Another and much more relevant one in my mind was the question about how different it might have been if Gordon Banks had not been struck down with sickness in the hours before the game and how, when that happened, when he left the pre-match meeting to vomit uncontrollably in a nearby bathroom, a look of dread touched every face in a room suddenly filled with unaccustomed tension.
It was unthinkable that we should lose the man who just a week earlier had made that amazing save from Pelé’s header, one that I couldn’t believe when I saw it on the field because it happened so quickly, so improbably, and which still stretched credibility on the television reruns.
His deputy, Peter Bonetti, was a talented goalkeeper who had recently performed brilliantly in Chelsea’s Cup final defeat of Leeds United. He also had a superb England record, six appearances and six victories and just one goal conceded. But unfortunately all he could do as the Germans seized their chances, and rode their luck when the Argentinian referee mysteriously ruled out a Geoff Hurst goal, was confirm our belief that Banks was indeed irreplaceable.
Bonetti had been worried by the fact that his wife had joined those of Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst at the World Cup, and that there had been reports of their receiving a lot of unwelcome media attention in Mexico City. He had not, it seemed, come into the match with total concentration and when this emerged I could only say it was another vindication of Alf’s instincts.
He had been against the idea of a cavalcade of loved ones journeying to a World Cup and there is no doubt he would have been appalled if he had known that by 2006 in Germany the wives and girlfriends of England players would be installed in their own official and media-besieged hotel.
I shook hands with Alf as he got up from the plane seat to leave me to my memories and return to his private thoughts, and no doubt self-recriminations. I told him nothing had happened in the last few weeks to make me question my huge debt to him.
He had changed my horizons, made me believe the greatest prize in football could be achieved. This was a gift which remained unsullied by the misadventures of León.
He had taken me to the mountain top and that enduring fact, along with the steady rhythm of the jet engines, I believed, would always carry me home.
2. Starting Cold in Paris
HAD ALF SKETCHED out a scenario for his first match as the officially appointed, if not yet fully instated, manager of England he might have given it the title, ‘Notes on a game I can afford to lose’.
Win, and his effect, his professional weight, would be immediately apparent. He was – couldn’t everyone see? – the strong arm which had been required so desperately through all those years of deeply entrenched failure. Lose, and, well, here was the evidence of all the work that he needed to do – and all the power he needed to be granted.
In shocking fact, the score on the night of 27 February 1963 on a field of frozen snow at the Parc des Princes Stadium in Paris was France 5 England 2.
For the Football Association here was still another international disaster, defeat in a qualifying round of the old Nations Cup, forerunner of today’s European Championships. Yet if the loss was a final black eye for the time-expired England selection committee – they handed the new manager, who was still completing his contract with Ipswich Town, the team sheet shortly before the kick-off – the countenance of the man who had already pledged himself to winning the next World Cup was quite unblemished.
He may have regretted the woeful performance of his new charges but he did not show any serious signs of anger or frustration. In fact he made a small joke in the deadpan fashion with which we would soon become so familiar. When he asked the captain Jimmy Armfield if we always played as badly as that, and Jimmy answered with an emphatic no, he said, ‘Well, that’s the best news I’ve had tonight.’
But if Alf kept his reactions largely to himself, I could not. I had gone to Paris wrapped against the cold but also warmed by the idea that a bright new chapter was about to start.
We had been placed in the charge of a man steeped in the professional game, someone who had improved himself quite relentlessly through his own playing career and on his first managerial assignment had gone to obscure, Third Division, Ipswich Town and made them champions of England.
I considered how much knowledge and determination must have gone into that achievement and concluded that surely England would be put on an entirely new and competitive footing. Now, however prematurely, I felt that hope had been pushed somewhere over a very distant rainbow and after pulling off my frozen boots I threw them to the floor.
I was, to put it mildly, extremely cheesed off. Alf, however, remained serene enough after a few brusque comments on some of our inadequacies. And then, as we were driven back to our hotel through Paris streets emptied by the bite of winter, it occurred to me that it was not too hard to imagine that for him each French goal had been one more flurry of vindication. They underlined, he must have thought, everything he had believed about the running of the team since his own international playing career ended in that firestorm of Hungary’s 6-3 victory ten years earlier.
Alf’s greatest complaint was that England’s lacerating experience that afternoon at Wembley was nothing so much as an ambush waiting to happen. The shattering nature of it could not have been better illustrated than in a recollection of Malcolm Allison, who would prove to be one of the most inventive coaches English football would ever know and was always acknowledged by Bobby Moore as the biggest single influence in his football life.
Malcolm recalled that before the game he and his West Ham team-mate, and future manager of Cardiff City, Jimmy Andrews, ran their eyes over the Hungarians as they warmed up on a patch of grass normally reserved, and appropriately as it turned out, for greyhounds.
Twenty years later Allison reported a still vivid memory. He said, ‘I noted their light, modern gear and their streamlined boots and that registered with me vaguely. But Jimmy drew my attention to the “pot” bulging out of the red shirt of Ferenc Puskás and said, “God, we’re going to murder this lot.” I had to agree on the face of it even though you could see a neatness and an impressive level of skill as they did their limbering up.
