THE Greyhound in Ferryhill may not be a football fast track, but it's the pub down the road where Stan Cummins used to drink and he's a local lad made good.

Remember Stan? He was the boy wonder, discovered at 11, in Middlesbrough's first team at 18, Sunderland's record signing before he was 21.

Boro assistant manager Harold Shepherdson compared him to Jimmy Greaves. Jack Charton forecast that 5ft 4in Stan would become Britain's first million pound footballer.

Some thought it millstone, not milestone; Little Stan, on any argument, is entitled to feel short changed. And now the boy wonder just wonders.

His English football career ended in disillusion and frustration when he was 26. He'd never won a team trophy, never worn an England shirt at any level. For the past 15 years he has been playing, then coaching, in America.

On Wednesday night, however, he was back in the Greyhound - vodka and orange, Liverpool and Crystal Palace, bald at 42.

Stan the Nearly Man? "I can't grumble. I've played at the top, had a tremendous career, done well for all the clubs I was at but don't regret getting out when I did.

"The game was becoming a bit more physical and the more charismatic players were being marked very tightly. Basically I'd just had enough of it."

He had been home for three weeks, flew back yesterday to the States, a genuinely unaffected bloke whom the Greyhound pack reckoned little changed but for his use of "A to Zee" and the pronunciation of "got" as in our man at Dunkirk.

You know, Field Marshall Lord Gort.

For all that, an hour with Stan Cummins becomes more like a job interview, if not with the club chairman then with the Resettlement Officer. The little feller is desperate to come home.

"I've applied for management jobs all over, but no-one seems willing to take the chance. I know how to get teams going, how to make them hard to beat, how to give them flair up front.

"I know I could do it back here. Sometimes your face fits, sometimes it doesn't".

He was discovered while playing for Ferryhill School by Ray Grant, the fabled Boro scout who also found Brian Clough. He'd been sent to watch a 6ft 2in 12-year-old called Gordon Hodgson.

Grant recognised the best football brain he'd seen in 40 years. "Perfect timing, remarkable positional play," he wrote.

Whatever happened to Gordon Hodgson - Stan doesn't know, Backtrack readers may - Ray Grant is now 92, fit and well and living near Northallerton.

Stan visited him on Wednesday - "still talks the hind legs off a donkey" - impressed that the retired headmaster had retained his file ("and in real writing") among the 2,000 in the spare bedroom.

By 18 he was doing so well that Charlton, legendarily thrifty, promised him a fiver if he scored 50 goals a season in junior and reserve team football. He missed the target by ten goals.

He joined Sunderland for £300,000 ("an absolute bargain," said Roker manager Ken Knighton) after being unable to hold a regular Boro place under John Neal, left Sunderland after disgreements with Alan Durban - "the king of the moaners" - left Crystal Palace because he didn't like London and returned, on a free, to Sunderland.

"Looking back I should have signed for Newcastle and Arthur Cox the first time I left Sunderland. After I turned them down they signed Peter Beardsley from Carlisle, and the rest is history."

Facing an expensive divorce settlement, he accepted a "fantastic" offer to play indoor six-a-side in America - "indoor suited me, with being a bit small" - stayed, formed his own ten-team club in Kansas, has an American wife and four children.

He twice sought the Sunderland managerial vacancy in the early 1990s, and even offered to help Middlesbrough when times, very recently, looked desolate.

"Terry has done exactly what I would have done. I just saw childish and schoolboy errors and I knew I could put it right.

"I'm not saying I'm a Terry Venables but I had natural ability as a player and I believe I have natural ability as a coach and manager. I don't know why people won't take a risk. The stumbling block seems to be they think I'm some sort of nonentity."

"I've had lots of nice letters," says Stan. "They're almost all of the thanks but no thanks variety, but I haven't given uo hope."

He shook familiar hands, watched Liverpool demolish the Palace, loped back from the pub for a last night at his mam and dad's before the homeward flight.

If anyone read the column and wanted a manager, said Stan, he could be back in the Greyhound on Saturday night