Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sir Bobby Charlton
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
1. Another Side of Alf
2. Starting Cold in Paris
3. Ice Man Moore
4. A Price for Glory
5. Jack and Nobby
6. Bond of the Blood
7. Olé, Olé, Olé
8. Man in the Mask
9. The Legacy of Dunc
10. Staying Alive
11. The Sweetest Goal
12. Nobby’s Trial
13. Tango in Hell
14. Reaching for the Light
15. Laughter and Tears
16. A Date with Franz
17. The Leaves that Never Fade
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
About the Book
In 1966 England won the World Cup at Wembley. Sir Bobby Charlton, England’s greatest ever player, was there on the pitch. Now, fifty years on, Sir Bobby looks back on the most glorious moment of his life and England’s greatest sporting achievement.
In 1966 he takes us through the build-up to the tournament and to the final itself, describing what he saw, what he heard, and what he felt. He explains what it was like to be part of Sir Alf Ramsey’s team, gives us his personal memories of his teammates, the matches, the atmosphere; the emotion of being carried on the wave of a nation’s euphoria and how it felt to go toe-to-toe with some of the foremost footballers to ever play the game. He reveals what it means to be forever defined by one moment; how a life fully lived can come back to one single instance, one day when a man stands side-by-side with his best friends united in a single aim, in front of a watching nation.
About the Author
Having survived the trauma of the Munich air disaster aged just 20, Sir Bobby Charlton played as if every game was for his fallen colleagues, recovering from his injuries to reach the pinnacle for both Manchester United and England. Playing as an attacking midfielder Sir Bobby is regarded as one of the greatest footballers the game has ever seen. During his playing career that spanned twenty years he won three League Championships, the FA Cup, the European Cup and the World Cup. With England he played in four World Cups scoring a then-record 49 goals. He is currently a director of Manchester United.
Also by Sir Bobby Charlton
My Manchester United Years
My England Years
List of Illustrations
1. Bobby and Jack Charlton signing autographs (Bob Thomas/Getty Images)
2. The England squad, 1966 (Press Association)
3. England’s preparations at Lilleshall (Mirrorpix)
4. Alan Ball and Nobby Stiles, Lilleshall (Mirrorpix)
5. Bobby Charlton’s first goal, England v Mexico (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
6. Jack Charlton and Ignacio Calderón (Press Association)
7. England v France (Press Association)
8. Argentine players threatening to walk off the pitch, England v Argentina (Press Association)
9. Celebrating Geoff Hurst’s goal (Mirrorpix)
10. England celebrate Bobby Charlton’s opening goal, England v Portugal (Press Association)
11. Stiles and Eusébio (Press Association)
12. Bobby Charlton celebrates after scoring (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
13. A tearful Eusébio after defeat (Gerry Cranham/Offside)
14. Gordon Banks and Nobby Stiles (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
15. Jack and Bobby Charlton with their mother (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
16. Jack and Bobby Charlton during a friendly cricket match (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
17. The England team play golf during a break from training (Central Press/Getty Images)
18. Team visit to Pinewood Studios (Rex)
19. The England team playing cards (Mirrorpix)
20. Sir Alf Ramsey speaking to the press (Mirrorpix)
21. The England team at Roehampton on the eve of the World Cup final (Mirrorpix)
22. The England team travel to Wembley Stadium (Mirrorpix)
23. England fans, England v West Germany (Art Rickerby/Getty Images)
24. England and West Germany line up before the final (TopFoto)
25. Bobby Charlton with the ball (Fox Photos/Getty Images)
26. Martin Peters scores (Press Association)
27. Martin Peters, Geoff Hurst, Roger Hunt celebrating (Gerry Cranham/Offside)
28. Bobby Charlton and Franz Beckenbauer (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
29. Bobby Charlton after a missed opportunity (Gerry Cranham/Offside)
30. Wolfgang Weber’s equaliser (Press Association)
31. Alf Ramsey and his management team with players during break before extra time (Mirrorpix)
32. Geoff Hurst’s controversial third goal (Gerry Cranham/Offside)
33. England celebrates Geoff Hurst’s third goal (Art Rickerby/Getty Images)
34. Parading the trophy (TopFoto)
35. Queen Elizabeth II presents the World Cup to Bobby Moore (Mirrorpix)
36. The final score (Mirrorpix)
37. Bobby Moore kisses the World Cup trophy (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
38. The victorious England team (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
39. Wives of the England squad during a celebration banquet (Mirrorpix)
40. Bobby and Jack Charlton set off on a triumphal tour of Ashington (TopFoto)
For Sir Alf Ramsey, without whose courage and knowledge I would not have had this story to tell.
Sir Bobby Charlton
1966
My World Cup Story
With James Lawton
Prologue
WHEN YOU HAVE been very lucky, and to the degree that you frequently stop and look back at your life and wonder all over again how it was that so much came to you, it is not always so easy strolling back through the autumn leaves of memory. Certainly this is so as I contemplate the startling fact that it is now fifty years since I went out with my England team-mates to win the World Cup for the only time in our nation’s history.
