One Wilf Mannion, there's only one Wilf Mannion . . .

It was February 1941. The world was at war as Wilf Mannion laced up his boots for his debut game for England. The match was at Newcastle and the opponents were deadly - more deadly and more determined, some would say, than the enemy which threatened the cities of the North-East with its fearsome blitzkrieg.

It was a game which ended in a 3-2 defeat at the hands of the Scottish eleven. But it was a game which propelled a young Wilf Mannion on to national stardom and paved the way for a glittering, if not financially-rewarding, career.

The previous year, Mannion had been preparing an aircraft landing strip with the Green Howards as the British Expeditionary Force attempted to halt the Nazi advance across western Europe.

Unprepared for the ferocity of Hitler's war machine, the North Yorkshire regiment, along with the rest of the Allied army, was forced into an ignoble retreat.

"We weren't there long," Wilf said later. "We had to have our running pumps on to get back home. There was a forced march for two or three days to get to the escape route at Dunkirk."

Reported missing in action, but escaping from Dunkirk on a supply ship and arriving back in England on the weekend of the FA Cup final, Mannion made his way to Richmond and the headquarters of the Green Howards.

While he was stationed in the North Yorkshire town, he received his call-up papers for another national army - the England team.

It was not the first time he had been called up for the national side, but it was to be the first time he played. Previously, in the days of uneasy peace before the war, he was signed up as a reserve for a match against Wales at his home ground, the newly-refurbished Ayresome Park, in the centre of Middlesbrough.

But the Newcastle match was his first taste of international soccer, his introduction to the England team in action. And although the wartime strip was bereft of its three-lion emblem, and emergency regulations forbade caps to be awarded at those non-official wartime internationals, and although the match ended in a decisive, though not disastrous, Scotland victory, it provided the young Teesside player with an unforgettable experience and proved to be his ticket to greater things.

The return match in May, at Hampden Park, rewarded England with a 3-1 victory and put the seal on Mannion's place in the team, where he partnered Stanley Matthews.

Mannion's career was developing faster than his wildest boyhood dreams could ever have imagined. The Green Howard's name was spreading beyond his native Teesside to be uttered in every smoke-room in every pub of the land.

Wilf Mannion, like his good friend and team-mate George Hardwick, was becoming a household name. And like many of his contemporaries, his story began amid the terraced streets and industrial heartlands of First World War Britain. Wilf's story began at South Bank, in Teesside's iron and steel producing belt, as the Great War entered its final bloody summer.

WILF was born one of five brothers and five sisters on May 16, 1918, in Napier Street, the son of County Mayo man Thomas Mannion, a worker at the nearby Bolckow Vaughan blast furnace, and his wife, Mary.

His footballing apprenticeship began on his nat-ive Slaggy Island, among the streets and acres of puddling waste. He played for his school team, St Peter's, winning praise from his teachers and more experienced players, before the world of work beckoned and the young Mannion went in search of a career.

He left school at 14 to train as a welder at Smith's Dock, but it was a job he hated, and he left for the rolling mills, handling red-hot steel as it passed through the production process.

After playing for local teams, Wilf got his first big break when he signed for Middlesbrough FC's reserve team and rose swiftly through the ranks, winning promotion to the first team at the age of 18, in 1937, for a game against Portsmouth.

Middlesbrough FC's inaugural match took place in February 1877 in front of an unenthusiastic crowd of 13 people - one of whom died before the final whistle blew.

Sixty years later, 25,000 turned up at Ayresome Park to watch the home team draw 2-2 with Portsmouth and witness the debut of the diminutive, blond-haired boy from South Bank at inside-right.

The news reports heaped praise on the newcomer. One said: "A lightly-built lad, looking almost boyish against these hefty Portsmouth fellows, he did quite nicely, showing exceedingly clever footwork in flashes, the ability to drop back and help a harassed defence, and a cool head.

"Mannion appears to have more of a chance of making good later on. This outing will have done him good."

Mannion's "chance" came sooner rather than later. That November, and after only two first-team games, he was called up as a reserve for the England team in the game against Wales at Ayresome Park. In the event, his feet didn't touch the pitch, but he had been noticed - that was the main thing. He had been selected for England and his fame was spreading across the country with the speed of an express train.

Matt Busby, at that time a Liverpool player, nicknamed Mannion the Wonder Boy, and the name was embraced by the Press. Gradually it changed to Golden Boy, a name which was descriptive if not prophetic. Mannion had arrived. The Golden Boy was the toast of the sports writers and a favourite with the fans.

But then came the war, bringing with it upheaval and disruption, and, for Private Mannion, after the Dunkirk retreat, hostilities in the Middle East with bouts of jaundice and malaria. The war took a huge chunk out of Mannion's life, robbing him of chances to play in international matches at the very peak of his playing career.

The Golden Boy's return to Boro was celebrated with a 3-0 win against Bury. On that occasion Mannion did not score, but he was responsible for setting up the goals.

The papers said: "There were some highly satisfactory features, and outstanding among these was the display by Wilf Mannion, back in the team after four years service in the Middle East. His forward line generalship, for which we have so often yearned, was quickly in evidence, coupled with cool, adroit play and picture passes that played a significant part in the side's superiority."

Soon to follow was one of the highlights of the young Mannion's career - his first official international, an away match in Belfast against Northern Ireland, in September 1946.

