Looking back: Jack Lewis

The start of the 1969/70 season saw Lewis deputising for the injured Gordon Hughes on the right wing as City made a poor start to the season. Out of the side on Hughes’s return he then began to fill in on the opposite flank when Dave Smith was dropped from the side for a spell. His first game in that position, a 4-0 win over York, saw Lewis hit a brilliant 20-yard drive which Maurice Burton rated as City’s best goal of 1969.

With Smith restored to the side Jack was then on the sidelines again before another brief run, this time as a striker alongside Rod Fletcher. His last home game for City was as a substitute against Grimsby Town on 17th January, and after a last appearance in a 4-0 defeat at Chesterfield it was something of a surprise when he joined the Mariners for a fee of £3,000 later in the month, having featured in the first team squad for the majority of the games in the season, many from the bench, although scoring just two goals.

With Grimsby there was a slight improvement in his scoring rate, with four goals from 19 games played during the remainder of the 1969/70 season. However, there seemed to be little change from his experiences with City as he was generally in and out of the Grimsby side over the next three seasons, the second of which saw the Mariners crowned Fourth Division champions under Lawrie McMenemy. But after that, now generally being played as a striker, Jack Lewis entered the best period of his career, finishing as Grimsby’s top scorer for three Third Division seasons in a row, with a best-ever return of 22 goals from 45 games in 1974/75.

November 1975 saw a call-up to the Welsh squad for the Derbyshire-born player which came about following the issue of a circular from the Welsh FA to all Football League clubs asking for players with Welsh parentage to make themselves known. Responding that his father was a Valleys boy from Glamorganshire the player with the good Welsh name of Lewis found himself selected on the bench for a European Championship qualifying match against Austria. Although not getting onto the pitch on that occasion he did gain international experience as an over-age player for the Wales Under-23 team in a 3–2 defeat to Scotland the following February. This was to be the high spot of his career, as 1976/77 saw Grimsby relegated from the Third Division with Lewis’s contribution down to 9 goals from a total of 39 appearances.

Lewis himself moved upwards, being signed by his old Imps team-mate Jim Smith for Blackburn Rovers. The only time he played in the Second Division, a moderate total of six goals from 28 games contributed to a fifth-place finish for the Lancashire club. With Smith having left to take over at Birmingham City before the end of the season Lewis also moved on in August 1978 dropping back into the Fourth Division with Doncaster Rovers where he was to gain something of a ‘super-sub’ reputation over his two seasons with them, 19 of his 71 appearances coming from the bench. He managed only 12 goals in his time with Doncaster, three of them scored at Blundell Park, Grimsby against his old club on the last day of a 1978/79 season that saw Doncaster applying for re-election. After a mid-table finish the following season Lewis moved on to Alliance Premier (nowadays National) League side Scarborough at the age of 32 making just a dozen or so appearances for them. He now lives in Armthorpe near Doncaster.

Prior to the advent of Percy Freeman Jack Lewis was my favourite City player and I always felt he was wasted when played in midfield, although arguably it did give him the chance to take defenders on in what was described in one newspaper report as one of his ‘crowd-pleasing runs’. In some ways he could have been described as the George Best of the Fourth Division and looking back, he probably would have been best employed by City as a goal-scoring right winger in the manner of Gareth Ainsworth or the early Gordon Hobson, but with Gordon Hughes one of City’s best players over the majority of Jack Lewis’s time with the club that was unlikely to happen. As that writer to the newspaper said, he had real talent, and probably should have spent more time at a higher level than just one season in the Second Division (now the Championship). The fact that he didn’t was perhaps that, as he admitted himself, he had difficulty in motivating himself for run-of-the mill games rather than for the big occasion.

Another reason for comparing Lewis to George Best is that to us chaps at the time it seemed as if Manchester United’s Irishman, with his ‘pop star’ looks, was almost solely responsible for creating interest in football – and footballers – amongst the young women of the day and Jack Lewis could again be described as the Fourth Division equivalent. In the late 1960s the Lincoln City match programme included within it the Football League Review magazine with Lewis featuring regularly in its pages in the weekly poll for (presumably) female supporters to vote for the best-looking footballers of the day.

Jack Lewis’s Football League record totalled 410 appearances with 99 goals scored (certain sources crediting him with 412 appearances seem to be in error).