In a cardboard box, among the piles of clothes and everything else at the bottom of Brian Punter’s wardrobe, there is a piece of paper that counts among his more prized possessions. It is dated September 28, 2008, and it is the scouting report from the Mid-Staffs Junior League tournament when Punter, then a talent-spotter for Wolverhampton Wanderers , saw an eight-year-old Morgan Gibbs-White for the first time. Advertisement “I can still remember it,” Punter tells The Athletic , and suddenly he is out of his armchair to re-enact the moment, shaping up for a header in the manner of an old-fashioned centre-forward.
“It was the way he headed the ball that really stood out. He wasn’t big. Most of the other lads were two years older than him.
But when the ball came up to him, he set himself for the header and I thought, ‘Christ, he heads the ball like a professional’. He was running the game, making the difficult things look easy.” Punter played for Wolves in the 1953 FA Youth Cup final against Manchester United , won three England caps at youth level and went on to have five years as a semi-professional with Lincoln City in the lower divisions.
He is 89 now, living in a retirement home in Wheaton Aston, 12 miles north of Wolverhampton. He quit scouting in 2009 after his wife, Barbara, developed Alzheimer’s and has never sought publicity for being the scout who discovered Gibbs-White. If anything, he sounds surprised that word has got out.
“You always hope to f.
