Weston: Donald Patrick (Don)

1962-1965 (Player Details)

Forward

Born: Mansfield: 06-03-1936

Debut: Stoke City (h): 15-12-1962

5’7 1/4” 11st 6lb (1963)

After representing East Derbyshire Schoolboys, and then working briefly as a coalminer near his hometown of Mansfield and played for Pleasley Imperials, he was spotted by Leeds United as a sixteen-year-old amateur, but refused to sign as a professional for personal reasons. Then followed National Service at an army camp near Rhyl, in North Wales, and it was while excelling in military competition for the Thirty-first Training Regiment Royal Artillery (North Wales) and the Kinnell Park Barracks that he was spotted by the local Football League club, Wrexham, and signed for them in June 1959. After enlisting at the Racecourse Ground on amateur terms, Weston was so keen to impress that he went AWOL to play in one game, being confined to barracks for two weeks for his pains. Undeterred, the intrepid escaper bounced back to earn a professional contract with the lowly Third Division club, for whom he netted twenty-one goals in forty-two League appearances during 1958/59 and the first half of the following campaign, before joining First Division side Birmingham City for £15,000 in January 1960. However, he failed to settle and eleven months later in December 1960, after scoring three goals in twenty-one League appearances, he stepped down a Division, moving to Second Division Rotherham United in a £10,000 deal. At Millmoor, Weston flourished immediately, his goals helping United to reach the two-legged final of the League Cup in 1960/61 and, after a 2-0 first leg home victory over Aston Villa, the Merry Millers seemed set to lift the trophy in its inaugural season. But Villa prevailed 3-0 on the night, 3-2 on aggregate. Thereafter the pacy marksman continued to perform creditably for Rotherham, scoring twenty-three times in seventy-four League games, enough to persuade Revie to pay £18,000 for his services in December 1962. Having been bought to fill a gap left by the departed hero John Charles, Weston might have been on a hiding to nothing, but he slotted in smoothly in central attack alongside another recent purchase, Jim Storrie, and made the best possible start to his career with Leeds by scoring a debut hat-trick and he went on to be the joint top scorer as United swept to the Second Division Championship. When the progressive young Manager Don Revie guided Leeds United into the top tier of English football as Champions of the old Second Division in the spring of 1964, Don Weston was one of his most potent attacking weapons. The foundation of the Yorkshiremen's success was a formidably flinty rearguard featuring the likes of Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Paul Reaney, while the most influential individuals were the tiny but inspirational Scottish schemer Bobby Collins and his rising midfield henchmen Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles. But it was the wing-heeled Weston, frequently damned by historians' faint praise as a mere journeyman front-runner, who supplied much of the crucial cutting edge. As Collins put it, "Don had a turn of foot like nobody's business" and, during that memorable season, as Revie proceeded with his painstaking construction of a team destined to bestride the national game by decade's end, the north Midlander employed it to such devastating effect that he finished joint top-scorer, on thirteen goals, with the left-winger Albert Johanneson. Usually operating at centre-forward or inside-right, the shortish, wiry Weston relished dropping deep, where he was difficult for his designated marker to locate, then he would sprint at wrong-footed defenders, frequently climaxing his dash with a powerful shot. He compensated for lack of extravagant natural talent through fitness and dedication to his craft, though later he would be revealed to lack the necessary class to thrive among the First Division elite. Weston missed only seven games in the Second Division title campaign which followed, but although Revie kept faith with him at first, as Leeds made a rousing return to the First in 1964/65 he receded to the fringe of the team following the purchase of the England centre-forward Alan Peacock. In October 1965, with his thirtieth birthday approaching, Weston moved to Huddersfield Town but featured only intermittently for the Second Division promotion hopefuls, scoring seven times in twenty League starts and two games from the bench, before rejoining Wrexham, by now in Division Four, in December 1966. Weston departed the Racecourse for the second time in 1968, following differences with the new boss Alvan Williams, after scoring nineteen goals in forty-two League games. He then served Fourth Division Chester fleetingly in starting one League game and being a substitute in two more before finishing his playing days with Non-League Altrincham and Bethesda Athletic. Later he returned to Mansfield, where he ran a car dealership. He died on 20th January 2007, aged seventy, in Mansfield.