The legacy link between Tony Green and Brian Kilcline – Newcastle United fans | OneFootball

Over the last few days I have seen Tony Green and Brian Kilcline mentioned in articles and comments on The Mag.

I realised there is a link between the two players: both hold legendary status in the minds of a lot of Newcastle United fans, despite [for different reasons] not having made many appearances.

Tony Green was way before my time [his career was over years before I was born] but he is still spoken [and written] about with much love.

An all-action midfielder, what few clips there are of him online show a classy midfield dynamo who seems to glide over the muddy 70s pitches as if he was playing on a bowling green, dribbling and driving past opponents and comfortable using his left foot, though mainly right-footed.

He was injured out of the game at the age of 25.

Manager Joe Harvey said:

“It was the saddest day of my life. He was my very best buy.”

He’d only made 35 appearances for Newcastle but did enough in those games to still be talked about as an all-time great 50 years later.

Quite the legacy.

Brian ‘Killer’ Kilcline was a very different type of player.

A huge, hard central defender, he was 29 when Kevin Keegan made him his first signing in those exciting/terrifying days in the spring of 1992. He was given the captain’s armband. He was a motivator as well as a calming presence at the back.

While he was no Philippe Albert or Fabian Schar, he was however not scared to try to play from the back.

Killer’s ability to mix things up with shorter passes into midfield rather than the long balls humped forward was the beginning of Keegan trying to change the way we played.

Newcastle were still hopelessly inconsistent in the remaining games but we did enough [including, obviously, the clean sheet at home to Portsmouth in the last home game, some of you may recall that match] to beat the drop.

Killer didn’t play much in the promotion season 1992-93 [Keegan preferred Kevin Scott alongside former centre-forward Steve Howey] but he was there, as club captain, to lift the First Division trophy with Barry Venison on the day of the final home match v Leicester. After one match for Newcastle in the Premier League [his 24th start] he was allowed to leave for Swindon.

An interesting character, interviews with him are always entertaining.

Are there any other players that hold legendary status despite only playing 30-ish games? [Not including the several hundred players who were legendarily bad, natch].