‘Then, out on the pitch, just before the kick-off, I saw the “fat guy” volleying shots into the arms of the goalkeeper Gyula Grosics from forty yards and I said to Jimmy, “They’ve got some skill, you know, this could more interesting than we think.” ’
Also in the stand that day was my future friend Geoffrey Green, the football correspondent of The Times, who would so often lighten the apprehension I felt on long plane journeys with his stories and his banjo-playing as he sipped a Scotch.
Geoffrey brilliantly conveyed the confusion that hit England’s defence as the Hungarians deployed their withdrawn centre-forward strategy featuring Nándor Hidegkuti. He wrote a sentence which might have been, if anyone at the Football Association had been reading, the ultimately damning epitaph for all that had gone wrong since the day five years earlier when a superb English team featuring such players as Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney had strolled masterfully to a 4-0 victory over Italy in Turin.
Geoffrey wrote that England’s centre-half, Harry Johnston of Blackpool, had responded to the brilliance of Puskás with the urgency of a fire engine but unfortunately one going in the wrong direction.
Even as a schoolboy I, too, felt that this was a significant moment, something more than another passing defeat, and that it demanded a major overhaul in the thinking of all those with a hand in running the national game. I remember declaring with much indignation, ‘This just cannot go on. We have to stop believing our way is the only way. We can’t keep kidding ourselves that we’re the best in the world and that we have nothing to learn.’
My fellow schoolboy Bobby Robson, a future England manager, also had a telling recollection of England’s second defeat to foreign opposition on home soil, the first one coming four years earlier against the Republic of Ireland. He said, ‘We saw a
style and a system of play we had never seen before. None of their players meant anything to us. We didn’t know about Puskás – or any of those fantastic players. They might have been from Mars as far we were concerned. Their technical brilliance and new tactics completely kyboshed our old W-M formation in just ninety minutes.’
Ramsey paid the highest price that day at Wembley, losing not only his place in the England team but also a source of some of his deepest pride.
Many years later he would say that the circumstances surrounding the Paris defeat confirmed his belief that his predecessor Walter Winterbottom, who was just one shocked witness of the football equivalent of a car crash when the Hungarians were so effortlessly dominant, had been inhabiting a nightmare. It was something he remembered vividly when he was interviewed as a potential successor to Walter – and it stiffened his determination to win the powers that would enable him to do the job properly.
He thought the FA men in Paris, led by chairman Graham Doggart, who had a distinguished career as an amateur footballer, including international caps and a stint with Corinthian Casuals, were well-meaning in their way – but he also believed that there was nothing in their backgrounds to provide them with any real insights into the challenge he faced.
He couldn’t see much chance of a meaningful dialogue with men speaking a football language different from his own. ‘They were enthusiastic enough,’ he confided to a friendly journalist, ‘and the chairman seemed like a nice man. I liked him. But in all honesty I couldn’t believe any of them were qualified to offer me a worthwhile opinion.’
England, Alf was more than ever convinced after those first few days on the job, had to be in the hands of a dyed-in-the-wool professional, someone who knew about international football, who understood its demands, its constantly changing trends represented by the emergence of superb teams like Italy and Austria in the thirties and then Hungary and Brazil after the interruption of the Second World War.
The Italian example, after all, had long been written into the history of the game. Vittorio Pozzo – known across all his country’s football landscape as il Vecchio Maestro, the Old Master – was never the servant of committee men. He had learned the game at every level, played in England and Switzerland and returned home to Italy to serve as a player and coach of such great clubs as Torino and Milan. When he took control of the national team his authority was absolute. Pozzo was cast as part teacher, part messiah, and no one in Italy who looked for a moment at his background and record had the temerity to challenge his judgement.
It helped that he was reinforced by achievement every step of the way. The Old Master delivered World Cup triumphs in 1934 and 1938, and in 1936 won Olympic gold in Berlin, another success to underpin a tradition which has four times made Italy world champions, a record second only with Germany to Brazil’s five. Such authority was only briefly interrupted that day in Turin when Matthews and Finney and their colleagues impressed themselves so strongly that one leading Italian sports newspaper said that England were a team of ‘football gods’.
Now, a decade after the dire exposure by Hungary, England was finally being pushed towards some long-proven foundations of international success.
You just had to have, Alf insisted to the FA, someone who knew the game and was also free of any influence of committee men, who in many cases saw the worldwide game as a route to prestige, glamour even, not so readily available to mere leaders of local business and politics.
He made it abundantly clear that if the FA wanted him to take over, it had to be on his terms and, as he would prove on several critical occasions down the years, they would be broken only at the grave risk of his departure. It was a massive statement of self-confidence but it was implicit in everything he said and did.
As I’ve never been slow to declare, I was a believer right from the start. I travelled down with Roger Hunt for our first meeting with him at the Hendon Hall Hotel en route to the Paris game. The hotel in north London would become both the principal home and the laboratory of all our hopes over the next few years.
