For a footballer, having two working feet is considered essential, even if, like Maradona, one of those feet is only used for balance. For the Annandale Soccer club’s Bill Lyne, suffering a severe gunshot wound to your dominant left foot, so severe it was enough to send you home from Gallipoli, was career ending.
William Alfred ‘Bill’ Lyne, was the eldest of four brothers born in Sydney’s inner west to William Snr and Alice Lyne. Bill enlisted at the end of August in 1914 a matter of weeks after the death of his mother. Assigned to A Company of the 1st Battalion of the AIF, the 25-year-old fitter and turner shipped out for training in Egypt at the end of October 1914. When he actually landed at Anzac Cove is unknown but it is fair to assume that the 1st Battalion was there at the outset, and so was Bill Lyne.
Lyne managed to survive three months of the horror of the failed Gallipoli campaign before suffering his career-ending gunshot wound, a wound which would send him home. It was possibly a blessing in disguise given that only a week later his unit would be part of the Lone Pine battle in which almost 2500 Anzac soldiers lost their lives.
William Lyne returned to Australia knowing that his football playing days were done, just like so many others. He picked up his trade, married Catherine Cameron and lived a quiet life. The couple had no children and Bill died in 1944. Catherine however, lived to the age of 90 spending nearly forty years as a war widow.
With the early deaths of both his mother and one of his brothers, and his experiences of war one can only imagine the horrors that must have haunted Private William Lyne to his own early death, and wonder if maybe returning to the football fold even if he couldn’t play may have helped. This though, is only speculation.