Mark Walters

[Sexual Ealing]

I saw on social media it was his 62nd birthday yesterday. He never seems to get mentioned on here. He was one of the reasons I first loved Villa, and my memory is of a tricky, winding (but probably inconsistent) winger, but he never gets his flowers.

I'm too young (I love writing that, aged 48) to remember, but was there a falling out? Or perhaps my memory is playing tricks and he wan't that good, but he went to Rangers (their first black player? He suffered some horrible racism, anyway) when they were good and rich and Liverpool (when they were shite under Souness), so he must've had something.

What's the story, you old gets?

[dave.woodhall]

He was good for us, then he was too good for us but he wasn't ever good enough to be a legend. He's still around on matchdays and was playing in the local leagues until he was about forty; he said he had nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon.

[Sexual Ealing]

Cheers Dave. So no big schism; he just moved on and so did we, in our way?!

[PeterWithesShin]

Walters was very good, scored some crackers. We were shit and he left. Should have had more than 1 England cap. Wasn't overly popular when he returned with Liverpool especially for his reaction when scoring in the Rosenthal game.

[PeterWithe]

He was pretty much always our best player when I first started watching us every week, in the 1983 onward period. We were skint, Doug would sell everything that wasn't nailed down and at the time Rangers were paying very big money for English players, from memory I think he went for about £650k. Looking back he wasn't particularly quick, didn't score a lot of goals but the ones he did were usually brilliant, Spartak Moscow away springs to mind. Also, however good a winger he was, there was no one left to get on the end of his crosses. He did really well at Rangers but so did a lot of average Joes.

By the time he'd gone most of the crowd had given up on us so didn't really blame him for getting out. 

[thick_mike]

He was my favourite player in my teens, to the point where I named my first cat after him (despite discovering the cat was actually female). He had amazing ball control. Wasn’t his cousin a world keepie uppie champion or something? I vaguely remember him walking around the pitch at halftime juggling the ball the whole way.

[PeterWithesShin]

Despite leaving halfway through he was still one of our top scorers in the promotion season. He suffers a bit as there isn't footage of a lot of his best stuff. his goal v Luton for example. Plus our crowds were shit so it was closer to apathy than anything else when he left.

[PeterWithesShin]

A day that surprisingly moody at times

[thick_mike]

Morley on the left and Walters on the right! Unfortunately the rumour was that Morley had done a lot of long distance runs over the summer previous to get over the disappointment of not being selected for the World Cup squad and lost a bit of explosive pace as a result.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

I remember my Dad coming back from Villa youth games singing the praises of this young lad called Walters, previous to Walters it was Sid who turned out to be his favourite ever Villa player. There was very high expectation of Walters developing into a top, top player but he never reached those heights for us, still a lovely player to watch on his day but he made his breakthrough at the wrong time as PW pointed out, not long after Ellis came back.

Truth be told, he was born at the wrong time for the talents he had, today he'd most likely be in the US with the England team. Back in the 80s he was surrounded by cloggers and wannabe hard men and that's before you even get to the racist fans both home and abroard. I'm sure there was a Villa game in Europe where he suffered abuse that made the headlines but can't remember where.

Looking around online I came across this about his time with us as a Coach with the Academy:

"I coached for 10 years and coached for Aston Villa for six or seven of those years in the academy. When a full-time job came up, I wasn't even considered for the job and I was the only one who had played league football, never mind represented Aston Villa 200 times and scored a few goals for them.

"When I saw that, I was very disillusioned. Luckily I had options and carried on working for the FA and did other things. But some people have no choice."