Fred Davies 22/8/39 – 3/9/20
The death was announced yesterday of former City goalkeeper Fred Davies who played for the club between January 1968 and July 1970, making one hundred and twenty seven first team appearances in the process.
The Liverpudlian played for another Welsh side before City as Wolves signed him as a teenager from Llandudno in April 1957. It took Davies five years to make it into the first team with the Molineux club and when he did it was in a derby against fierce rivals West Brom in the FA Cup. Davies established himself as first choice at Wolves through the mid sixties, making over one hundred and fifty league appearances for them mostly in the First Division as he experienced a relegation and then a promotion.
A fee of £10,000 was enough to bring him to City halfway through the 67/68 campaign which saw City doing well in Europe and making the first steps in an improvement in the league which saw them gradually transform from relegation battlers into one of the best sides in the Second Division and, Cup Winners Cup ties when he was ineligible for selection apart, he was an automatic selection for two and a half season.
However, one of reference sources I use says that Jimmy Scoular gradually lost faith in Davies with a blunder at Birmingham City, which I do not recall, accelerating this process.
I can remember it coming as a shock to learn of his sale to Bournemouth during the summer of 1970 and, given how the man brought in to replace him, Frank Parsons, fared, I daresay that it could be argued that the City boss was too keen to get rid of him – indeed, would the 70/71 season have turned out different if we’d had Davies still in goals during the first two months of that season?
Davies’ spell at Bournemouth coincided with something of a boom time at the south coast club and he racked up another hundred plus appearances with them before retiring in 1974. That wasn’t the end of his time in the game though as he followed Bournemouth manager John Bond to Norwich where he became a goalkeeping coach. When Bond became Swansea manager for a short while in the 80s, Davies was there as his assistant in the first of two spells with the jacks and he held a similar post at Birmingham and Shrewsbury when Bond was their manager. However, when his mentor resigned at the latter club, Davies stayed on to become, first, caretaker manager and then permanent boss. Overall, his time with the Shrews would have to judged as a success as they won the title of the old Fourth Division in 1994, made it to Wembley for the Final of the Auto Windscreen Shield in 1996 and maintained their place against the odds in the third tier until they were relegated in 1997.
Davies was dismissed after this and moved into non League management at Weymouth where he guided them to a promotion in one of the two seasons he was in charge before returning to the club for a while in 2000 as Director of Football.
For myself, I posted the following on the City messagebord I use earlier this morning;-
“Even in a time when goalkeepers were not the size they are today, he struck me as on the small side, but I can’t say it was ever something that held him back.
I can remember he made his debut in a home match with Portsmouth on an absolutely awful, wet afternoon that left the pitch a quagmire. City were 3-0 up playing towards the Grange End at half time and ended up winning very comfortably by that score. However, I can remember being impressed by our new goalkeeper’s professionalism as he asked the kids stood in the boys enclosure on the Grange End how long there was to go every few minutes, but the passing of the years has made me believe that it was much more likely that he was really concerned with how much longer he had to stay out in the lashing wind and rain.
RIP”
