Bobby Smith obituary

Brian Glanville
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 September 2010 19.04 BST



A prolific and effective centre-forward, Bobby Smith, who has died aged 77, played 15 times for England, and with Tottenham Hotspur won the first League and FA Cup double of the century in 1960-61, scoring 28 goals in the League. The following season he added a second FA Cup medal, and many felt he was unlucky not to be included in the England squad that went to the 1962 World Cup finals in Chile.

Like so many British football stars, he was a victim of his times. Today, such a player would be a millionaire, better able to accommodate the gambling problem that Smith was widely, if tacitly, believed to suffer from. But in Smith's era, the iniquitous maximum-wage system existed until 1961 – then at £20 – by which point he had only a few years' football left.

Born in Lingdale, near Middlesbrough, Smith was playing for the local Redcar club when Chelsea brought him to London as a 16-year-old, making him a full professional at 17. He made such an effective start for them – 48 First Division games and 18 goals in his first two seasons – that his future seemed assured at Stamford Bridge, especially as he seemed a player very much in the mould of his manager, Ted Drake, a bulldozing centre-forward in his day for Arsenal and England. Strangely, in the following two seasons, Smith made far fewer appearances.

Chelsea might have taken a hint in 1955-56, when Smith scored four times in seven First Division games, but they transferred him to Tottenham, where he promptly scored 10 League goals in 21 games. Initially used by Spurs at inside-left, he was soon moved to his ideal position of centre-forward. There his strength, his right-footed shooting and his ability in the air, despite a relative lack of height – he stood 5ft 9in, and in his prime weighed 12st 10lb – quickly made him formidable.

The following season brought 18 League goals, and in 1957-58 he equalled, with his 36 goals, the club record established by Ted Harper in 1930-31, in the Second Division. Jimmy Greaves, who became his partner in the season after the double was done, beat his record five years later with 37 goals.

For England, Smith played those 15 times with the impressive scoring record of 13 goals, first appearing in October 1960 against Northern Ireland in Belfast, when his strong shot gave England the first goal in a 5-2 win. Later in the month, he scored twice against Spain in a 4-2 victory at Wembley, the first a header from Bobby Charlton's cross, the second an astute lob, which showed he had subtlety as well as power.

Alf Ramsey favoured him at first when he took over the team in 1962, and he took part in Ramsey's first successful European tour in 1963, scoring England's second goal against Czechslovakia in Bratislava in a 4-2 victory. The following October he led the England attack in a match against the Rest of the World at Wembley, providing the pass from which rightwinger Terry Paine scored in a 2-1 win. But his last cap came barely a month later, again at Wembley, when he scored once in England's 8-3 defeat of Northern Ireland.

He scored in both Tottenham's winning FA Cup finals at Wembley. In 1961, Spurs had a somewhat lustreless victory against a Leicester City side diminished to 10 men. With an expert pivot and a thump, Smith gave Tottenham the lead; they went on to win, 2-0. The following year, against Burnley, the 3-1 success was far more convincing. With an ebullient Greaves by his side, Smith coolly scored the second Spurs goal. Burnley had only just equalised and were perhaps relaxing when Smith, receiving from the elegant John White on the left, had time to trap, turn and shoot home.

In 1963 he was part of the team that won the European Cup Winners' Cup, but the following year things went cataclysmically wrong, when Spurs took exception to a series of newspaper articles published by Smith, and packed him off to Fourth Division Brighton for a derisory £5,000. There, he scored 19 goals in 31 games. But it did not last. Before the following season was due to begin, Brighton suspended him on grounds that, now 15st, he was unfit.

Smith drifted into non-League football with Hastings United but, even there, fell foul of the administration, with two suspensions for missing training and two appeals. He had a trial with Leyton Orient in 1967, and another with Banbury United, a non-League club, in the summer of 1968, but his playing career came to an early end.

Thereafter, he had various jobs as a taxi and van driver, a painter and decorator, but was injured when falling down a manhole. In 1999, his 1961 FA Cup winners' medal, which had vanished from his house, suddenly turned up in an auction, where it was sold for £11,200. "I think it's disgusting," said Smith, "It's only football. How can prices like this be justified?"

He is survived by his second wife, Jean. His first marriage, to Mavis, the mother of his two sons, Stephen and David, ended in divorce in 1966.

• Robert Alfred Smith, footballer, born 22 February 1933; died 18 September 2010