Bill Shankly paid the then enormous sum of £110,000 to bring the precocious talents of 18 year old Alun Evans to Liverpool from Wolverhampton in September 1968. His start could hardly have been more sensational with a goal 10 minutes into his debut at home to Leicester and then 2 more the following week as he returned to Molineux and helped destroy his former club 6-0 !
He played in every League game from his debut in September until the end of the season, contributing 7 goals to a team which still contained many of the men who had won the League, Cup & League again in successive seasons earlier in the decade.
At the time he seemed the ideal candidate to be groomed as Roger Hunt's successor but he failed to make the same impact the following season, making only 17 League starts and scoring only 3 times in those games. Most of those appearances came after Hunt had departed for Bolton and the expectation and responsibility seemed to weigh heavily on his young shoulders.
He did make a bright start to the 1970-71 season with 7 goals in the first 10 games but after that things started to go wrong. Badly scarred by broken glass in a night-club incident back in Wolverhampton, he was also badly injured during a UEFA cup tie in Bucharest and consequently lost his place to the emerging Steve Heighway although he later won it back (at John McLaughlin's expense) and played in 8 of the last 10 League fixtures as well as in the 1971 F.A. Cup Final against Arsenal.
Alun only played another 6 matches for the club, his last ironically enough against his first club Wolverhampton at Molineux towards the end of January 1972. Soon afterwards he was transferred to Wolves' Midlands rival Aston Villa. He later played for Walsall briefly before travelling to Australia and making a fresh start with South Melbourne.
Alun might be described as one of those "could have been" players. He had so much potential as a teenager but never matured the way he had been expected to. There should have been many more memorable performances like the marvellous hat-trick with which he destroyed Bayern Munich at Anfield in March 1971 but sadly they never came to be. Alun scored 21 League goals for Liverpool, with a further 12 coming in cup competitions.
