These were more than day trips: they were the pilgrimages that brought the greatest excitement to our lives. The importance of making them came before any other fleeting pleasure or the chance of free time to laze around. It was in our blood to work at something, and to play football, and so nothing made more sense than trading a little effort for the chance to see the best of the game we loved.
We did odd jobs, most profitably delivering groceries for Donaldsons’ shop. There was an old bike that had a tray fixed in front and we rode it through the rain and the wind on a rota that depended on our various commitments: for both of us playing for our teams, and for Jack the hunting down of wildlife. We told the shopkeeper, ‘There’s two of us, so we can get the job done between us.’ Those deliveries were never neglected because they were an investment in colour and glory and adventure on a Saturday afternoon.
It was such a thrill to get on the bus to Newcastle – the fare was two shillings – and, when the journey was over, to choose between the cafe at the Haymarket bus station where we could get pie and chips, or the Civic restaurant for a wider menu but still cheap rates. Finally, there was the mounting anticipation that came with the walk up the hill to St James’ Park. We clutched the shillings that would take us into the ground – and guarantee the greatest bargain a young boy could imagine.
Where we went in the stadium depended on the names that dominated the cast list of that day’s theatre. If there was a great goalkeeper on show, a Bert Trautmann or a Bert Williams, we would tend to go behind the goal. That might also be the strong temptation if a Tommy Lawton or a young Nat Lofthouse was leading the visiting attack because that decision would be justified for at least one half of the game by our own Jackie Milburn stretching every defence he faced with the pace that made him a Powderhall sprinter and with one of the most dynamic instincts for striking on goal.
There was one demand above all others, however: to be somewhere near the corner flag if the greatest of them all, Matthews, was playing on the wing. You went to the corner because of the certainty that at least once or twice he was going to be really close to where you stood. Tom Finney of Preston North End was a compelling rival attraction and there were some who pointed out that he headed the ball more often than Matthews, certainly tackled more and that he was just as fast off the mark – but I never thought that last claim was quite true. The genius of Matthews, it was evident to a boy, was that he dominated with his sense of timing, and his awareness of the vulnerability of a defender. This was his supreme gift as he launched himself from a stooping gait. He wrote his own agenda in a language which only he truly understood.
Some years later the greatest teacher of football I would know, Jimmy Murphy, would unlock those parts of the Matthews puzzle that I hadn’t worked out for myself. He did it during the several years I spent, reluctantly, on the left wing of Manchester United. Murphy said that, if you had genuine pace, the key to everything you did was the moment you chose to truly challenge the defender. You had to take control, you had to show who was dictating the terms. ‘The defender has to turn,’ said Murphy, ‘and that is your great advantage. You have to exploit it from the moment you knock the ball past him. He’s off balance, and if you put it in the right place at the right time you are gone.’
That was the essence of Matthews and it was something I never forgot when I played wide. I thought of what Murphy said but, mostly, I remembered what Matthews did.
As I stood with Jack on the terraces I could not have imagined that one day I would be invited to be president of the National Football Museum in Preston; infinitely more predictable, certainly, was that the slim, coiled, and then darting figure who so mesmerised us would claim a prime place in the film archives of such an institution. I have spent much of my life admiring the talent of great team-mates and opponents, but nothing has moved me more than the elusive genius of this frail-looking man. Whenever I go to the museum I insist on looking again at the refurbished film of the ‘Matthews Final’ in the 1953 FA Cup, when he systematically undermined that most formidable of Bolton full backs, Ralph Banks. It still makes the hairs on my neck stand up when he pounces, cat-like, on Banks and then strides into daylight. The Bolton man had a huge reputation for destroying wingers, but you cannot destroy a target that dissolves before your eyes.
When I rode the grocery bike I knew that when I had saved enough there would be some great and unforgettable reward. Maybe it would be Trautmann reaching out to make some improbable save from Milburn, or the young Nat Lofthouse showing the strength and the heart which would earn him the title ‘Lion of Vienna’ for his overwhelming performance for England.
Sometimes, beyond the thrill and the spectacle there was the pure force of revelation. Even in the longest football life there are not so many times you see something that changes your view of the game, puts it into another dimension and makes you think about possibilities beyond anything you have seen before. Tottenham had this effect when they brought their championship-winning team to Newcastle. I did not realise a team could be so well organised, so filled with coherence in their passing and smooth in attack. They didn’t have a Matthews or a Finney, but they had something of rare power: a team which had been beautifully dovetailed. I would remember well enough the big goalkeeper Ted Ditchburn, Alf Ramsey, the polished right back with the slicked-back black hair, and Ronnie Burgess, the captain of Wales, but the most pervasive memory of all was the push-and-run rhythm of an entire team that had found a way to play beautifully.
