Squad Profiles - Legends of the Game

TO DESCRIBE Joe Bambrick as prolific hardly does justice to a player who is believed to have scored close on 1000 goals during his career. 

While the majority of those goals came during his time with Linfield, he will probably best be remembered for bagging a double hat-trick for Ireland (as we were still called despite partition) in our 7-0 drubbing of Wales in Belfast on the 1st February 1930, an Irish record which is unlikely ever to be beaten. 

A strongly built and powerful player, Joe’s first real taste of top class football actually came with Linfield’s fierce cross-town rivals Glentoran for whom he managed to score 44 goals in just 37 games during his one and only season at the Oval. 

At the start of the 1927/28 campaign Joe had switched his allegiances to Windsor Park where he had managed to find the net an incredible 81 times by the seasons end. However, two years later he was to eclipse even that phenomenal total when he scored an amazing 94 goals, six of which came against the Welsh on that memorable day at Celtic Park. 

In December 1934, Joe, who had naturally become a cult figure among Blues supporters, was on his way to England and Chelsea for a fee of £2,500. Although he found the competition across the water a good deal more intense, he still managed a very respectable 37 goals in 66 appearances over three seasons at Stamford Bridge. 

A move to Walsall ensued in March 1938, but his stay with the Midlands club was a brief one and he was soon to return to his beloved Linfield, for whom he eventually coached and scouted following his retirement from the game. 

On the international front, he won his first cap against England in 1928 just 12 days short of his 23rd birthday and true to form, he scored an equalising goal at Goodison Park just 30 minutes into his debut. 

Despite terrorising defences at club level, over the next decade he was surprisingly only chosen for Ireland intermittently, eventually finishing with an impressive tally of 12 goals in just 11 international matches. 

Joe Bambrick was a true gentleman both on and off the pitch and was without question one of the greatest strikers ever to have graced an Irish side, and if he were playing for the modern day Chelsea in the much hyped Premiership his value would be incalculable.