Barnsley struck Middlesbrough gold with £250k Premier League promotion hero | OneFootball

John Hendrie only cost a quarter of a million pounds from Middlesbrough in 1996, but he was a vital cog in a Barnsley team that scaled new heights.

Barnsley paid just £250,000 to Middlesbrough for John Hendrie, and he immediately became a crucial player in helping them to scale unprecedented heights.

When Middlesbrough sold John Hendrie to Barnsley in 1996, they felt that they were a club on the rise. They'd just finished 12th in the Premier League, having won the First Division title the year before. Fabrizio Ravanelli and Emerson arrived from Juventus. and Porto respectively. The Riverside Stadium opened with their first home game of the season against Chelsea.

When Hendrie first arrived at Middlesbrough in 1992, they were still playing at Ayresome Park. He was in the team that won promotion to the newly-formed Premier League at the end of his first season, and although they'd been relegated back, he was the top-scorer in their First Division title-winning team of 1995.

But Juninho Paulista, the Brazilian international Juninho Paulista, was signed in October 1995 and that spelled the beginning of the end of Hendrie's four years with the club. Having lost his place in the team, he was sold to Barnsley for the relatively modest fee of £250,000.

Barnsley make history in Hendrie's first season with the club

Hendrie's new club had aspirations themselves. Had it not been for the fact that the Premier League was contracting back to 20 clubs from 22 - meaning that there was only one automatic promotion place for the 1994-95 season - they'd have finished that season in the play-offs themselves. The 1995-96 season brought a slightly disappointing return of 10th, but there was still a feeling that something was building at Barnsley under manager Danny Wilson.

And Hendrie looked an excellent signing from the outset. He'd been the champions' top goalscorer in this very division just a year earlier, and at £250,000 he was affordable, a reflection that he was by that time 33 years old. He looked from the outset like exactly the player they needed.

Barnsley shot out the traps at the start of the 1996-97 season with five straight wins. Hendrie scored his first League goal for them in his second appearance, a 3-1 home win against Huddersfield Town. The fourth of those five wins was away to the just-relegated Manchester City. October brought six draws in seven games. By the start of November, they were 4th.

By the new year, it was starting to become evident that a chasing pack was only playing for one automatic place, with Bolton Wanderers six points clear and having only lost three of their first 27 games. But by this point Barnsley were second, with games in hand on most of those around them.

Hendrie's contribution was huge. He scored twice in three days in the middle of April in consecutive home wins against Charlton and Oldham, wins that put them on the brink of the promised land. Promotion was achieved a couple of weeks later with a 2-0 win against Bradford City, played in front of a crowd of 18,506, comfortably more than double the previous season's average of just over 8,000. It would be the first time, since joining the Football League in 1898, that they'd be playing top-flight football.

Hendrie was a bit-part player as Barnsley found the Premier League a step too far

The Premier League proved too much for Barnsley. They started reasonably okay, with two wins from their first four games (although their second home match ended in a 6-0 defeat to Chelsea), but then their form fell off a cliff. They dropped into the relegation places in the second half of September and never emerged.

There were bright spots, the most notable of which was a 1-0 win at Anfield in November 1997, but there were also some horrible losses; 5-0 at Arsenal, 6-0 against Chelsea and West Ham, 7-0 at Old Trafford against Manchester United. Three straight wins gave them a glimmer of hope in the middle of March 1998. But they were relegated in 19th place in the end, five points adrift of safety.

John Hendrie was a bit-part player in all this. He only made 20 Premier League appearances for Barnsley, and only seven of them were starts. He did score once, in a 2-2 home draw against Newcastle United in the middle of December. But at the end of the season, when Danny Wilson resigned, he was offered the position of player-manager, but was sacked in 1999 after having fallen short of the club's target of making the First Division play-offs at the end of his first season in charge.

Middlesbrough's bright new dawn also fell flat. Both Ravanelli and Emerson had very public fallings out with the whole town itself, and Middlesbrough were relegated in bottom place in the table, meaning that John Hendrie never got to face-off against his former club in the Premier League in what remains to this day Barnsley's only ever season of top-flight football.