Meet Tom ‘Pongo’ Waring, the last top-flight star to score 50 goals in a season.. nearly a CENTURY before Erling Haaland
ASK AI to design the exact opposite of Erling Haaland and Tom “Pongo” Waring might be the result.
Except for a magical figure, achieved 92 years apart, bonding the supreme lean machine with a Merseysider nicknamed after a dopey dog.
Aston Villa legend Waring was the last player before the Manchester City superstar to bag 50 club goals in a top-flight season.
But modern-day monsters like the Norwegian hero might shudder if they heard of Waring’s lifestyle.
The Times claim he’d hunt for any beer left on the terraces when he turned up for training on Mondays.
And he was more down to earth than down the gym.
Such was his rapport with fans, 23,000 watched his debut for Villa RESERVES after he signed for £4,700 from Tranmere in 1928.
Born in Birkenhead – as was Everton‘s scoring sensation Dixie Dean – Waring even combined football with work for the The Hercules Motor and Cycle Company in Aston.
He was famously scared of no-one and never doubted his ability – understandably for someone on his mighty club wages of… 30 shillings a week!
Waring told Arsenal boss Herbert Chapman in 1931: “You’d like to buy me, Herbert, wouldn’t you? I am better than any of your lot.”
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And when his own Villa manager lambasted him for failing to help out his midfield, he responded: “If you want me to do two jobs you can pay me 60 shillings a game.”
The club’s then-skipper Billy Walker wrote in his autobiography: “There were no rules for Pongo.
“Nobody knew what time he would turn up for training—ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock.”
And in the days well before energy drinks perhaps Pongo was ahead of his time – at least if you interpret another Walker anecdote extremely generously.
The ex-England inside forward revealed Waring would “go round all the refreshment bars on the ground and finish off the lemonade” left by customers.
Pongo’s half-century of goals came in 1930-31, with 49 in the old First Division when Villa were runners-up to Arsenal and one in the FA Cup.
In contrast, Haaland has notched 34 Premier League goals, plus three in the FA Cup, one in the EFL and 12 in the Champions League… with potentially nine more games to come.
Waring finished with 167 goals in all for Villa from 1928-35, also netting four in five matches for England.
And whatever other goal records Haaland goes on to achieve in England it’s unlikely he’ll do it with such an array of clubs as Pongo.
Those included Barnsley, Wolves, Accrington Stanley, Bath City, Graysons, Birkenhead Docks, Harrowby, New Brighton and Ellesmere Port Town.
And when he died aged 74 in December 1980, his ashes were scattered in Villa’s Holte End goalmouth before a game with Stoke City.