Among Walter Winterbottom's England team were great names from the era - George Hardwick, Mannion's Boro team-mate making his debut as England captain, Tom Finney, Tommy Lawton, Neil Franklin, Frank Swift, and newcomer Billy Wright.

Raich Carter scored the first of the seven England goals, followed by two from Mannion, one each from Finney, Lawton and Bobby Langton - and Mannion scoring a third for his hat-trick.

It was a dream come true. The blond-haired boy from Slaggy Island was the toast of the England team.

MANNION'S footballing feats came thick and fast, like goals in a penalty shoot-out. In May of the following year, he scored twice for Great Britain against the Rest of Europe in a game billed Match of the Century.

A fortnight later he was in the team which slaughtered Portugal 10-0, although he was the only English forward who didn't sink the ball in the back of the net.

The following May he was a member of the England team which defeated Italy 4-0 in Turin.

Finney maintained the Turin game was one of the best Mannion ever played for England.

"I remember Wilf so well because he was such a fantastic player," he said.

"He had a tremendous amount of skill, he was great passer of the ball, and had a great sense of all that was happening around him. I've always nominated him as one of my favourite players."

Stanley Matthews said: "Wilf, playing the Italians especially, had scintillating feet. He was so light on his feet you never thought he was touching the ground."

And on the home front too, on Teesside in his familiar Boro shirt at Ayresome Park, he delighted the crowds with his dazzling footwork - the Wonder Boy, the Golden Boy, the young player Tom Finney once described as "a ballerina in tiny boots as he glided across the muckiest of pitches, hands spread out at right-angles to his body, leaving would-be tacklers with empty space and anguished expressions".

Most memorable of all was the match against Blackpool in November 1947, said to have been one of Mannion's finest, although he insisted it was not one of his best. The Golden Boy didn't score, but his creative skills produced the perfect crosses from which the Boro forwards sent Blackpool packing in a fabulous 4-0 victory.

The Press were ecstatic.

"Behind every Middlesbrough attack - and there were plenty of them - was the guile, the incomparable craft of a brilliant Mannion," they said.

"Wilf was the consummate football artist. He moved his body a couple of inches and had the defenders running the wrong way; he balanced the ball on his head, let it run slowly down his body to trap it on the move; he drew a net around him to come waltzing out of it, the ball at his feet; he split open one of the most formidable rearguards in the league to flash a goal pass to an unmarked colleague."

Another paper said of the performance: "On this occasion he was the inside-left par excellence; his skill was so superb; his judgement so unerring. There can have been few first-class games anywhere at any time in which a player was dispossessed so rarely."

Mannion, though, had a special reason for playing well in that glorious day against the Lancashire visitors. There was a young woman in the crowd, a girl he had met on Saltburn pier, and it was the first time she had seen him play. Bernadette Murray and Wilf had just announced their engagement, and this was her first visit to a professional game.

Wilf said later: "I was just showing off for my girl really. I thought I'd show her what football was about. I kept hold of the ball and showed what I could do. I thought it was a bad game really, because I wasn't looking out for the team as much as I usually did, but everyone remembers it as a good game."

It certainly was a good game, because the players formed a guard of honour to applaud the Golden Boy off the pitch, and Blackpool's manager, Joe Smith, said: "Mannion - what a player. He made that ball do everything but talk."

Wilf and Bernadette married within weeks at St Philomena's Church, just a few streets from Ayresome Park.

WILF Mannion will always be remembered as Boro's greatest player. Ironically, there was no love lost between the management and the star player, and his later years were overshadowed by his discontent at the draconian system which kept him tied to the club and prevented him transferring to more lucrative pastures.

There was his infamous eight-month strike, beginning in June 1948, brought about when his request for a transfer was refused and which ended in defeat and an embarrassed return to Ayresome Park.

On the international scene, too, there was the all-time low of the England defeat at the hands of the US outsiders during the 1950 World Cup in Brazil.

A year later he suffered an horrific facial injury during an international against Scotland at Wembley and was carried off the pitch. The following year he played his final international, partnering Tom Finney for the last time, in a match against France at Highbury.

In his final years, Mannion broke the Boro chains at last, departing for Hull City for £4,500. This was followed by a swift decline and relative obscurity at Poole, Cambridge United and Kings Lynn.

No football fortune, no millions of pounds or huge transfer fee accompanied the star of Ayresome Park into his later years. The Boro and England star ended his working career as a tea-boy for a gang of pipe-fitters at ICI Wilton, on Teesside, only a few miles from the docks and blast furnaces where he had worked when leaving school at 14.

But the fans never forgot the Golden Boy of Boro's post-war glory years.

In 1995, Boro played their last game at Ayresome Park, against Luton Town, before transferring to the multi-million pound Riverside Stadium.

One man was given the honour of being the last person to walk around the ground. The crowd rose to the occasion and chanted: "One Wilf Mannion. There's only one Wilf Mannion."

The Northern Echo reported: "For one last time possibly the most gifted feet ever to grace Ayresome Park's pitch trod the turf. The hair may no longer be golden and the legs are a little less athletic, but there is still no mistaking Wilf Mannion.

"He came to say farewell to the ground where he made his name; the fans to pay there respects one more time."

There was only one Golden Boy. Only one Wilf Mannion