1966

by Bobby Charlton

  Cooper’s reference was to the nursery song which goes, ‘You put your right foot in, Your right foot out, In out, In out, Shake it all about, You do the Hokey Cokey, And you turn around, That’s what it’s all about.’ After his long months of careful analysis of the team’s potential, and his hard decisions about the qualities of individual players, Alf, the relentlessly self-taught professional, was incensed by such open, and in his opinion ill-informed, mockery. Perhaps fortunately, Eric declined the invitation with thanks.

  But then if Alf didn’t get the chance to express himself physically, he was soon able to effectively stem that swiftly risen tide of doubt and criticism.

  We would go another ten games without defeat before the World Cup curtain was raised, winning nine of them, with an aggregate of twenty-three goals to six, six clean sheets and claiming such formidable scalps as Spain, in Madrid, and West Germany at Wembley, when Nobby scored his one international goal.

  What couldn’t be defined by statistics, though, was the interior life of a team learning about itself, beginning to understand its own developing potential.

  For me the arrival of Jack and Nobby brought an especially warm feeling. For one thing, I was being joined by two new England team-mates in whom I had always recognised superb competitive instincts. For another, I could also tell myself that I had the company not only of a growing band of close and stalwart team-mates but of brothers, Jack, who had shared my youth and my hopes back in the North East, and Nobby, who I had already come to love with an intensity that still grips me to this day.

  Both were so overjoyed by their selection they could scarcely contain their feelings. They were like young warriors called to action for which they had long yearned.

  Jack, nearing thirty, made that emotional announcement to me when he burst into the United dressing room just after his Leeds United had beaten us in an FA Cup semi-final and some of my club-mates made it clear quite bluntly that he was in danger of overstaying his welcome. Nobby wore a blissful expression from the moment he got the call, right up to attempting to shake hands with our great United colleague Denis Law before the Wembley kick-off and being told, ‘Eff off, you little English bastard.’

  Afterwards, Nobby confided that the exchange had removed his last qualm about kicking his esteemed team-mate up in the air whenever the occasion demanded.

  It has to be said, though, that not everyone in English football shared my enthusiasm for Nobby’s elevation to a potentially key role in the World Cup crusade. Some, including many years later such a weighty figure as Brian Clough’s European Cup-winning lieutenant and a future international manager Martin O’Neil, suggested that by picking Nobby, Alf was turning towards the cultivation of thuggery.

  Right from the start, I saw that as a travesty of football judgement. Nobby played with passion, and an extremely hard edge, but in my view he always displayed the heart – and the tactical brain – of someone who both loved and understood the game right down to the core of his being.

  I could give you a thousand examples of how graphically he conveyed his feelings for the game and the football club which had brought us together – and quite how deeply they were rooted in some of his earliest experiences.

  He made me familiar with his Manchester. He took me down the streets of his native Collyhurst, where he was born in the cellar of his family’s two-up, two-down terraced house during a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe. He showed me the old abandoned cemetery where he and his friends had played football amid the upturned gravestones. He showed me the football field made out of waste land by his father Charlie, an undertaker, and some of his friends. He took me into so much of his past that it made it that much easier for me to understand the force of his desire to succeed when he put on the shirts of Manchester United and England.

  Most affecting, for me at least, was the detail of his memory of the most dramatic day of my own life.

  Four years younger than me, he gave a haunting account of how it was back at Old Trafford when he and his fellow apprentices were told to go home and await the facts of an ‘incident’ involving the first team at Munich airport.

  ‘The sixth of February 1958,’ he said, ‘was supposed to be just another shift at the football dream factory. It was a frosty morning, the kind that when I was an altar boy kept me in bed for an extra half an hour when I knew the stern Canon Early was saying mass. I took the usual 112 bus for the forty-five-minute ride from my home in Collyhurst to Trafford Bar. There the bus crew changed for the final leg that took me to the ground.

  ‘Inevitably much of the talk on the bus concerned United, particularly so that morning. The day before, the first team had qualified for the European Cup final, drawing 3-3 with the fine Red Star team in Belgrade. The team, despite its youth, was growing before everyone’s eyes. On the previous Saturday they had beaten Arsenal 5-4 in one of the most thrilling games ever seen at Highbury. For so many people in Manchester they were young gods and when I heard the talk on the buses and in the street I swelled with pride.

  ‘I knew these gods. I ran for their bacon sarnies. I had pleaded successfully for their autographs. I cleaned their boots. I watched, up close and enthralled, as they played in baseball boots on a stretch of concrete beside Old Trafford on Friday afternoons, twenty-two of them shouting and joking and showing bits of skill and creating a world I couldn’t wait to be part of.’

  Nobby’s passion for the game and his love of United still glow in every line of his report and maybe the desolation he felt and expressed so vividly when he learned that the misadventure of Munich had brought such terrible consequences, and which so mirrored my own at the dreadful scene, was the first and most enduring of our bonds.

