To room with the captain of England and Wolves, the team which, apart from the Real Madrid of Di Stéfano, had filled me with most awe as a young player, was indeed stunning. For a little while it brought me out of myself, away from the worst of my fears, and in retrospect I see clearly that it was a significant step along the road of recovery.
Wolves had opened up the wider world of football with their floodlit games against Spartak Moscow. They had big, tough defenders and quick, skilled forwards and Wright was one of the great figures of the English game.
Up in the room he helped me answer some of the mail that was still piling up in the wake of Munich. He was a kind and calming presence and what he said about the help I would receive out on the field proved true enough.
Tom Finney, no less a star and a boyhood idol, provided the cross for my first goal in international football, which I executed according to the fierce dogma of Jimmy Murphy, who had always told me, in the one-on-one sessions we had on Sunday mornings at the back of Old Trafford, that when a winger went to the line to cross, my duty was to run as hard as I could, however speculative I considered the attack, and that when I shot my first priority was to keep the ball on the target because then anything could happen, depending on the power and the accuracy that I produced.
There was, I knew very well from my days as a schoolboy spectator, very little left to chance in the play of Tom Finney, only the most refined professionalism, and when he beat his full-back the resulting cross was perfectly tailored for my needs. I drove home the first of my forty-nine goals for England. I was then astonished, and moved, when the Scottish goalkeeper, Tommy Younger of Liverpool, came running into the centre circle before the restart.
He shook my hand and said, ‘Congratulations on your first game for your country – and your first goal. There will be many more, laddie.’
It was a moment I would always treasure as an affirmation of all I hoped to find in the game which had always lured me so strongly. Here was the starting point of the re-awakened memories of the game I had played across the world that I carried home from Mexico, and as I persuaded myself that I was right to decide that my days of international football had come to an end.
Those memories, the great skein of them, were all in place, the highs and the lows, and shaping all of them was the most powerful sense that there had always been someone like Tommy Younger to remind me of the satisfaction that came when you could say that you had taken your chances as well as you could, that you never willingly compromised the belief that if you had a certain talent there was also a duty to develop it with everything in your power.
No, of course, this never proofed you against painful setbacks. I thought again of the deep disappointment I felt a few months after that day at Hampden when Alf’s predecessor, Walter Winterbottom, left me on the sidelines throughout the 1958 World Cup in Sweden.
It was the price I paid for a poor performance when England lost 5-0 to Yugoslavia and I couldn’t clear from my head those horrific scenes in Munich airport the day after I’d played in the same Belgrade stadium for the last time with the team I believed was going to be the best in Europe. They were still so vivid in my nightmares when I returned there just a few months later.
Against the hard and talented Yugoslavs, I mourned afresh the loss of Duncan’s power and brilliance, the cool authority of the captain Roger Byrne, the superbly sharp work of Tommy Taylor at the front and, not least, the snake-hipped inventions of Eddie Colman as he worked his way through midfield.
Back in his home street in Salford, where I had spent so many happy and carefree hours in my first years with Manchester United, for weeks Eddie’s pet dog stood sentinel for the return of its master which would never come and, in Belgrade, I, too, felt that I had been abandoned.
While I sat on the sidelines in Sweden, however, the newspapers increasingly called for my selection and Jimmy Murphy, who on a leave of absence from United was in charge of the Welsh team which reached the quarter-finals before losing to Brazil by the only goal (scored in the seventy-third minute by Pelé), said he would have picked me for his team without a moment’s hesitation.
It was an encouraging statement because the Welsh team was not exactly threadbare, not with such world-class assets as John Charles, Ivor Allchurch and Cliff Jones.
Murphy said he was staggered by my enforced idleness. But Winterbottom insisted I was too raw for the World Cup and I would have to learn my trade before I could consider myself a finished international product. I could only envy the trust Brazil placed in the seventeen-year-old Pelé.
I saw him from time to time with his team-mates strolling through the parks of Gothenburg, where we were based throughout the tournament. We shared their training ground and after their work was over they lingered in the city before being taken back to their headquarters deep in the countryside. Sometimes you saw one of the Brazilian players, still clad in his yellow training shirt, invariably with a beautiful Swedish girl on his arm.
For myself, I was content enough with the company of Don Howe, the West Bromwich full-back who was one of the closest to my age in the squad. He had also been on duty in Belgrade, which was England’s heaviest defeat since the humiliations inflicted by the Hungarian wonder team half a decade earlier, and he encouraged me to believe that I would see some action before the tournament was over. But the call didn’t come and I was hurting now because my appetite for football had been returning in the weeks since Belgrade.
I also had the unstated but nagging feeling that I had paid the heaviest price for a defeat in which few, if any, of my team-mates had distinguished themselves.
I respected Walter Winterbottom. He had a feeling for the game, he was tireless in advocating new standards of coaching in England after the indignities inflicted by the Hungarians, but his background and his style were academic. He had played briefly for Manchester United, certainly too infrequently to understand, I concluded, in the way that Ramsey did, the needs – and the fears – of the professional player.
