Cardiff City mauve and yellow army.

I’m very sad to hear today of the passing, at the age of eighty six, of a true Cardiff City stalwart in Colin Baker.

Colin was a wing half, a position which went out of fashion around about the time I first started taking an interest in the game, so it’s not a term that has been in common use for over half a century! In today’s terminology, Colin was a number six, a defensive midfielder.

It seems fitting that Colin should have played in a position from a different age, because his career was from a different age in so many ways. For a start, he first signed for City as an amateur and the club were convinced he had something despite only having seen him play in local parks football.

I was going to say that a signing like that just does not happen these days, but I suppose there must be the odd player or two somewhere to prove me wrong, However, if there are some, they would be labelled a “project” today and, if he was just nineteen as Colin was when he arrived at City, it would be a long while, if ever, before he’d come into first team contention – especially at the Cardiff City of the past decade!

Yet, Colin was making his first team debut for the club within about six weeks of signing for us when he played in the old First Division in the final match of the 1953/54 season – a 2-2 draw with Sheffield Wednesday at Ninian Park.

The following season brought progress of a sort as, besides an appearance on the final day of the campaign (a 2-0 loss at Huddersfield) again, Colin also played at Roker Park, Sunderland in a 1-1 draw in March,

It was the following season that brought his breakthrough as a regular selection in the senior side. Picked for his first match of 55/56 in late November, Colin only missed one game from then on and scored his first goal for the club in a 9-0 win Welsh Cup over Pembroke Borough (the first game City played after I was born as it turns out!) in February 1956, but the one he got a month later against Newcastle to secure a 1-1 draw in front of a crowd of 31,000 must have given him a lot more satisfaction.

From then on, Colin was an almost automatic selection in the side until 1963/64 and gained selection for the only Welsh squad to have ever played in a World Cup Final tournament in Sweden in 1958 where he played in Wales’ second match, a 1-1 draw with Mexico.

I mentioned earlier that Colin was a very regular member of our first team up until 63/64, which happens to be my first season watching the team. However, he was there in the team for my first match against Northampton.

Given that he played around another forty games over the next three seasons before he dropped out of the first team picture completely, I must have seen him play a few more times and I’m a bit ashamed to say that I cannot remember anything about him as a player now.

Defending myself somewhat, from what I’ve read and heard of him, it is understandable that Colin didn’t make an impression while I was watching as an under ten year old. It seems Colin was very much a team player who went about his business in a solid and unfussy way – one of the reference works I turn to often on all matters Cardiff City says he was “never one of the stars of the sides he played in, nevertheless he always made a valuable contribution to City performances, and was always well thought of by City supporters” – from what I can gather, that describes Colin to a tee.

Continuing to play for the reserves for a number of seasons after his last first team appearance in 65/66, Colin also ran the club lottery in the late sixties, before ending his association with City in the early seventies having played three hundred and sixty times for them in all competitions, scoring twenty goals in the process.

Colin worked as a clerk at Cardiff Magistrates Court after leaving City and it was here that I met him while I worked there for most of 1976. I can’t say it was I time that I enjoyed too much because I was something of a dog’s body, filling in for people when they were ill or on holiday and I was treated very much like an underling by some there, but Colin, along with two or three others, was never like that with me – in fact, I’d say he was the best friend I had there.

The funny thing was that our conversations rarely featured football or Cardiff City – it wasn’t that Colin didn’t want to talk about his career, but he was an interesting, generous and intelligent man who I just liked talking with about all sorts of things. Needless to say, when we did talk football and specifically about him, he was modest about himself and fulsome in his praise of others.

Once I left the Magistrates Court in late 1976, I lost touch with Colin, apart from one occasion a few months later when I bumped into him outside the ground just before the Fifth Round FA Cup game with Everton – this conversation had to be about football of course and it’s funny how things stick in your head, but I can remember him tempering my youthful enthusiasm by saying that, although he thought we’d give Everton a really tough game, he believed they’d just about edge it and he turned out to be right on all counts.

Having come across him so soon after I had finished working with him, I thought I would bump into Colin now and again at games or around Cardiff somewhere, but I never did, yet, despite it being more than half a his lifetime since I hast saw him, it still came as such an unpleasant shock to read about his passing on the club website this morning.

I’ve lived my life with a maxim of not really wanting to meet the players who I’ve watched representing the club for the last fifty eight years for fear of disappointment because they would not live up to my expectations of them, but, in my limited experience (e.g. Ronnie Bird, Roger Gibbins and Gary Bell), this has been far from the case and Colin Baker most definitely was another case in point.

RIP and my condolences to Colin’s family and friends.