Gracefully athletic player, who has died aged 72, was one of England’s finest keepers and a legend at
Liverpool and Spurs
Ray Clemence was not just one of the finest goalkeepers
England has ever produced, he was a link back to the time when footballers used to have day jobs or summer occupations. Impossible as it will now seem to imagine, there was a period relatively recently when promising young footballers would find themselves meeting and dealing with members of the public, as Clemence famously did when working as a deckchair attendant on the beach in his native Skegness.
Just in case younger generations find this hard to credit, photographs exist of a young Clemence not only distributing the aforesaid folding finger-traps, but also leaping around on the sand on being asked to demonstrate his goalkeeping ability.