Len Shackleton was another who went beyond what I thought was possible on a football field. I saw his first game for Newcastle, a 13–0 slaughter of Newport County in a Second Division match, and if it wasn’t much of a contest it was still unforgettable. Shackleton scored six times, but more than that he did things which made it impossible to take your eyes off him: flicks and jinks performed in the fine, arrogant belief that he could outplay anyone who faced him. Newcastle had brought in other top players – George Hannah, a clever forward, and Alf McMichael, the Northern Ireland international full back – but they were lost in the crowd. It was Shackleton’s day, his greeting to a new and immediately captive audience. He took over the game, shaped every phase of it.
When I first met ‘Shack’ many years later I was surprised to learn that he came from Bradford in West Yorkshire. I had always thought him a prime property of the North East because of the manner in which the terraces of St James’ Park had embraced him so ferociously as one of their own.
In those days football was played in virtually any conditions. They crushed the snow and drew lines in it for the markings and put down straw to try to thaw out the surface, but usually that only made matters worse. It made the pitch treacherously skiddy. For someone like Shackleton, however, it was simply another challenge to surmount. He operated on the principle that if you brought enough imagination to football you could always get something done and, best of all, you could always entertain the people for whom the game was the climax of a hard and often discouraging week. He seemed to understand the public view of football: it was a show that above all demanded a certainty of effort; imagination and skill were the bonuses that made everything worthwhile. The average spectator worked hard in the pit or the shipyard and there was one thing he would never tolerate: indifference on the part of those who had been paid to play the game professionally. If this attitude was identified, the reaction was as harshly vociferous as the praise for some outstanding piece of work could be unrestrained to the point of splitting the sky.
For Jack and me, Shackleton was most intoxicating on a freezing New Year’s Day after he had moved on to Sunderland. We were in a narrow little paddock at Roker Park, next to the corner flag, for a game against Wolves. Shack came over to take a corner. To emphasise the conditions, if that was necessary with the snow piled up around the pitch, he had rolled up his socks to his thighs, as though he was wearing a pair of nylons, and the crowd roared with laughter. Fooling around he may have been, but his on-field cabar
et acts were almost invariably supported by football substance of the highest quality. The corner kick was stupendous. I shouted to Jack in the uproar, ‘Look at that, he’s put back-spin on it.’ I was wrong. What he had done, in fact, was drive the ball to where the force of the wind stopped it and carried it down into the most dangerous possible position for the defence. (Shackleton was indeed also a master of the art of putting spin on the ball, chipping down on it with the outside of his foot, as though he was using a short golf iron.)
In those first visits to St James’ and Roker, Jack and I were getting a degree course in our future trade. It was on several levels. We could understand more easily what the game meant to the people – and what certain players could bring to it according to their talent and their willingness to push themselves to their limits. We could see the difference between the good players and the great ones and, most clearly of all, those who cared and those who did not.
Bobby Mitchell, Newcastle’s left winger, was another of our favourites. There was never any question about how much he cared as he tore his way to the corner flag before putting in immaculate crosses, but in Mitchell there was an example of that separation between the good and the great – the players who could make a big impact on their day, but who might not stand the test of evolving tactics and changing priorities, and those who could survive any new day, any new circumstances. Mitchell belonged, I came to suspect, in the first category and Matthews in the other.
My fear for a Bobby Mitchell of today is that he just wouldn’t get a kick. His problem would be that his opposing full back would not be alone in countering his pace and trickiness. There would be plenty of help for the embattled defender, as there is in today’s game when someone is obliged to face a Lionel Messi or a Cristiano Ronaldo. Indeed, in my own time, when George Best first became rampant, even a full back as fine and as quick as Bob McNab said the job of marking Best would have been impossible without the help of his Arsenal team-mate Peter Simpson. It was said of McNab that no one contained George better, and indeed I heard that the Arsenal backroom staff felt his effort in one game was worthy of a video defining classic defence, but he was the first to admit it was not a job for one man alone. In Bobby Mitchell’s prime no one helped the full back. It was eleven against eleven, number two marked number eleven, number three took on seven, and the best man survived.
Matthews would undoubtedly have received the treatment meted out to Best, but he, too, would have survived. He would have done so because of his awareness of space and where everyone was. Also, he would have the choice of going one of two ways. Each Saturday you would read the same story from the lips of the full back who happened to be marking Matthews that day. The proposed antidotes to genius became so familiar Jack and I could have recited them to each other as the bus wound its way to Newcastle … ‘I’m going to keep my eye on the ball’ … ‘I’m going to push him on to his left foot, he’s not so good with that one’ … ‘I’m going to catch him hard with an early tackle, and we’ll see how he likes that.’ You would read all that, you would shrug, and then you would see Matthews imposing a quite different reality.
Another reality, the one of economics which touched almost every aspect of our lives, meant that we could go to Newcastle or Sunderland only three or four times a season – but each time was a feast, something you could store against the bleakest of days, and sometimes, too, there was a cut-priced thrill to be had at home in Ashington. Down the years our local team had slipped into the North Eastern League, but from time to time they still drew a good crowd, especially for a cup game, and they could get decent players in an area so filled with aspiring professionals, including our Uncle Stan who played for them before moving to Chesterfield.
