Debut: 1-0 defeat to Queen's Park Rangers, March 15th 1986
League record: 73 games (+19 as sub), 22 goals
Sold to: Middlesbrough (can't find evidence of the fee), November 1988
Signed by Big Ron in the Spring of 1986, at the point where the wheels hadn’t just come off the title challenge wagon but had overtaken us and were lying at a heap at the bottom of the hill. He was brought in to try and score the goals after we’d arranged for Mark Hughes to be packed off to Barca, leaving the latter's mind somewhat off the ball.
Wirral lad Davenport wasn't the first attempt at this. Months before, Terry Gibson had been signed from Coventry City, where he had scored plenty of goals in a struggling side. However, Gibson had even less luck, only scoring one goal before Fergie packed him off back to that London, where he played for Wimbledon in their amusing 1-0 defeat of Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final.
Davenport, meanwhile, was seen as the latest in a succession of players who were brilliant for Nottingham Forest but failed at United: Ian Storey-Moore and Garry Birtles were the original sinners, although Moore was desperately unlucky both with his injuries and that he was playing in a dire team bound for relegation. The curse would only be lifted, of course, with the signing of a young lad from Cork many years down the line.
As noted above, Davenport was a very good striker at Forest, good enough to win an England cap as sub against Ireland, where he had enough time to tee up Gary Lineker for his first international goal. In a series of events that rarely (if ever?) happens these days, he'd arrived at Forest as a 20-year-old from non-league Cammell Laird, having failed a trial at Everton.Within a matter of months, he was playing top flight football and banging in a hat-trick against Ipswich.
With 118 games and 54 goals in the bag, he was sold off to us, apparently to pay off repayments on a stand. £570,000 must have seemed a reasonable fee at the time, but Handsome Pete, like Birtles, failed to get out of the blocks, with only one goal in 12 prior to the end of the 85/86 season. And even that was a penalty.
1986 may well have been United’s worst calendar year since relegation – mercifully Big Fat Ron was sacked in November and Govan’s finest brought in to stop the rot, with the team picking up to achieve mid-table safety in 1986/87. Davenport was actually top scorer that campaign, but Fergie had obviously seen enough and Brian McClair was snapped up to lead the line.
My own actual memories of Davenport at United are very limited. The stats show he had a short run of form, scoring in three consecutive games against Luton, West Ham and Rotherham (the last one in the League Cup) before losing his place. He put in a transfer request and we binned him off to Middlesbrough, only for him to come back to haunt us by scoring the winner a few months later at Ayresome Park – a game amazingly played 24 hours after our 3-1 victory over champions Liverpool on January 1st. For that goal alone, he gets the tag below.
Despite that moment, he never really cut it as a top striker again, either on Teeside or up the road at Sunderland - he also had the misfortune of relegation with both teams. He later rocked up playing for the Mackems in the 1992 FA Cup final and I seem to recall him playing for Airdrie in Scotland. The last few years have seen him undertake several non-league coaching/management roles.
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