Where, I ask as I walk beneath the trees surrounding my home in Cheshire and scuff those fallen leaves, did all those years go? And where have they left me?
But if the questions can be taxing, and so often provoke the deepest yearnings to go back to when all was so fresh and inviting, invariably they also return me to one point of certainty, one bedrock of the deepest satisfaction.
The years, I tell myself each day, have bequeathed a pride that redeems some corner of every one of those occasions brushed by some of the sadness and regret which I suppose is inevitable in the process of growing old. And which in my case will, until my last day, always be touched by the tragedy – and unshakeable horror – of the Munich air crash that robbed me of dear team-mates and friends and, for a little while, made me question the basis of a life which until then had seemed to be such a gift of extraordinary and uncomplicated riches.
Now, in my seventy-ninth year, I know more surely than ever before the extent of the privilege that accumulated on the long and so often blessed journey away from that twenty-year-old’s pain, confusion and despair.
I know, too, in this year of golden anniversary where to place the summer day of scudding clouds and rain and fleeting sunlight in 1966 when our young captain Bobby Moore wiped the sweat from his hands to receive the great trophy from the smiling and still youthful Queen of England.
It is on the highest ground of my experience. It is on that supreme plateau known only to the most fortunate of professional sportsmen. It is the place you find when you can tell
yourself that you are part of a team of champions. This is a bond you know will last all your days.
Of course the years wage their attrition on us all. There is no immunity from that; a team of champions can seize the day but it cannot hold back the years and their consequences and we are depleted now.
Alf Ramsey, the man who made it all possible after telling us in his most formal style, ‘Gentlemen, most certainly we will win the World Cup’, Bobby Moore and Alan Ball, the majestic captain and the insatiably optimistic, ever-scuffling young hero, have gone, and in their huge absence some of us fret about each other’s wellbeing as well as our own.
We go to our annual reunion, we re-conjure the past, and we wonder sometimes if perhaps it is time to put aside the ritual. But then one of the sturdiest among us, maybe George Cohen or Geoff Hurst, says that we should go on, that we have something we should never willingly surrender: the still vivid memory of a day when all our hopes, and all our strivings, were fulfilled in a way that, even as it was happening, we knew we were never likely to surpass.
When I see my brother Jack, never far from the surface is that feeling we shared when we embraced on the field of celebration after he held out his arms and said, ‘What about that, kidda?’ and I agreed we had a moment that we could share for ever.
Like members of so many families we have known times of dislocation, and, yes, outright strife, and I will always regret that sometimes they became public, but the years do bring some healing and for us the sharing of that great moment has been an iron link of experience and achievement that we have always known can never be broken.
My dearest wish now, at this late hour, is that I could still easily rekindle such emotion with each of the comrades with whom I shared that day of triumph. With Ramsey, Moore and Ball it is no longer possible and with Nobby Stiles, the companion who became so close and precious to me it was as though we also shared the same blood, it has become difficult in the extreme. It means that now he resides, for me, solely at the core of my memories of some of the happiest and most tumultuous days of my life.
Nobby was inaccessible the last time I visited him in his home in Stretford, so close to Old Trafford, the great passion of our lives. He was present but it seemed only physically. He had never been so remote from me and I was shattered by the strong feeling that he no longer knew who I was. When his wife Kay came with me to the door I could not suppress my tears.
She said later that in fact Nobby, despite the effects of Alzheimer’s, still recognised old friends and team-mates but suggests he does not out of embarrassment over his condition. His pride is still strong but when I left his home it did indeed feel as though I was leaving behind a great swathe of my life – and a part of it filled by fierce support and the warmest companionship.
If we were a team of champions, he was our competitive conscience. He was at the heart of all we did; he tackled for me and there were times when he seemed to be the guardian of us all, chivvying us along, reminding us that we could not let slip the chance of making our mark on the game of our lives.
I happened to score both the goals that took us to the final against West Germany, and some said it was the finest game I ever played in an England shirt, but nobody needed to tell me that all my efforts would have come to nothing if Nobby Stiles hadn’t made himself the embodiment of our determination to finish our task.
Nobby policed the great Portuguese player Eusébio, who some called the Lion of Africa and predicted would one day rise above Pelé, with an unerring vigilance. He kept safe all our ambition and the hopes of all his countrymen.
I recall a thousand memories on my autumnal strolls. I play football as a boy back in the high winds of the North East, I run amid the sand dunes and the old wartime concrete bunkers on the coastline where my father collected the coal that spilled from the barges plying out of Blyth harbour.
I return to St James’ Park in Newcastle with Jack at those times when we had saved up enough money from our grocery rounds to pay for the bus, a pie in the café near the ground and a place next to the flag where we were so close to Stanley Matthews when he took the corners for Blackpool. Often a fan, noting that the great star was the first professional footballer in those days of maximum wage and one-way contracts to own a racehorse, would cry, ‘Matthews, your horse has lost.’
