Normally, these date-related posts revolve around the squad numbers era, but instances of players moving from 4 to 6 are rare – David Unsworth at Everton could be said to count, albeit with stints at West Ham United and (barely) Aston Villa in between.
However, there is an example from the late 1980s – in his final season at Manchester United, Remi Moses wore 4 in midfield up to December 12 but from the following week on, he only started games wearing 6.
The story which acts as a cipher for one of the first number oddities I noticed when I began watching football in 1990. While my beloved Republic of Ireland, and some English clubs such as Aston Villa, Everton and Nottingham Forest, had numbers 4 and 5 at centre-back, I was aware that 5 and 6 was the more common pairing.
Either configuration was seen as acceptable, but with 5 as the common factor, anything without that number in central defence was unsettling. Obviously, Liverpool had the Argentina-style 4-2-6-3 back four and it would take me a couple of decades to unpack how that came into being whereas Manchester United had the ‘correct’ full-back numbers with Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister wearing 4 and 6 respectively at centre-back.
Bruce had joined United from Norwich City on December 18, 1987 and made his debut against Portsmouth the following day – wearing 4 alongside number 5 Kevin Moran, having presumably persuaded Moses to move to 6.
It was in the summer of 1996 that I found out why he had an attachment to 4 – or, rather, why he had an aversion to 5.
At a car-boot sale in Glengarriff in West Cork, I came across the Shoot! annuals of 1986, 1989 and 1991 for IR£1.50 and the first of those featured an interview with Dave Watson.
The Liverpudlian was Bruce’s defensive partner at Norwich at the time – when they beat Sunderland to win the League Cup final in 1985, Watson was 6 with Bruce 4 while midfielder Peter Mendham donning 5.
The Shoot! piece was headlined ‘Watson gets shirty – he hates wearing number 5’ and featured this extract:
But Dave has harboured one secret hate about Norwich City.
“Wearing the number 5 shirt. It’s just a superstition that involves Steve Bruce and myself.
“When Steve arrived here last summer he was reluctant to wear the number 5 because he’d scored three own goals while wearing that number for Gillingham.
“Then after just minutes of his debut for us against Liverpool Steve put through his own goal again.
“He was so uptight about it, I offered to swap my number 6 with him. But while I was wearing the number 5 I scored two own goals myself! The only time I enjoy carrying that number is for England.”
Watson would wear 5 for England at Euro 88 – his namesake had done so at Euro 80 – and managed to overcome the phobia when he joined Everton in 1986, but Bruce stuck with 4 for the remainder of his career, playing for Birmingham City and Sheffield United before his retirement.
With Pallister having a preference for 6 – apart from wearing 4 on his Middlesbrough debut, it was the only number he wore as a starter in club football – his arrival at Old Trafford in 1989 ensured the 4 and 6 defensive pairing established itself for the best part of the next decade.