Winterbottom talked the theories of football wonderfully well but he might have been conducting a university tutorial. He was much less acute in his perception of how to motivate a player unsure about his readiness, or his ability, to step up to the highest level.
While Winterbottom ran an endless seminar, Alf went to the heart of matters, hard and sure about his idea of the way a game would unfold, and what his players had to do to control it.
When Alf played against those brilliant Hungarians, his last experience of the international game as a creative full-back who, with much self-education, had flowered in the glory of Arthur Rowe’s push-and-run Spurs, he was bruised deeply. Earlier he had a similar experience as a member of the England team beaten by the part-timers and amateurs of the United States in the mining town of Belo Horizonte, in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil.
Before that game Winterbottom had, as usual, been handed the team sheet by the Football Association committee of selectors, mostly club directors who often argued the case for players attached to their own sides, and despite the manager’s pleadings there was no place for Stanley Matthews. For Ramsey it was another of many outrages inflicted by the ‘amateurs’ of the FA and for him correcting the weaknesses he had seen so vividly, and experienced so painfully, became nothing less than a personal crusade.
He had suffered wounds that only truly healed, I believed, on that day England won the World Cup.
Winterbottom’s greatest interest, it seemed, lay in the administration of the game, and maybe that turn in the direction of his ambition became more entrenched after the World Cup in Chile in 1962. Soon after that he was disappointed when he lost his bid to succeed Stanley Rous as secretary of the Football Association and he then settled for the job of directing the Central Council for Physical Recreation.
Clearly his long tenure with the England team had run its course. We had some good moments in Chile under the captaincy of the richly talented Johnny Haynes and had been strengthened by th
e arrival of Bobby Moore, who made his debut en route to the World Cup in a game against Peru in Lima. In that high altitude, the twenty-one-year-old from West Ham looked perfectly acclimatised to the demands of international football. His reading of the game, his timing despite a lack of genuine pace, was as breathtaking as the snow-capped Andes.
I couldn’t imagine that there had ever been a more assured arrival on the international scene. He was so relaxed about all that was in front of him he might have been sitting back and puffing on one of the Havana cigars so pleasing to his Upton Park mentor and senior team-mate Malcolm Allison.
Though we reached a World Cup quarter-final for the first time, before being overwhelmed by the brilliance of the dynamic Garrincha, who performed for Brazil the improbable feat of compensating for the absence of Pelé, it was again still true that we lacked the force of real leadership that would have made us genuinely competitive in the great tournament.
The team never came together in that solid way which would mark our efforts under Ramsey four years later. Apart from the distance created by Winterbottom’s manner, his remoteness from the day-to-day moods and concerns of his players, I had, unusually for me, some fiercely expressed problems with the captain, Haynes.
As a player I admired him immensely. Indeed, it was a privilege to play beside him. His passing was superb, his instinct to find a weak spot in an opposing defence was sometimes surreal. I would go to his funeral in Edinburgh in 2005 not only with respect for his personal achievements over many years but also to pay homage to one of the truly great English footballers, a player of rich gifts and intense commitment.
This, however, did not prevent an angry exchange – probably the most severe I was ever involved in through the whole course of my career – after we played a goalless draw with Bulgaria, who at that time were perhaps the least ambitious team on earth, to qualify for the quarter-final against Brazil.
Johnny was rubbing his hands as we came off the field. I was incensed at the nature of our performance, the absence of any willingness to attack such a negative and sharply inferior side, and I was particularly outraged by the fact that our captain, and most accomplished creative player, had been at the heart of our approach. When I complained, Haynes said, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve made the quarter-finals for the first time, you should be happy.’ I said I couldn’t be further away from such a state. Rather, I felt ashamed to have been part of such a performance.
We had passed the ball about aimlessly with the sole intention of achieving a draw, which struck me as stupidly hazardous and, indeed, as I said to Haynes, we might well have paid a terrible price if the Bulgarians had not squandered a late opportunity.
Hungary, for whom beautiful performances from Flórián Albert and Lajos Tichy carried the promise of a significant renaissance in the football nation that had so recently stunned the world, had earlier beaten us deservedly, 2-1. We also touched on possible redemption in the next group game against Argentina. The young Rattín, not yet anything resembling the demon of Wembley four years later, displayed some fine skill, unlike the extravagantly overrated José Sanfilippo.
He was the toast of Buenos Aires and we heard, constantly, that his ability would overwhelm us. Instead, we won 3-1 and I was pleased with my performance on the left wing, creating one goal and scoring another.
That might have been the catalyst for more prolonged celebration in our mountain-top headquarters borrowed from an American mining company. But we were undermined by the Bulgarian game and Garrincha was too much for us in the quarter-final. His performance was so compelling; stunningly, he even managed enough thrust from his short, once-crippled legs, to head a goal, the most memorable counterpoint coming from us when Jimmy Greaves brought cheers by going on all fours to retrieve an invading dog.