We went behind the goal when a great goalkeeper was performing, someone like Bert Williams of Wolves and England or maybe my first great hero between the posts, Manchester City’s former paratrooper of the Eastern Front and prisoner of war, Bert Trautmann.
In every game there was someone who captured our imagination and was at the centre of our conversation on the ride back home to Ashington: Len Shackleton, the outrageous Clown Prince of English football whose move from Newcastle to Sunderland caused such furore, Tom Finney, the rival to Matthews who saw the game quite differently (he was more concerned with practical effect than the creation of fantasy) and superb old-fashioned strikers like Tommy Lawton and Nat Lofthouse, the Lion of Vienna.
I remember the day my mother dressed me in a long green mackintosh she said I would grow into and sent me off to the great adventure that was Manchester United. I was fifteen then and the world lay at my feet when I stepped off the train in the big and sooty city that I have come to love so much and which a few years ago bestowed upon me, officially, the freedom and feeling of opportunity it had nourished in me since I was no more than a boy.
Before that I had played at Wembley as a schoolboy international and scored two goals against Wales after inspecting the manicured turf and the great sweep of the stadium with the sensation that I had arrived in paradise. It belonged in another universe to the wind-scoured field in the North East where I played an important regional trial match in which a goalkeeper was cheered for brilliantly saving his own kick into the teeth of a gale.
There are teeming memories. They take me back across the world to places and scenes which I could not have imagined existed when Jimmy Murphy, Sir Matt Busby’s assistant at United and my most ferocious and influential first mentor, collected me at the old Exchange Station and drove me to my digs as he talked, unceasingly and exultantly, about Duncan Edwards, the phenomenal man-child footballer under whose shadow I would have to pursue my professional career.
I go again to the bay in Rio de Janeiro beneath the statue of Christ the Redeemer where a giant stingray burst out of the ocean and seemed to symbolise all the colour and the excitement of the life that had come to me because it happened that I had a gift to play football.
I revisit the huge Lenin sports palace in Moscow as a twenty-year-old unversed in politics who could only be in wonder at the facilities provided for young people, but then of course I was in no position to evaluate the cost.
I return to the day in Guadalajara when, four years after we won the World Cup and just a week before our most crushing disappointment as the team Ramsey made, we played Brazil in perhaps the highest-quality game I ever experienced. We lost by one goal after playing Pelé and his team-mates to a standstill in the heat and the knowledge that maybe we were competing with the most sublime national team ever assembled, an assessment confirmed in the splendour and celebration that would soon surround their third World Cup triumph.
It was at the end of that game that we had the famous picture of Bobby Moore and Pelé exchanging their shirts and if you wanted an image of the respect that grows between great opponents at the highest level of sport you did not have to look any further.
Sometimes I find myself again in the old killing fields of Cambodia, where I have had the opportunity to help combat the scourge of landmines which still take a regular toll of lives and limbs. Or an African clearing designated as a football field and I see the excitement in the eyes of the young people preparing it. I range across the world, I meet again the old Japanese lady who told me I was the first European she had ever met and I talk with the widow of the great lithe goalkeeper Lev Yashin, who sent me the old Russian lamps which now hang in the k
itchen of my home.
I’m thrilled, and moved all over again, by the fact that I found my success in a sport which touches every culture, and which still – in this time when the weight of money and commerce, and the smell of corruption, is so heavy – can provoke delight and ambition in the poorest corners of the earth.
It is because of this passion, this recurring love for the world’s most popular game, that I have to believe that the wrong-doing by Fifa, the world’s ruling body, which in recent years has been so relentlessly exposed, will one day be purged from the system through new levels of care and vigilance. There is, I know well enough, no easy way around the immensity of this task but I also have to believe that there is too much at stake for the challenge to be ignored.
Maybe football needs help in recognising its own importance in the hearts and lives of so many people of so many different backgrounds.
I still go to United, I still work as a director of the club and travel to Champions League games, but much of the travelling is done now along the lanes of memory.
There, I encounter the great players I have played with and against. Often the journey begins and ends with the uniquely strong, gifted and tragically unfulfilled Duncan Edwards, a friend and an idol, but there are so many who re-engage me and delight me with the sheer scale of their talent and their imagination: Pelé, Alfredo Di Stéfano, Johan Cruyff, Ferenc Puskás, Franz Beckenbauer and, not least, the extraordinary virtuosos George Best and Denis Law, who emblazoned themselves on the years which led to our European Cup triumph in 1968.
That victory may not have healed entirely the wounds of Munich but maybe it eased some of the ache which came when I thought of how that pursuit of the great prize had ended so cruelly. Certainly when in the first minutes after we had beaten Benfica in the Wembley final I shared an embrace with Sir Matt Busby, whose life had hung in the balance so precariously in the weeks after the crash and who would always feel a terrible responsibility in that he pushed so hard for our involvement in the competition in the face of opposition from the Football League, I believe we were as one in our emotion.
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