In the end, no one could argue with that assessment. Alf Ramsey knew football all right. He knew how to play to strengths – and to obscure weaknesses. His whole late-starting playing career was a testament to that. He had improved himself relentlessly, learned from whomever he could find a hint of guidance. But then the question for Roger Hunt and me as we travelled south concerned whether Alf could be truly his own man in the new environment of international football; could he break the shackles imposed on a Winterbottom also handicapped by a lack of anything resembling the new man’s professional background?
We didn’t have to wait long to put away our concerns. If nothing else, Alf Ramsey was certainly his own man – and he was quick to display to us the firmest set of priorities.
Chief among them was the understanding of his players that he would have the last, decisive opinion.
He was waiting, immaculately dressed and composed, in the hotel lounge when we arrived, welcoming his troops and giving a first strong indication of his style of command. Clearly it had little to do with the politics of consensus.
His first move was to separate the more experienced players from the rest. It meant that I found myself in a room with Jimmy Armfield, the captain who had taken over from Johnny Haynes when a car accident ended his international career, Ron Flowers and Ray Wilson.
Alf didn’t waste too much time on pleasantries. He said he wanted some candid opinions about what had been wrong with the old regime. How might we improve, how might players feel better about their call-ups to England? He said he wanted us to speak freely, and confidently, because that would be the quickest way of telling ourselves that we were part of something new that would swiftly and naturally clear away so many of the old problems.
I was the first to break an uncomfortable silence. I was anxious, perhaps too anxious, not to give the impression that I didn’t have a mind of my own – or that I had made no attempt to analyse any of our problems. I was, after all, the most senior player with the departure of Haynes and if I didn’t have anything to say, who did? Even so, I was reluctant to go to the heart of the matter, which was Walter’s failure to carry the players with him. Instead I settled on the familiar complaint about the time it took us to negotiate the North Circular Road on the way to our training headquarters at the Bank of England complex in Roehampton. Would it not be easier to either find a place to work in north London – or change hotels?
Alf’s face was sphinx-like as he listened to my logistical input. Then he said, ‘Thank you, Bobby, but I think we will keep the arrangements as they are.’
Looking back, I suppose it was a simple enough device. He was inviting suggestions, then shooting them down as though they were clay pigeons. The message could hardly have been clearer: we could propose but, most certainly, he would dispose of all that didn’t originate in his own carefully prepared thoughts.
However, by way of compensation he said we should believe we were going to win the World Cup before the gaze of our own people. We had enough talent, enough competitive character. Now we merely had to do the work.
Quite how much this involved became clear enough in Paris a few days later.
The casualty rate wrought by Alf’s regime, his reluctance to proceed with players who hadn’t earned his complete confidence, is clear enough from the briefest glance at the team presented to him by the FA selectors before we went out in the Siberian setting of Parc des Princes.
Only two of the names would appear on the sheet Alf handed to a Fifa official before the Wembley final two and a half years later. They were Bobby Moore’s and mine. The Paris team read: Ron Springett, Jimmy Armfield, Ron Henry, Moore, Brian Labone, Ron Flowers, Charlton, John Connelly, Bobby Tambling, Bobby Smith, Jimmy Greaves.
Springett’s nightmare of indecision and faulty positioning stripped away any belief Ramsey might have had in him, for all his impressive progress in the game to that point. Armfield, who complained strenuously that the Paris game should never have been played, so difficult were the conditions, survived the Parc des Princes but for him there was a trapdoor waiting in the next game, and Alf’s second straight defeat, against Scotland at Wembley.
In Paris I felt particularly sorry for Henry, a fine left-back for Spurs who arrived at White Hart Lane towards the end of Alf’s time there. He had to wait several years to replace the Welsh defender Mel Hopkins in the beautifully pitched Spurs team but when he did, he performed so impressively he made himself part of the great Double triumph, playing behind such stars as Mackay and Jones.
Yet his one game for England was in Paris. Like the rest of us, he came into the debacle after being been made inactive for two months by a harsh, record-breaking English winter.
It was the worst kind of preparation for his one chance to make an impact at the highest level and later my sympathy was renewed when I read his low-key and philosophical reflections on the night which put a brisk end to his international hopes.
Ron recalled, ‘Before the game Alf just said, “If you behave yourself and work hard you’ll get on all right with me.” He didn’t talk tactics much that night. He just said, “Go on, you know what you have to do.”
‘It was such a terrible night. We hadn’t played for so long because the winter had been so bad at home. The pitch had a covering of snow, Ron Springett was in goal but he might not have been there because he was frozen and didn’t move. It was so cold that when we finished we had to sit around the edge of a big square bath and dangle our boots in the hot water because our laces had frozen solid. Alf could not really say much afterwards but he came round and shook all our hands.’
