Another in the sequence of drawings sourced from portraits of former footballers contained within the pages of the 1970-vintage ‘Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book’, using enlarged & consequently slightly degraded photocopies of which as the immediate point of visual reference.
The player represented here is one Carl Slee, another name previous unknown to me, active during the period immediately prior to my developing an interest in the game & for which I seem most nostalgic, then plying his trade for Swansea (City, as they’d recently been renamed, upgraded from ‘Town’) before leaving the Football League within a couple of years to join Merthyr, another illustration of the transience & ephemerality of the footballer’s career, the photograph the trace of a particular moment in time, as, effectively, is the legend printed in the book beneath its reproduction & included as part of the drawn image, with the drawing serving as a trace of the photocopy(-as-trace) of the reproduction, its physical presence being a trace, a record, of the drawing process itself.
In the manner of such things, it’s amusing to note that the official Swansea City online archive describes Carl Slee as a ‘hard-tackling defender’ whereas he’s affectionately recalled as ‘Clogger’ on a fans’ forum!
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