Its walls could tell so many stories of how it is when a group of men, who in this case happened to be professional footballers, come together in a common purpose which demands both heightened ambition and an understanding that they have to work together in every situation – and that if they cannot do this, if the discipline or the pressure is too great, the only option they have is to walk through the lobby and out of the swing doors as they settle for something less.
Even today when driving to some appointment in London I try to go by way of the hotel; it remains so much part of the furniture of my life it seems wrong to go about my business without giving it a nod of the most affectionate recognition.
When I do this so many old scenes and sounds come back to most vivid life.
I see the troubled, often angry look on the face of Jimmy Greaves when it became obvious to him that his chances of making a mark on the football history of his country were fading away under the muscular challenge of Geoff Hurst.
I see the thrill and anticipation on the face of my brother Jack and remember the joy and astonishment in his eyes when he burst into the United dressing room – after his Leeds United had beaten us in an FA Cup semi-final – to tell me that he had just heard he had been picked to play for England for the first time.
I see the unchanging, resolute expressions of our great goalkeeper Gordon Banks and his fellow Yorkshireman Ray Wilson, who would sometimes tell me that he had never imagined, while learning his trade with Huddersfield Town, that he would get such an opportunity. I see the cool demeanour of Bobby Moore, never rattled in any circumstances, including the attempt to remove him from the 1970 World Cup with the fabricated charge that he had stolen a diamond bracelet in Bogotá.
I hear the eager chatter of Alan Ball, which for a little while became subdued when Alf left him on the bench until recalling him before the action became most serious. I hear the encouragement of George Cohen – and the mystification he expressed over the northern sense of humour which had Nobby Stiles falling out of his seat when we went to see the Liverpool comedian Ken Dodd in the West End.
I hear, too, the laughter when Nobby knocked something over in the fashion of Inspector Clouseau – and the groans when Alf announced after training that he was taking us to see still another western starring John Wayne.
For Roger and me, back on that February Saturday in 1963, Hendon Hall was the place where we hoped to confirm the suspicion that our international careers might just be moving on to another and much more soundly based level of expectation.
Like me, Roger had suffered frustration in that huge gap between the intensity – and success – of our club football and the drift we encountered on international duty. The previous year he had lived through his version of my Swedish experience when he was called to the World Cup squad in Chile.
He was first selected as a Second Division player marching forward with Bill Shankly’s Liverpool, then in South America spent the entire World Cup tournament on the bench while sharing with me a resentful disappointment that the squad contained too many players of something less than full commitment.
The weekend we travelled down to Alf’s first gathering we had played against each other in a ferocious match at Anfield between a reviving United and a Liverpool filled with that storm of passion brought by the extraordinary Shankly. There was plenty to reflect upon from that day’s action, not least the sharply different styles of our Scottish managers, the unswervingly diplomatic Busby, the inflamed activist Shankly with his stories of youth among the miners of a village which was fast disappearing. But then our thoughts and conversation turned quickly enough to what we might find in London.
We agreed that England’s new manager could not have performed his wonders at Ipswich without formidable strength of character and authority and an outstanding feel for effective tactics. He had produced a stunning body of work, catching the elite of English football with a series of surprise
punches which were all the more devastating for that.
A team as sophisticated and talented and poised as the Double-winning Tottenham of Danny Blanchflower, Dave Mackay, John White and Cliff Jones were among their victims.
Alf made a previously lightly considered Scottish winger Jimmy Leadbetter the most influential player in the First Division as he became the tactical hub of a stunning title triumph. Leadbetter was a withdrawn winger. He played finely delivered passes into the path of Ipswich’s striking pair Ray Crawford and Ted Phillips, and many years later Brian Clough, a fierce critic of Alf in his time, would pay him the compliment of handing a similar role to another Scottish winger, John Robertson.
That was crucial to Clough’s extraordinary achievement in winning two European Cup titles for Nottingham Forest. It was also a reminder that when Alf claimed that Martin Peters, the player he brought into the World Cup squad with Alan Ball at the expense of England’s top echelon of wingers represented by John Connelly, Ian Callaghan, Terry Paine and Peter Thompson, was ‘ten years ahead of his time’, he might also have been referring to himself.
I met Jimmy Leadbetter again while walking down an Edinburgh street. It wasn’t long before he died in 2005. He looked even less like a footballer. I said how good it was to meet him again. We were two men who owed so much to one man who could see in us the potential to do some of his most vital work. Alf was a man of great judgement and force and, no, we agreed, it couldn’t be denied by anyone, and least of all those who knew him as such a strongly opinionated and effective player at Southampton and Spurs.
I recalled our first game against each other in the season Ipswich consigned those superb reigning champions Spurs to second place. I told Leadbetter the mood of United when we faced the upstarts Ipswich. We did it with great confidence. We would put them in their place, sweep them aside with a bigger game and more gifted players. We had the players and a much stronger background. And then I told him how rueful we felt about those opinions when we looked back on our 4-1 defeat. Jimmy smiled and said, ‘Aye, there was no doubt about it, Alf could be a strange character at times, you didn’t always know what was going on his mind, but he knew a thing or two about “fitba”.’
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