946 he signed for one season with Chelsea while he completed his National Service at an RAF base on the outskirts of London. ‘It was a unique one-season transfer,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t a loan, it was a complete transfer and a complete transfer back to Celtic.’
Soon afterwards, though, he was back living in the capital after marrying his fiancee Eileen, a Londoner.
Many more years followed before in the winter of 2013 he received an invitation out of the blue to return to Stamford Bridge as a guest of the club.
He remembered that in his Chelsea playing days he thought the home support was pretty pathetic compared to what he was used to at Celtic. And now, nearly 70 years later, he felt the same. Chelsea were losing 1-0 to Southampton at halftime and the crowd were not giving the team the lift they badly needed.And once there he was invited to go onto the pitch at halftime to address the crowd. He agreed because there was something he badly wanted to say.
So he took the microphone: ‘I’ve waited a long time to say this. I’m 90 years old but I’m very, very proud to have worn the Chelsea jersey, 67 years ago, on the left wing, when we beat the Arsenal in an FA Cup tie.’
The stadium, which had been quiet, erupted and the noise rose to a crescendo as Paton asked twice: ‘Do you really want Chelsea to win this game?’
He now had a captive audience. ‘Well,’ he told them, ‘I want to hear the Chelsea roar. The players on the field, in my opinion, won’t win this game – you will.’
‘The place went mad,’ Paton says. And down in the Chelsea dressing room, John Terry told Paton later, the players were aware of a buzz going on and wondered what it was.
After the match, Chelsea having won 3-1 after scoring within minutes of the restart, a message reached Paton that Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, wanted to see him.
‘I’d never met him,’ Paton says. ‘And you know what he said, I couldn’t believe it. He said, “Johnny, I want to thank you. You helped us to win this match”.’ Paton told him that he had merely done what came naturally.
(Johnny Paton gave this interview in 2013, 10 days after his visit to Stamford Bridge. He died in October 2015 at the age of 92)
Jon Henderson | @hendojon | When Footballers Were Skint