A British pensioner has defied medical and family advice to reclaim his title as Spain’s only British matador.

Frank Evans, from Salford, who is 66 today, has suffered a badly damaged knee and undergone quadruple bypass heart surgery, but he came out of retirement yesterday to win two ears.

Known as El Inglés – and dressed in black on a sweltering day – Mr Evans deftly made his passes against a black two-year-old, which fell twice during the fight. The English bullfighter completed his performance by driving his sword into the bull’s neck to the hilt, earning the applause and the waving white handkerchiefs of the Andalusian crowd.

“This confirms what I’ve been telling all those doubters, that I’m fit enough to do this,” Mr Evans said after his bull was dragged from the sand and he was presented with the animal’s ears. “Here is where I’m happiest. I live off these people watching me do this.” Mr Evans faced his first bull in three years during a charity fight in Villa-nueva de la Concepción, a small town about 30 miles (50 kilometres) north of Málaga. This weekend was the town fiesta.

A damaged ligament in his left knee forced Mr Evans, the son of a Manchester butcher, to retire in August 2005. After his first farewell fight, the crowd carried him from the bullring on their shoulders – a seemingly storybook ending to his 40-year career. However, his enthusiasm did not die with his last bull. “It was a marvellous send-off, but deep down I didn’t want to go,” Mr Evans told The Times a day before his fight, after waterskiing with his son. “I should have simply stopped and waited for the knee surgery instead of retiring.” El Inglés, who sports a long, meandering scar on his right thigh from a horn in Mexico, scoured Europe for an orthopaedic surgeon who could put his knee into bullfighting condition.

A Belgian doctor found the solution: a knee replacement made from the hard-wearing Oxinium. But in September, as Mr Evans started getting his new knee into shape, doctors found a blockage and a valve leak in his heart, forcing him to undergo quadruple bypass surgery. In January he began working out in England. He has been adapting to the Spanish heat near his home in Marbella, fighting calves with students young enough to be his grandchildren.

His decision to return to the bullring did not please his friends and family. Most bullfighters retire in their thirties or forties and only a few have fought into their sixties. “We tried to talk him out of it, but he won’t listen to us,” said Bob Rule, Mr Evans’s long-time aide-de-camp.

“I have a friend who raises bulls and he refuses to give me any to fight,” Mr Evans said. “He rang me on Friday to try to convince me not to fight. But bullfighting is like sex: it’s good watching it, but it’s better doing it.”

Mr Evans moved to Spain in the 1960s and joined a bullfighting school in Valencia after reading a book on bullfighting by Vincent Hitchcock, a British bullfighter in the 1940s.

His first fight happened by accident, when a promoter signed the 23-year-old Evans to fight in Montpellier, thinking that he was signing another, more experienced English bullfighter named Henry Higgins, who was also known as El Inglés. That day Mr Evans killed his bull, and he has since become the only British native to receive the formal title of “matador de toros”. Since then he has fought mainly in southern Spain.

Mr Evans wants to arrange a professional fight in the autumn and then head to South America in the winter to complete his objective to fight in every country that kills bulls in the ring. He has yet to fight in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Mr Evans knows that age conspires against him, but being an active bullfighter is all that matters, he said. “It doesn’t matter if you accomplish your goals, but you need to make the effort,” he said.

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