As it happened the odds were always against the admirable Henry. His greatest problem was not the extreme conditions of the Paris night but the inevitability of Ray Wilson, my regular room-mate on England trips, reclaiming the left-back position. Ray didn’t have a lot to say for himself but when he spoke his words always carried weight. They were underpinned by his superb consistency in understanding his role as a full-back, one who was able to go forward with sharpness and conviction but never at the cost of his defensive responsibilities.
When he first came into the team in 1960 it was at that time when I was operating, not with total enthusiasm, as a left-winger and I valued his presence from our first game together. We developed a clear understanding of our roles when the other team had the ball; I would go with a runner while Ray would attend to the man in possession. His tackling was as sharp and hard as anything I have ever seen in the game and always he showed that willingness, and capacity, to take the action to our opponents.
Shankly, making his name at Huddersfield, had first seen Ray’s potential as a youngster splitting his time between working on the railway lines by night and in the day attempting to establish himself as a professional footballer.
Ray could be quite a solitary figure and talked often of his passion for walking on the moors, once giving me a long and fascinating account of a trek he made along the spine of northern England, from the Peak District to the border hills of Scotland. He said he loved the freedom that came to him in such terrain – and certainly when he played there was always the sense of someone who was perfectly self-contained in his knowledge of what he could do to help in any situation on the field.
We got on extremely well, right from the start. We were comfortable in each other’s company on and off the field and very soon we agreed that we had enough in common – we were both very happy in our club football in the north, him in Yorkshire, me in Manchester – that it would make sense if we stuck together.
He was better on the ball than his World Cup full-back partner George Cohen but he also had the ability to compete physically with anyone he marked. If you wanted to discourage a potentially dangerous right-winger he would do the job, starting at the very first opportunity.
Most remarkable was his ability to recover from a mistake, something he proved for all time in the most important match any of us would ever have to play, the World Cup final. Everyone
makes mistakes but Ray was one of the few players who could expel one from his mind in the course of a few strides.
He was indeed a rock, as formidable as any outcrop of it on the moors he loved so much, and if Ron Henry had some legitimate regrets about the difficulties presented by the challenge that came to him at the Parc des Princes, an even greater one, no doubt, was that he was in competition with a man of Wilson’s ability and extraordinary competitive character.
Alf quickly made it clear that as an old full-back he adored Ray’s all-round qualities. They might have been custom-made for the requirements of a team that might just beat the world.
So, too, was another man who became so quickly strong, and irreplaceable, in the wake of the Paris shambles.
Occasionally Alf would take me to one side and ask for my opinion on certain players and invariably I felt they were the ones he had already decided would provide the strong foundations of everything he hoped to achieve.
When he came to the issue of goalkeeping – one of the most fundamental aspects of any team’s success – we reached instant agreement. Yes, I also felt that not only was Gordon Banks the outstanding candidate but that also there was every reason to believe that very soon he would announce himself as the best in the world. If I ever had a morsel of doubt about this it disappeared very early in his run of seventy-three England caps.
His brilliance, and his resolution, created so much confidence that I remember thinking, after the great prize had been won, how much harder it would have been to believe in our chances had he not been there to retrieve our mistakes, to make us believe that with him around everything was indeed possible.
Once while reflecting on this I watched him closely as he worked on a training pitch in Mexico City which had the yielding capacity of solid concrete. Time after time he would throw himself down on that cruelly unforgiving surface. His commitment, and durability, was staggering and when we came off the field I asked him a question to which he provided an answer I’ve never forgotten.
I wondered why he put himself so constantly in danger of injury while training. Did he never feel inclined to save at least some of himself for match action? A small smile flickered across his face and he said, ‘Bobby, without doing what I did today, with all the risks, I simply couldn’t do my job.’
The pain, and the possibility of injury, was the price he had to pay. It was a simple equation. So many times before a car accident and the loss of an eye ended one of the great football careers, I had reason to recall his matter-of-fact statement of professional dedication.
It was the recurring reminder that when Alf Ramsey came to the great challenge of his professional life, his most vital task was to decide not on whose talent was the most arresting but on those in whom he could invest all his trust.
Not so long before he lapsed into the half-world of dementia that brought such sorrow to his beloved and wonderfully protective wife Vicky and all those who would always be indebted to the strength and the precision of his judgement, Alf said to me, ‘To have a chance we had to identify the players who were capable of producing all that was asked of them. My job was to make sure that was always the first – and last – consideration.’
It was a task that I suspect brought him agonies of private analysis – and one fierce national controversy – but there was no doubt that he was least taxed when it came to deciding who would stand in our goal, who would make saves to rival any in the history of the game; someone who would never forget that if the training for the job didn’t hurt, if it didn’t demand every ounce of your commitment and physical resilience, you would, sooner or later, fail.
The key to so much of what a goalkeeper can achieve lies in his ability to handle the pressure of living with the knowledge that on so many occasions he is going to be the difference between the joy of winning and the irreparable regret of losing the most important matches. You need a special turn of mind and character for that and the more I got to know Gordon, the more I saw that he had it. I would never call him arrogant but nor would I say that he was ever going to be in danger of underestimating himself. Long before the end of his career he didn’t need telling that he was the best in the world. ‘I just do what I have to do, Bobby,’ he always said whenever I told him how much I admired his work.