  This is how he described the impact of the confirmation of all the devastating facts. ‘I found out what happened on the way home when I changed buses in the centre of town. I went up to the newspaper seller and bought a copy of the Evening Chronicle. It was strange seeing the faces of Roger Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Mark Jones, David Pegg, Tommy Taylor and Liam Whelan staring out of the front page. They belonged at the back of the paper. But they were dead. “Coly” was dead. He couldn’t be dead. I cleaned his boots. None of them could be dead, but especially not Coly. But that’s what the Chronicle was saying in big black headlines.

  ‘I felt sick. Everything seemed normal enough. The streets and the shops looked just the same. The sun was presumably still up there beyond the low leaden sky.

  ‘I knew no one would be at home. My mum and my dad and my brother Charlie would be working. I couldn’t face the empty house. When I got off the bus I walked across Rochdale Road and down Livesey Street and into the church. You could just walk into a church in those days. They’re all locked up now. I prayed and I prayed that the Chronicle had got it all wrong. I prayed and I wept. I sat back in the pew for a long time. It could have been an hour or two, I don’t really know. There was no one else in the church.

  ‘Then I went home. The house, as I expected, was empty. The lads were dead, or so I had read, but people still had to work. I put the dinner in the oven.

  ‘The rest of the day and night is mostly a blur. I remember my father calling Jimmy Murphy, Matt Busby’s right-hand man who hadn’t made the trip to Belgrade, hadn’t sat on the runway while the plane was refuelled and the wings froze over, and telling him that he had a car at his disposal. My dad ran Jimmy to all the funerals.

  ‘That’s all we seemed to be doing for weeks, going to funerals. I served on the altar for several requiem masses. Not Coly’s. I went to his funeral and was surprised to learn that he wasn’t a Catholic, not that it mattered. Coly was dead. It kept coming into my head but it wouldn’t stay there. For a long time it was a shock which greeted each new day. It was devastation. I’d given his boots their last shine. I’d never see him moving upfield so smoothly, so quickly, despite carrying a bit of podge. That was his body type but it didn’t affect his game.

  ‘He could leave his marker with an easy change of
pace and great control. He could really motor when he decided to go forward and I tried to copy everything he did on the field. Later, when I scored my first goal for United – against Newcastle – I was proud for lots of reasons but the biggest one was that I thought it showed a touch of Coly. I broke quickly and sent the ball into the top corner of the net. It was a nice goal for a kid to dedicate to his hero.’

  In these words I believe we find the essence of my beloved Nobby. If he played tough, and overcame some formidable obstacles to any kind of athletic success, it never coarsened the nature of a man who, for all his ferocious reputation, ultimately always found it easier to love than to hate.

  Most touching of all, for me, was his passion to play. My, he wanted to play. He was far more able as a player of insight and skill than many of his critics allowed, but inevitably it was the force of his tackling, and the absolute commitment of his approach, which drew most attention. In the World Cup he would endure, but survive, one great controversy and two years later he near miraculously avoided another when we were side by side at the Bernabéu against Real Madrid to win a desperate battle to make it to the European Cup final against Benfica.

  What he did was guaranteed to offend the purists and it was also true that one or two of his team-mates were also left aghast. His job was to man-mark the quick and clever winger Amaro Amancio.

  Amancio was something of a reincarnation of the great Francisco Gento in his speed and crossing ability and he was also extremely subtle – on and off the ball. After scoring a first-half goal which helped wipe out our lead from the first leg – by the interval they were winning the game 3-1 and looking good enough to make irrelevant the fact that they had failed to score in the away leg at Old Trafford – Amancio struck another cruel blow. He kicked Nobby hard on the thigh as most people’s attention, including most crucially that of the match officials, centred on our goalkeeper Alex Stepney clearing our lines.

  Nobby’s thigh tightened ominously and he feared that he would finish the game a badly hobbling passenger, quite unable to curb the menace of Amancio. As that apprehension hardened, it was then that he repaid the winger in kind. With the most serious action elsewhere, he knocked Amancio down before running to the referee and pointing out that the Spaniard was down. ‘He’s injured, ref,’ said Nobby most earnestly.

  The great stadium howled its displeasure but Nobby’s gamble that, like Amancio earlier, he would escape the gaze of the referee and linesmen was a winning one and, whatever the morality of what he did – he could, of course, as a good altar boy, quote from the Bible about an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – there was no doubt it was a huge contribution to our progress to the final. That was confirmed when Bill Foulkes, who formed a superb partnership with Nobby in central defence, made a rare foray upfield to score one of two late goals, the other one coming from David Sadler.

  On the way home Nobby confided that he was still appalled by the possibility that he might have been sent off. ‘Can you imagine the headlines?’ he said. ‘However, I knew my thigh was tightening despite the heat treatment at half-time. I reckoned I just had to take the chance.’

  There was no censure from Sir Matt Busby. He had reached his goal of a place in the European Cup final and, no doubt, he realised that Nobby’s decision was a big, perhaps even the most vital, contribution. The Old Man, as I came to refer to the founder of the great Old Trafford tradition, always preached on behalf of a beautiful game, always sought to surround himself with the most gifted players. But he was also a practical man who grew up in the Lanarkshire coalfield after losing his father on the Somme. So, perhaps, no one knew better that amid all the beauty sometimes it was necessary to inject a touch of iron.