One game I remember vividly was after Ashington fought their way into the second round of the FA Cup and were at home to Rochdale. In those pre-floodlit days, games in mid-winter were played in the early afternoon, which meant that two-thirds of the miners were above the surface. So 12,000 fans packed the ground, some of them sitting on the roof of the stand, to see Ashington go down passionately and by just one goal.
However, nothing that I remember lifted the town quite so much as Jackie Milburn’s first selection for England, against Northern Ireland at Windsor Park, Belfast. Jack and I were disconsolate because in that time before live television we couldn’t see the greatest day of our famous relative. But then, as it turned out, our despair was only temporary. Our consolation came with a sign outside the cinema which announced that before the big picture – Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, a film which in normal circumstances would not have attracted either Jack or me – the Pathé newsreel would show highlights of Wor Jackie’s debut for England.
A visitor to Ashington might have assumed that he had arrived in the one mining town in the world obsessed with ballet. The queue was so long that by the time Jack and I claimed our seats The Red Shoes had been pirouetting along for at least a quarter of an hour and we’d missed the first showing of the news. When the film ended and the lights went up, an usherette told us we had to leave. We said we had come to see Wor Jackie, but she was unmoved. ‘You’ve seen the main film, now you have to go,’ she insisted – but then someone in the crowd said, ‘You know, these boys are related to Jackie Milburn,’ and we were left in peace as the newsreel began again for the second showing and we could enjoy the great achievement of the man we revered so much, together with all those proud people in the cinema who cheered, along with us, one of their own when the cameras caught him trotting on to the field.
It was, though, the last I would see of Jackie Milburn’s first game for England. The rest of the filmed report was dominated by the amazing Stanley Matthews. He sent the Irish full back, maybe the most harassed soul ever seen on a football field, every way but the one which might have given him contact with the ball. Matthews feinted and dummied his way to a performance which would surely have won the approval of the great Moira Shearer, who also – Jack and I had by now established – knew something about footwork. To cap everything, Matthews shimmied his way over sixty yards before scoring.
He sent us dancing our way home to Beatrice Street. Matthews may have worn plain brown boots, not red shoes, but they glittered more brightly than anything a lad who loved football would ever see on the silver screen.
3
BEGINNING THE GREAT ADVENTURE
ST ALOYSIUS IN Newcastle was one of those few schools which gave hungry lads like me something to eat and drink after the game, but it was the gift I received out on their well-manicured field that I would remember most clearly. My Bedlington Grammar School team-mates lifted me on to their shoulders after I scored the winning goal in a match which we had looked certain to lose. When I think on it now, it was my first ‘Roy of the Rovers’ moment.
It was as though I was playing under a spell, one that created the feeling that anything I wanted to achieve was within my grasp if I applied myself enough. Before this I had known plenty of success in school colours. Back at North Hirst Primary, the sports master Mr McGuinness had sometimes told me to hold back a little, particularly once when we were hammering in goals against weaker opposition and it looked as if we might go on from a 12–0 lead to a cricket score. He said that it was bad sportsmanship to humiliate opponents – but the match against St Aloysius was quite different.
They had some big strong lads and they could play a bit. They came at us hard and were leading by a couple of goals when I realised, maybe more clearly than ever before, that I could really influence a game, shape it according to my will. The more the St Aloysius players paid attention to me, the more I thrived under the pressure. I felt myself growing with every kick. When I volleyed home the winner it was a perfect climax.
Every game was a challenge to me, I desperately wanted to win every time I played, and it would be false modesty to say that I hadn’t realised very early in my life that football came to me more easily than it did to most of my friends. When two big lads picked the teams at Hirs
t Park, the one with the first choice would almost always say, ‘I want Bobby.’ It was a natural thing, something I had come to expect, but then what happened at St Aloysius seemed to me to belong in another category. It was a wonderful, dawning sense of the power of my ability. I was determined not to lose, and I told myself I would do anything I could to prevent it. When it happened, when we pulled ourselves back into game and I sensed the tremendous excitement and confidence building among my team-mates, it became the most important challenge I had faced.
When I scored the winning goal I had never been so pleased on a football field – and then, when the final whistle went, and the boys lifted me up, for once I didn’t push them away. I thought to myself, ‘Tanner is right. If you try hard enough, if you really want something, you can get it.’
Soon enough there seemed to be no limit to the scale of my adventure. Scouts were beginning to watch me as I made the East Northumberland Boys team and then the Northumberland Juniors. By the time I was picked for England Schoolboys there was no doubt that I would get the chance to join my uncles and Jackie Milburn in the professional ranks.
First though, my future had to be guaranteed beyond the risks of football. My mother was emphatic about this, and looking back I can see more clearly why she would make this point so strongly. Frequently she voiced the question that, because of the background of her family, was never far from her mind: what if you are injured seriously, what, then, do you make of your life? For me such a disaster was not even a speck on the horizon – and nor would it ever be, a fact which, when I think of all the games I have played, is not the least of the miracles of my career. Today I’m walking around with my cartilages still intact and without the nag of any of those chronic injuries which have accompanied many of my fellow professionals so deep into their retirement.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 4