Those occasions included the time when I said how much I wished he could do some of it on behalf of my club United. That was a hope that didn’t survive the mysteries and the intrigues of the transfer market so I had to settle for all the reassurance he brought to me and the rest of his team-mates in the national team.
Banks of England elected himself to do the job. More than fifty years on, it is still so easy to say with certainty that without him we couldn’t have so truly believed that we had the means to do all that we set ourselves. Banks made a fortress of his goal. It was a place which never ceased to make us feel both safe and inspired.
3. Ice Man Moore
FOR MOST OF my team-mates it was just one of the less spectacular examples of Bobby Moore’s ability to remain uncannily calm under even the most intense pressure. If I ever mentioned it to them, suggested that I found it, well, sometimes a little disconcerting, they would laugh and say, ‘You should know by now, that’s Moore.’
They would go on to point out something about which in almost every other context I was perfectly aware. He did, after all, operate in another dimension from the rest of us once he put on an England shirt. This was why when he was made captain it seemed no more than the most inevitable and natural extension of his personality.
What I was talking about, they said, was as much a part of his nature as his extraordinary capacity to read the flow of a game, to make, for a classic example, the kind of tackle which robbed the explosive Jairzinho in our great World Cup game in Guadalajara in 1970 when one false half-step could so easily have yielded a penalty. Instead, Bobby moved forward quite imperiously, the ball at his feet, the huge yellow-clad Brazilian throng hushed by a sublime example of skill and authority.
For me, this particular habit was, though for no more than a second or two, as startling as a visitor from another planet, which I knew was certainly not the intended effect.
Maybe we were defending against a potentially dangerous free-kick, perhaps we were deep into a battle to survive and Nobby was shouting at Jack, or vice versa, but it didn’t matter, Bobby would still stroll beside me apparently without a care in the world and say, ‘All right, Bobby, mate, how’s Norma and the kids? Everything okay?’
Sometimes I would respond a little tetchily, even by my occasionally grumpy standards, with something like, ‘Do you realise we’ve got an important football match going on here?’ Invariably he would reply, ‘Oh yeah, no worries, Bob.’
In another man you might have suspected a bit of play-acting, the self-conscious building of a little personal mythology. However, for Bobby, England’s youngest skipper, there was never a requirement to create an impression of elevated calm or superior nerve. He didn’t have to strike poses and that perhaps more than anything spoke of his awareness that when it came to the international game, he was born to handle anything that came his way. He didn’t role-play. He just played.
The moment he stepped on to the field he was perfectly attuned to his environment. He seemed to grow taller, become that little bit more composed. He had a corner of himself that was quite untouchable and anyone could see it. Alf saw it at once and great players like Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer came to put a higher value on it each time they played against him.
When he died so prematurely at the age of fifty-one in 1993, and we went to Westminster Abbey, a place normally reserved for the honouring of great statesmen and warriors and poets, to pay our respects to one of the nation’s finest sportsmen, the words of such titans of football were inevitably bound up with the reflections of all those team-mates who would never forget the value of his leadership and the uplift brought by his presence.
The tributes swelled as stirringly as the choral mus
ic that filled the building so woven into the history of the nation.
Alf was not so well on the day of the service but already he was on the record, his words as thunderous as any of those of some hymn of praise. He said, ‘My captain, my leader, my right-hand man. He was the spirit and the heart-beat of the team. He was a cool, calculating footballer I could trust with my life. He was the supreme professional, the best I ever worked with. Without him, England would never have won the World Cup.’
Pelé and Beckenbauer pitched their tributes just as high. Pelé said, ‘He was my friend as well as the greatest defender I ever played against. The world has lost one of its greatest football players – and an honourable gentleman.’ Beckenbauer echoed Pelé’s assessment, saying, ‘Bobby was the best defender in the history of the game, a gentleman and a true friend.’
When Alf outlined his earliest vision of his England’s future, and his need to identify swiftly the players who would be the cornerstones of his hopes, he was quick to say, ‘Bobby Moore must be one of them, he’s going to form a key part of what we’re trying to do.’
Of course, I agreed. I was beginning to look at England’s prospects more confidently than ever before. I was comfortable playing for this manager and his selection of Bobby as our leader, despite the fact that he was not as experienced as myself, seemed entirely logical. I liked to think I had a good and still developing sense of what to do to best influence an important football match but it did not include the shepherding of my team-mates. For one thing, I didn’t tackle, at least not in any way that did not inspire derision in expert practitioners like Nobby or Ray Wilson, Jack or George Cohen.
Bobby did it so well, with such extraordinary timing, that it became almost the fulcrum of our game, our belief that we could compete with anyone.
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