Anyone with a penchant for reading the football results would have done a double take at Aston Villa’s 2-2 draw with Leicester City in March 1976. The two scorers columns read “Nicholl, Nicholl, Nicholl and Nicholl”.
Chris Nicholl had scored two goals and two own goals in the same match for the first time since Sam Wynne achieved the feat for Oldham Athletic against Manchester United in 1923. Wynne would tragically die during a game at the age of 30 in 1927, but the 29-year-old Nicholl was about to enter a late flourishing.
A year later the no-nonsense defender would score one of the most celebrated goals in the history of Aston Villa and in the unlikeliest of fashions for a man more noted for roughing up centre-forwards.
It was the second replay of the League Cup final at Old Trafford and Villa were losing 1-0 with ten minutes to go. Nicholl controlled a clearance and started to run with the ball, dropping his shoulder like a tricky winger to swerve past the Everton forward Duncan McKenzie. He then hit the ball with his left foot from 40 yards out and watched as it dipped and swerved before nestling into the corner. Villa went on to lift the trophy. No one was more astonished than Nicholl. “I just panicked really,” he recalled. “So I hit it with my left peg as hard as I could.”
Christopher John Nicholl was born in Wilmslow, Cheshire in 1946, but spent his early years in Belfast, where his father was from. He was bright enough to attend grammar school, but football consumed him. “My dad played football in Northern Ireland and taught me everything I know. We used to go out on the green and practise all the time.”
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Nicholl made his league debut for Halifax Town before joining second division Luton Town in 1969. After Aston Villa signed him for £90,000 in March 1972, then a record for a third division club, Nicholl was credited as a key part of their renaissance.
The club won the League Cup in 1975 and would also return to the top flight that year. In 1976-77 they won the League Cup again and finished fourth in the first division, their best finish for 40 years. However, Nicholl fell victim to the rebuilding programme of the manager Ron Saunders that summer and was controversially sold to Southampton for £90,000. “We played golf together and he always beat me but that summer, for the first time ever, I beat him. Two weeks later I was sold. That pushed him over the edge.”
He joined another club on the up and established himself in the Southampton team that won promotion to the first division in 1978. It was at Southampton that Nicholl won the bulk of his 51 caps for Northern Ireland including — at the age of 35 — all five games of their fairytale run to the second stage of the 1982 World Cup, which included a famous 1-0 victory against the hosts, Spain.
Nicholl was sold to Grimsby Town in 1983 and helped them to challenge for promotion to the first division in 1983-84, eventually finishing fifth.
In 1985 Lawrie McMenemy left Southampton after 12 years in charge and Nicholl replaced him. However, that team was breaking up and while Nicholl could not match McMenemy’s success or his exciting brand of football, he did mould a solid, mid-table side and also nurtured young talents including a mercurial lad from Guernsey called Matt Le Tissier and a young Geordie called Alan Shearer.
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As old-school as they came, Nicholl spoke to players in a language they understood. One of his players, Micky Adams, recalled Nicholl’s assessment of their performances after a game. “He’d go around the room and tell us, one by one: ‘not bad’, ‘did all right’, ‘shit’, ‘wanker’. You’d sit there and think, ‘Please don’t give me a wanker, a shit will do today because I know I’ve not played well’. But it was great, because … you’d be desperate to prove him wrong. I’d come out on the training ground like a raging bull.”
Southampton lost an 1986 FA Cup semi-final to Liverpool and finished seventh in the first division in 1989-90, but a poor run of results the following season led to Nicholl’s sacking. He later managed Walsall, winning promotion to the second division in 1995.
Nicholl continued to play the game that he loved as an enthusiastic participant in legends football but in recent years was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of dementia attributed to years of heading footballs. In a 2017 BBC documentary Dementia, Football and Me Nicholl revealed that he often forgot where he lived. He is survived by his wife Jane and their children, Paul and Cathy.
Nicholl is remembered as a gentleman of the game: uncompromising but unfailingly sporting. His cousin Jimmy Nicholl, with whom he played in the same Northern Ireland team, recalled: “In 1980 we went to Australia with Northern Ireland. We scored, so I turned round to walk back to my right-back spot. Chris grabbed me by the neck and said: ‘Who do you think you are? That fella has just scored a goal for his country. You get up and shake his hand’.”
Chris Nicholl, footballer, was born on October 12, 1946. He died of CTE on February 24, 2024, aged 77