On this day in 1927, Dave Halliday scored a hattrick in a 6-2 win versus Leeds United in the First Division. Our other three goals all came from Stan Ramsay.
Before joining Sunderland, Halliday made a name for himself north of the border in Scotland with Dundee following brief spells with Queen of the South and St Mirren. Halliday joined the Dee in 1921, where he was initially used as a winger.
However, Halliday was quickly moved further forward to play as a striker, which would be the start of him making a name for himself as a goal scorer. He scored 38 goals in 36 games in the 1923-24 season: this remains the club's all-time seasonal league goal-scoring record. Halliday would spend four years on Tayside: scoring 90 goals in 126 appearances for his club.
It was his impressive form in Scotland with Dundee that would see Sunderland pay £4,000 to them for his services. Halliday quickly established himself as a goal scorer and was scoring just as many goals south of the border as he was in the north.
Halliday scored100 goals for the lads in his first 101 games on Wearside and remains the quickest player to score one hundred goals in the top tier of English football. This is impressive as he beat out Dixie Dean by one game, who was playing at the same time as him (and actually reached the 100 goal mark just nine days after Halliday), as well as Erling Haaland by the same margin. In the 1928-29 season, Halliday scored 43 goals and was the top goal scorer in the top tier that season, making him the most recent of only two players to be both top scorer in the top two divisions of England and Scotland (the other being Don McLean).
Halliday scored at least 35 league goals in each of the four seasons he spent on Wearside. His lowest tally of goals scored in a season was 35 goals, which is the best record for any player who has played for the club. Halliday also has the highest games to goals ratio in the club's history. The Scotsman’s goal record at Sunderland means he has the third-highest goal tally throughout the history of the club, scoring 12 hat-ricks and scoring 4 goals in one game on three occasions.
Halliday left the lads in 1929, finishing his time on Wearside with a grand total of 165 goals in 175 games. After leaving Sunderland, Halliday moved even further south to play in the capital with Arsenal. Halliday debuted for The Gunners on the 9th November 1929 but struggled to find form straight away. Arsenal’s manager Herbert Chapman tried different combinations and Halliday found form again in January of that season. He left Arsenal after one season and moved back up north to play at Maine Road for Manchester City.
The striker made the move to Manchester in November 1930 – just a year after joining the Gunners. The Blues paid Arsenal the fee of £5,700 for his services. At City, Halliday returned to his prolific goal scoring form and scored 47 goals in 76 league games, as well as scoring four goals in 6 cup appearances which helped City to the 1931-32 FA Cup semi-finals which they lost to Halliday’s former club Arsenal. He missed the 1933 FA Cup Final due to injury, which his side lost to Arsenal.
Halliday finished his playing career with Clapton Orient where he played between 1933 and 1935. He was their top scorer in both of the seasons he spent at the club. In the 18 months he spent at Clapton, he scored a total of 36 goals in 56 competitive first-team games.
After his footballing career ended, he would go back up north to Scotland to manage Aberdeen, where he would win a Scottish League title and a Scottish Cup. After leaving Aberdeen after 18 years as manager, he went back south of the border to manage Leicester City, where he won the second division in the 1956-57 season. His managerial career ended in 1958 but his involvement with Leicester did not. He became a scout for them in the north east of Scotland after he moved back to live in Aberdeen. On 5th January 1970, aged 68, Dave Halliday passed away.
