Billy Sharp: The boy who lived the dream as Sheffield United fairytale comes to an end

Even the best footballing fairytales have to end somewhere and late on Wednesday afternoon, when Sheffield United’s retained list was published, the suspicions, speculation and worst fears of the club’s supporters were confirmed.

Billy Sharp – captain, leader, legend – will leave his boyhood club when his contract runs out this summer. The curtain comes down on a remarkable Blades career which has spanned three stints, reaped three promotions and brought goals, and memories, galore.

The stats – 129 United goals in 377 games, scored in the depths of League One and the higher echelons of the Premier League, and everywhere in between – tell their own story and, at the same time, only a portion of it. Sharp, as a boyhood Blade who grew up watching his own heroes from the Bramall Lane terraces, lived the dream, and the indelible mark he has himself made on the club will live on long after he has hung up those remarkable shooting boots.

There is a certain poetry in the timing, with United back in the Premier League, but Sharp will no doubt feel a sense of unfinished business. He was desperate, visibly so, to score just one more league goal to reach the 250 mark in his career. It would have been another special landmark, made all the sweeter had it come in United colours.

But it wasn’t to be. Even in his 38^th year, the man unfairly christened ‘the fat lad from Sheffield’ showed he had lost none of his hunger for goals when he berated young Will Osula for not squaring the ball for a tap-in on what proved to be Sharp’s final appearance in a Blades shirt. What a fitting send-off that would have been.

Instead, Sharp will move on this summer to pastures new and continue banging in the goals. The 250 will come, and he – and his dad, Steve, who keeps detailed records of all his son’s games and has started doing the same for grandkids Leo and Milo – will have eyes on the next milestone. The man is just made to score goals, amusing teammates by his inability to walk past an unguarded net in training without putting a ball or two in the back of it. For the only man Oli McBurnie has encountered who counts his goals in training, it was a switch that couldn’t just be flicked off.

Life at Bramall Lane will simply not be the same without the Sharps, even down to wife Jade’s presence on matchday and the sight of Leo and Milo running around the pitch, long after the ground had emptied, with the young Flecks and other teammates’ kids. There will be a new club captain, a new name on the back of the famous No.10 shirt next season. As Brian Deane, another famous wearer of the club’s most iconic digits after the great Tony Currie, said recently: “I pity whoever takes the number 10 after Billy, because it’s a heavy load!”

He may not even know it yet but that is the legacy Sharp leaves at the Lane. Just as he and other kids of his generation idolised Deane, and those before them worshipped Woodward and Currie, the current crop of young Blades revere him. Every game saw a host of homemade signs asking for his shirt, the skipper aware that satisfying one would mean disappointing many. But few were more active and engaging with young supporters, always taking the time to sign an autograph or pose for a photo. Little things that, having been in these kids’ shoes, Sharp knew mattered.

It comes as no surprise to hear of Sharp’s plans to return to Bramall Lane next season and beyond, with Milo and Leo in tow, to watch from the terraces as a fan, when commitments with his next club allow. When he does return, some fans think it fitting that he parks next to a Billy Sharp statue, or glances out at Bramall Lane and sees the Billy Sharp Kop. Neither may happen in practice but the fact such ideas have even been floated shows the reverence for Sharp. Followed around the ground by a camera crew last year, he revealed his belief that Deane should have a statue and how Currie had to settle for a stand. “I might get that toilet block down the side of the Kop,” he laughed.

Nothing written on these pages could match the open letter penned by Sharp to the Blades, in which he thanks his teammates and managers, past and present, club staff, fans and his family. He spoke of living the dream, of how he “will always carry the memories, the lessons, and the love of this club with me”. A graphic created by United’s marketing department captured the mood perfectly, featuring Sharp the boy, in his pinstriped No.10 Deane shirt, and Sharp the man, having made that number his own.

There were tears on the Town Hall balcony as he faced up to the fact that this may be the end; no doubt tears as he sat down and tried to find the words to sum up a career that most could only dream of. There were certainly tears amongst some supporters as the tributes poured in.

Hopefully, in time, any disquiet that may linger over his exit will fade away and Sharp can look back at all he achieved at this football club – his football club – with clearer eyes.

The boy who lived the dream.