Playing Career
The son of former Barnsley and Lincoln City player Ron Smillie, Neil Smillie began his career with Crystal Palace, where he spent seven years, during which he had a spell on loan at Brentford and also spent two summers playing for Memphis Rogues in the North American Soccer League. In 1982 he was sold to Brighton & Hove Albion. During his time with the south coast club he played in the 1983 FA Cup Final, in which Brighton held Manchester United to a 2–2 draw before losing in a replay.
In 1985 Smillie moved to Watford for a fee of £100,000 but his spell at Vicarage Road was an unsuccessful one, with only 16 first-team appearances in three years, and in 1988 he moved on to Reading. A year later he was on the move again to Brentford, where he was a first-team regular for five years, notching up over 170 appearances.
Read more about this topic: Neil Smillie
Famous quotes containing the words playing and/or career:
“Someday our grandchildren will look up at us and say, “Where were you, Grandma, and what were you doing when you first realized that President Reagan was, er, not playing with a full deck?””
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)