  No doubt Alf had considered such a reality when he called up Nobby. He had also requested a number of character references and all of them, including the one I offered, spoke of his exceptional determination to succeed as a top-flight player.

  Nobby had conquered some considerable concerns about his physical capacity to play at the highest level. He was tough, but he was also small and not the least of his problems was extreme short-sightedness. That he found a solution, which brought so much relief he had to restrain himself from dancing down Manchester’s thoroughfare of Deansgate some years before his unforgettable jig of celebration at Wembley, was largely through the perception of our Irish goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, the hero of Munich.

  Harry was a fiercely emotional and often combative figure but, as Nobby would have great reason never to lose sight of, he also had an extremely kind heart. He saw, more clearly than anyone else at the club, or in Nobby’s life up until that point, that his problem represented much more than an inconvenience, and an embarrassment, that went back to his days of rubbing his eyes against blurred vision as he tried to read the exercise books in his primary school classroom.

  The extent of Nobby’s crisis, which he had come to believe was the reason for his only sporadic first-team appearances in the early sixties and the loss of his place in the 1963 final against Leicester City, became apparent to Harry during a card game as the team travelled by train to an away fixture.

  Afterwards, he said to Busby, ‘You know, boss, you just have to do something about Nobby’s eyesight. The kid is living his life half blind. He’s really struggling. He was putting down the wrong cards. He just couldn’t read them. We can only imagine how it is affecting his play.’

  It was much later when Nobby revealed the scale of his anguish – and his fears. He said, ‘You come to terms with a problem like that and, certainly back in those days, you just hoped that you would be able to get by. Deep down, though, I knew I had a terrible problem. Between my debut in 1960 and my omission from that Cup final and flirtation with a transfer request, I would have one good game and then slip back into the reserves.

  ‘The problem came to a head in my own mind during a match against Everton at Goodison Park. I went to receive a throw-in and I suddenly realised I was guessing when it came to the timing of the ball and to where and to whom I was going to play it. I was given a man to mark and in the flow of the game I frequently lost sight of him. It was a terrible shock but maybe out of fear of what I would be told if I raised the problem with Busby and was sent to see an eye specialist I kept quiet. I would try to get along in the fog.’

  Hearing those words gave me a new insight into quite the amount of difficult terrain Nobby had covered by the time he reported for England duty at Hendon Hall, his contact lenses carefully in place for what he deemed one of the most important appointments of his life.

  Nobby’s problems registered strongly in someone like me who had always taken his physical gifts, if not for granted, as assets supplied in the cradle, and came with the solitary demand of making the most of them, which of course for me would always be as much a pleasure as a duty. For Nobby there was no such luxury and I could only admire his determination all the more. He had got the better of what might easily have been an insurmountable barrier to his highest hopes.

  Once as a boy he had been alarmed to discover that his father’s undertaking duties had required a body to be kept overnight in the cellar where he had been born. He was reassured by his mother, Kitty, who said, ‘Nobby, love, it’s not the dead ones you have to worry about.’

  If that gave the boy some reassurance, it was nothing to the uplift he felt when he left the eye specialist’s surgery with his new contact lenses.

  Again, his recall of that liberating experience touched me deeply. Nobby remembered how the world had suddenly become a new and wondrous place. He reported, ‘First, I discovered in those posh consulting rooms that there was no easy cure. I had to wear big, hard contact lenses and squirt blue lubricating fluid into my eyes. I also realised when I walked out on to Deansgate that I would have to relearn the most basic steps I had made in the game. They put the big things in my eyes and told me to go out and have a walk.

  ‘I’ll never forget walking down Deansgate that time. Everything was so clear. Suddenly,
Manchester was a brilliant place of clean lines. The sky was the most vivid blue. The clouds were white and fluffy. The ends of the buildings were clearly defined. Everything was so sharp. But then I did find myself stepping off the curbside a foot too soon and when I started playing again I was guilty of some horrible miscalculations.’

  It was a hard period of rehabilitation and a lesser man might not have made it. It took him some time to adapt to the contact lenses which were in an early stage of their development. He complained that his eyes dried out for a lack of oxygen and often he would have dark panda rings around them. He fell away as a first-team contender for a while but, step by step, he came back and before the end of ’64 he had with growing assurance brought his game to a vital mix of clear vision and the sharpest of timing.

  Still, though, it seemed to me that everything was just a little harder for my friend. It seemed to be his fate that nothing he wanted to achieve would be simple or straightforward. He had to battle it out, prove to himself and those who sat in judgement of him that indeed he deserved any success that came his way. So it was when he made his final step into the England team.

  The door was opened to him by Alf in February 1965 when he picked Nobby for the Under-23 team to play Scotland in Aberdeen. He would be pitched against an impressive Scottish team which included such stars as Billy Bremner of Leeds United and Charlie Cooke, but then quickly enough it was clear this was the least of his challenges. The complication was that United were due to play an important league match the night before the Under-23 game and Matt Busby said that he needed one of his key defenders. Nobby was required to tell the England manager, who it seemed likely was considering him for a place in his World Cup squad, that he had to be scratched from his team.