Johnny Haynes(1934–2005)

John Norman Haynes was born at Edmonton in north London on 17 October 1934, the only son of a post-office clerk. Spotted at fourteen playing for Edmonton schoolboys, he chose Fulham over Tottenham, signed amateur forms at fifteen in 1950 and professional forms at seventeen in 1952, and played for the same club for the whole of his eighteen-year senior career.

He played inside-forward, the deep creative role on which English football's tactical organisation was built in the 1950s. He was, by the consensus of every contemporary, the most accurate long-passer of his generation; the manager Bill Nicholson, whom he had turned down as a boy, called him the best passer of a ball he had ever seen in any position. The thirty- and forty-yard pass struck to a winger's feet without a bounce became known at Craven Cottage simply as the Haynes pass. He first played for England three days before his twentieth birthday, won fifty-six caps, and captained the side twenty-two times.

The maximum-wage system had capped footballers' pay at twenty pounds a week through the post-war years. When the Professional Footballers' Association forced its abolition in January 1961, the Fulham chairman Tommy Trinder, who had called Haynes a hundred-pound-a-week player as a turn of phrase, was held to it by the press and signed him on exactly that. Haynes was the first British professional footballer paid a hundred pounds a week, the headline figure of the first post-cap year of the English game.

He captained England at the 1958 and 1962 World Cups and was, in those years, the outstanding creative player in the British game. He gave Fulham 658 first-team appearances, the second-highest total in the club's history, before leaving in 1970, and then played as a player-coach at Durban City.

He came home to a quiet retirement in Edinburgh, working as a Fulham scout and running a newsagent business with his partner Avril. Fulham named the stand at Craven Cottage facing the Thames the Johnny Haynes Stand in 2005. He died in Edinburgh on 18 October 2005, the day after his seventy-first birthday. The Haynes name, the triple-stream surname of Flemish Hainault, the English hay-enclosure and the dialect form of John's son, carries him from an Edmonton recreation ground into the foundation event of post-cap English professional football.