Given Garrincha’s luminous performance – perhaps only Diego Maradona’s sixteen years later against England in Mexico City rivalled it as a quarter-final explosion of both pure talent and ferocious purpose – we did well to keep the score down to 3-1 and there was, however fanciful, a flicker of hope when Gerry Hitchens equalised near half-time.
The reality, though, was that in yet another World Cup we had been ultimately outclassed. There was also the problem of that lack of unity.
Some members of the squad were unashamedly waiting for the tournament to end and later I learned that the fine player Bryan Douglas had sat disconsolately on his suitcase when he saw our miners’ retreat and announced that he felt homesick before he had unpacked his bags.
On the flight home from Chile I sat next to Alf’s most serious rival for the Winterbottom succession. Jimmy Adamson, who had worked as the manager’s assistant coach in Chile, had superb credentials and indeed he would have landed the job but for his passionate and, as it turned out, immovable attachment to Burnley Football Club.
While Ramsey was confounding the elite of English football with his title-winning feat in the backwater of Ipswich Town, Adamson was forming a superb creative axis with the brilliantly subtle Irishman Jimmy McIlroy as Burnley brought joy to their East Lancashire valley with their own title triumph.
Adamson would go on to manage Burnley, the only professional club he played for in a long and distinguished career, and he did so well initially that some predicted he would be in charge of ‘the team of the seventies’.
Sometimes I’ve speculated on what might have happened if he had not ceded the England job to Alf. Certainly it would have been a different England, perhaps keener to play more expansive football and almost certainly not as preoccupied by defensive discipline. But there was no doubt in my mind, as Adamson spoke at length on the journey home, that he would have brought a strong sense of team and the responsibilities which came with international selection.
He spoke, in the familiar tones of our home town Ashington, of his disappointment in the attitude of some of our players in Chile. ‘It is not enough just to arrive in an England shirt and believe you have done the hard part just by getting there,’ he said. ‘You have to embrace a new challenge, new demands, you have to produce more than you have ever done before.’
It was a stirring battle cry on another retreat from a field of English defeat and on this later one from Mexico, after Adamson’s mission statement had been fulfilled in so many ways by the man who had just come to sit beside me, I could only be grateful that I had experienced all of it.
And what now? Maybe I could do a little more for my club, Manchester United, who were entering a difficult phase of descent from the 1968 European Cup win, the great manager Matt Busby admitting to me his weariness in the face of the challenges still before him and not least the growing indiscipline and disaffection of the astonishingly gifted George Best.
I would hold to that obligation for another three years, playing my last game for the club on a spring evening in Verona. Then, my team-mates presented me with a beautifully hand-carved clock that still sits on my mantelpiece. There were some kind speeches as we sipped the good wine of the Veneto in an old restaurant on the shore of Lake Garda, one of the wittiest inevitably coming from the new United manager, Tommy Docherty.
There were no such ceremonials in the passenger cabin of the airliner flying home from Mexico a team still numbed by the anti-climax of missed opportunity and a terrible sense of what had been lost.
I had intended to make a farewell speech a few hours after the game when we gathered for a consoling drink beside the swimming pool but the mood was not right and, after calling my wife Norma back home in England, I settled for an exchange of condolences with my team-mates and a bottle or two of Corona beer that did little for my spirits.
On the plane, though, there was a dialogue I will never forget. It was with a man who was dropping, just a little, the high guard he had presented so resolutely from the moment he took over England – a man whose passion for what he did I would never cease to respect, and one whose impending rejection by the establishment of English football to this day fills me with both anger and indignation.
First Alf, who at times could don a mask of coldness more quickly than anyone I had ever known, put his hand on my arm and said, ‘I want to thank you for all you have done for England’s football – and for me.’
Then he said how much he regretted the manner of my departure from the England team the previous day.
He apologised for his decision to withdraw me from the game in the sixty-ninth minute, a time when we appeared to have won control. He said that in the gruelling heat his instinct had been to save me from the worst of fatigue before the semi-final in a few days. He added that he had become confident that our performance had been so powerfully shaped we had made ourselves impregnable. He shook his head and said that taking me out of the game might well have been the biggest mistake of his career.
I told him that he should not be too hard on himself. It happened to be true that I had been surprised by his decision – and also that I had been distracted by the activity on the touchline when Beckenbauer, who by his standards had been quite subdued, stole away to score a relatively soft goal to reduce our lead to one goal.
Yes, when I got the call to leave the field and Colin Bell, a fine and marvellously strong player, came to replace me, I did still feel full of running despite the drenching heat. But I urged him to accept there were other realities not to be ignored.
The match, I felt, had unfolded perfectly for our needs. We were more confident, more aggressive than the Germans and the goals from Alan Mullery, who played with impressive force, and Martin Peters, did not overstate our superiority. However, who was to say I would not have later felt drained by a ninety-minute effort if we had made it through to the semi-final against the Italians?
That was one imponderable to set against Alf’s sense of responsibility for defeat, the disconsolate figure he presented when sipping from a glass of post-game champagne in his hotel room in León.
1966 Page 3