VETERAN striker Steve Claridge, who saw service with 22 professional and semi-professional clubs, helped Brighton to one of the most amazing smash-and-grab raid wins I’ve ever seen as an Albion fan.
The former Millwall forward answered a plea from his old Lions boss Mark McGhee in November 2004 which paid off big time when the Seagulls snatched a 1-0 win away to West Ham United.
It was the first of only five games Claridge played for second-tier Brighton after McGhee turned to a player who had delivered for him during his spell in charge of Millwall.
Albion went into the game at the Boleyn Ground on 13 November 2004 on the back of three defeats and McGhee was desperate to stem a tide which had seen eight goals conceded and no points on the board.
A trip to West Ham (who ended up being promoted via the play-offs that season) was a daunting prospect if the bad run was to be halted.
However, as McGhee pointed out: “We approached the game differently. Whereas before we thought we could win, today we did not, and played to make sure we didn’t get beaten.
“We kept the ball up front more which is important. Steve Claridge was key to that.
“He is one of the fittest players I’ve worked with and I had no doubt that after 18 months away from this level he would be able to perform.”
Centre back Guy Butters headed the only goal of the game on 68 minutes from Richard Carpenter’s pinpoint pass and the Seagulls held out for an unlikely three points. Hammers boss Alan Pardew had to admit: “Technically they were perfect and obviously came here to play deep and try and nick it on a set piece, which is what they did.”
Claridge’s professional career looked to have run its course after he left Millwall in 2003 and became player-manager of Southern League side Weymouth.
But the disappointment of missing out on promotion had seen him and chairman Ian Ridley leave the club and Claridge, at the age of 38, was keen to give league football another go.
McGhee knew the qualities Claridge could bring to his ailing side having been a popular figure as Millwall came close to promotion from the second tier.
The West Ham success didn’t spark a great revival in Albion’s fortunes, however, and there was only one more win (1-0 at home to Rotherham) during Claridge’s month with the club.
In one of those strange footballing quirks of fate, his fifth and final game for the Seagulls came away to Millwall (see Argus picture at top of article) on 11 December 2004, when Albion lost 2-0.
Claridge said all the right things in a programme feature about him that day, included likening the circumstances of both clubs. “The club has no money and it is tough just to survive, but everyone is in it together,” he said. “At Millwall we had a great team spirit and togetherness, and that is very much the case here.”
Unfortunately, it seemed money was the obstacle that precluded Claridge’s stay at Albion being extended and, after his deal was over, rather than it being one last hurrah, he went on to continue his league playing days at Brentford, Wycombe Wanderers, Gillingham, Bradford City and Walsall.
Then, at the age of 40, and with him needing just one more game to fulfil the landmark of 1,000 professional games, his old club Bournemouth gave him a match against Port Vale on 9 December 2006. No fairy tale, though, as they lost 4-0.
Born in Portsmouth on 10 April 1966, there aren’t many clubs in Hampshire and Dorset that Claridge has not had some kind of association with! Having been brought up in Titchfield, he started out with nearby Fareham Town in 1983. AFC Bournemouth took him on and gave him his debut in 1984 but he only played seven games before moving to Weymouth for three years.
Crystal Palace offered him a route back to the full professional game in 1988 but he didn’t make their league side, instead moving on to fourth tier Aldershot Town.
In two spells with Cambridge United, he scored 46 goals in 132 games. A falling out with manager John Beck saw him sold to Luton Town, and then bought back after Beck’s departure!
Nearly two years later, Birmingham City paid £350,000 to take Claridge to St Andrews and he became one of the club’s most prolific goalscorers, netting 35 in 88 games.
Such form eventually saw him switch to Leicester City and Claridge wrote himself into Foxes’ folklore, scoring winning goals in a play-off final to earn promotion to the elite level, and in the 1997 League Cup Final over Middlesbrough, the last time the competition staged a final replay. That, though, came after an ignominious beginning with Leicester.
McGhee’s successor as manager, Martin O’Neill, signed him for £1.2m in March 1996 and his early form was dreadful. Astonishingly, it seemed his poor start might well have been related to the wrong medication he had been taking for a heart defect for EIGHTEEN years, according to this official Leicester City website report.
In 1998, Leicester sent Claridge on loan to his hometown club, Portsmouth, but, in March 1998, McGhee, then boss at Wolves and seemingly at odds with more established strikers at the club, took Claridge to Molineux for a £350,000 fee. Only five months later he was sold to Portsmouth for £250,000.
Writer Dan Levelle said on an amusing Wolves’ fan website: “He was that amazing food blender you saw at your mate’s house, but you can’t get it to work at all for love nor money.”
Claridge’s time at Molineux was clearly not appreciated by the Molineux faithful, as Levelle revealed in this 2012 piece.
Even more galling for Wolves followers was that no sooner had Claridge made the switch to Portsmouth, he was scoring a hat-trick against them in a 3-1 win at Fratton Park!
The goals and games came thick and fast for Claridge back on home turf – 34 in 104 – but his reign as player-manager at Fratton Park in 2000 was curtailed after just 25 games.
Remembering the player he’d seen only briefly a couple of years earlier, McGhee, by now in charge at Millwall, offered the striker a lifeline with the Lions, initially on loan and then as a permanent signing.
He joined on a temporary basis to cover a period when current boss Neil Harris was banned following a sending off, but, after he hit the ground running, was then tied to a permanent deal, as this Millwall blog post described in 2016.
Writer Mark Litchfield summed him up brilliantly when he said: “His style was unconventional, to say the least: shirt untucked, one sock down and no shin pads, any naïve defender probably thought they could eat him for breakfast. But hard work was a pre-requisite for Claridge – he wouldn’t give any opposition player a moment’s rest and would more often than not always get the better of them, too.”
Few could doubt Claridge’s enthusiasm for the game, as he told the Bradford Telegraph & Argus during his time in Yorkshire.
Even after achieving the 1,000-game landmark courtesy of Bournemouth, Claridge couldn’t resist the lure of another game, turning out for Worthing, Harrow Borough, Weymouth, Gosport Borough and Salisbury.
Many younger readers will know Claridge as a pundit who worked extensively for the BBC on TV and radio and he now coaches youngsters in Salisbury and Warsash through his own scheme, the Steve Claridge Football Foundation.
In parallel lines 
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