1966

by Bobby Charlton

  Alf had taken part in a seven-a-side game and been the victim of a clattering tackle by George. He went down heavily on to the frozen ground and George and the rest of us were aghast as he slowly and rather shakily got to his feet. ‘Fucking hell, Cohen,’ he said, ‘if I had another fit right-back you wouldn’t be playing tomorrow night.’

  But then if he was less voluble and eloquent after the match, neither did he seek to disguise his satisfaction.

  I had a sense that he wanted to be alone for a little while so as to better absorb the meaning of what he had seen. Surely everyone had to believe it was confirmation of his claim that England could indeed win the World Cup. We had the players, we had the system – and now, suddenly, there was the kind of recognition which could hardly have been imagined when Jimmy Hill was telling the nation to pack away its dreams for at least another four years.

  Certainly Fleet Street was agog at the style and the innovation of England’s performance. The style was strong and quick and filled with authority. The system was about to enter the history of the game and for all those who would later claim that Alf’s 4-3-3 was a tactical blight on English football, a discarding of romance and colour and what had always been presumed to be the unshakeable, everlasting appeal of dashing, elusive wingers, there were others, and certainly I was one of them, who either saw or lived it, who were convinced otherwise. We believed that in the right hands, and with the right personnel, it could deliver all that you wanted – and with more certainty than had ever been felt before.

  I went on the record with my enthusiasm and, looking back and rereading my words, I sound very much like someone who had suddenly seen a very bright light in a once murky room. I told a reporter, ‘Before Alf we never really had a plan away from home and this new development was really something. When he told us about the switch to 4-3-3 he emphatically made the point that we were not going to become a defensive team, that the three up front wouldn’t be alone. When we had the ball the three up front would become six.’

  The English media heaped praise on both the manager and the players. The headlines hammered home the theme of a major breakthrough. However, it was one thing for Desmond Hackett, the volatile voice of the Daily Express, to rhapsodise over our performance. It was quite another that professional opinion across the world was both intrigued and positive.

  Hackett’s piece, though, certainly made agreeable breakfast reading. He wrote, ‘England can win the World Cup next year. They have only to match the splendour of this unforgettable night and there is not a team on earth who can master them. This was England’s first win in Spain but it was more than a victory. It was a thrashing of painful humiliation for the Spanish. Gone were the shackles of rigid regimentation.

  ‘The team moved freely and confidently and with such imagination that the numbers on their backs became mere identification marks on players who rose to noble heights. England’s football was as smooth as the brush strokes of a master – precise, balanced and as lovely to watch as the ballet.’

  There was no provocation here for Alf to invite a sometimes scathing critic outside. But more gratifying, no doubt, was the homage paid to him – and England’s performance – by a fellow professional, the Spanish coach José Villalonga.

  Villalonga’s body language on the touchline had become quite desperate, as had that of the Spanish full-backs Severino Reija and Manuel Sanchís who held up their hands in bewilderment as they marked empty space normally occupied by traditional wingers – and we attacked from all points of the tactical compass. As it was happening, I said to myself, ‘This is fantastic. But we don’t have wingers and their full-backs are standing out there like lamp posts. They are doing what they have always done but everything has changed. And Alf has changed it.’

  It was, despite our steaming breath in the cold Castilian night, the most encouraging invitation to believe that we had indeed achieved an extremely warming new dawn. Ramsey’s Way suddenly seemed like the most inviting thoroughfare.

  Joe Baker, the star of Hibernian and then Arsenal, whose thick Scottish accent did not disguise his commitment to his native England when he put on the white shirt, scored early and played with impressive bite before having to leave the field injured after thirty-five minutes.

  When he did so he was replaced by Bobby Moore’s superb and ferocious understudy Norman Hunter, a development which prompted Ball, whose enthusiasm and relevance to every phase of the action cut a great swathe through our opponents, to produce a huge grin from beneath his red thatch, place his hands together and say, ‘For what they are about to receive.’

  It was not, though, brutal tackling that most disrupted the Spaniards. It was the sharpness and the range of our attack, the speed with which it was transformed from the most efficient of defences.

  Roger Hunt, who was making a rare appearance in the absence of the sick Jimmy Greaves, scored the conclusive goal after I linked in a sweeping passing movement which started with George Cohen and was carried forward by Moore. The effect was of the kind of killing sword stroke so familiar to those who patronised the nearby Plaza de Toros.

  The Spanish coach said, ‘This England team was phenomenal tonight. They were far superior to us in their experiment and their performance. No team in the world could have lived with the force or the variety of their attack. We tried to adapt to the situation, we did all we could, but I realised long before the end of the game it was never going to be enough.’

  For Alf the Madrid morning was full of such reinforcement and not the least rapturous – or lyrical – was that provided by my friend Geoffrey Green, who wrote in The Times of the post-match mood the man of the moment helped create over a little liquid refreshment.

  Alf had explained his thinking on 4-3-3 to a group of reporters and then invited questions as the champagne was poured.

  Geoffrey reported to his readers, ‘As the champagne corks popped so the temperature rose and the verbal exchanges sharpened and slurred. The giant crystal chandelier overhead sparkled like the Milky Way and Alf was on cloud nine. Laying his glass aside every now and then – every quarter hour on the quarter hour I would judge – he cupped his hands in front of an enigmatic smile to murmur, “This precious jewel.” Each time he repeated the action I tottered to my feet, raised my champagne goblet and gave a Russian toast, “Here’s to the four corners of this room.”

  ‘So the small hours unwound happily. It was only the next day, following a massive dose of Alka Seltzer, when I came to realize two things. The room I had been toasting was entirely circular; and Alf’s “precious jewel”, caressed in imagination, was football.’

  Alf, of course, was rarely given to public caressing of any sort, and he was still less inclined to count his victories in the long run of friendlies that, as the World Cup host nation, was our sole diet after elimination from the Nations Cup in Paris at the start of his reign. But he did hoard in his mind anything he considered to be superior performance from individuals and the team.

  In his estimation, until we played our opening World Cup game, results were meaningless and performance was everything. Here he was thrilled by the execution of his best hopes. Like an early fan of the Russian Revolution he was inclined to believe that he might have seen the future, and that it worked.

  He had already been hugely encouraged by the swift acclimatisation achieved by Jack and Nobby. They displayed a fine understanding and implicit acceptance of his demands and both had performed impressively in Madrid. And now Alf had another player to place at the core of his hopes.

  It was the astonishing, boyish, irrepressible Ball. As he had with Nobby and Jack, Alf had watched him over the months with a growing interest and, he would reveal later, excitement. It was not so much the liveliness of his play and the skills that accompanied the vision and the urgency but the overwhelming sense that he was perfectly comfortable with all the demands placed before him. He flowed like an electric current wired to every corner of his team.

  Alf saw Ball in the salty
air of Bloomfield Road, Blackpool, and when he came to the football strongholds of Manchester, Liverpool and London. The more he saw him, the more he loved the passion and the industry and the sharpness of wit brimming from his prospective recruit. It was no insult to the fine skills of the boy with the high-pitched voice and the unquenchable desire to succeed, which had been cultivated by his old pro football manager father, that Alf quickly saw in him potential as his ultimate foot soldier.

  Alan was a player he could trust to never stop running, never wilt in his duty to police the efforts of both himself and his team-mates. Many years later Nobby, for whom supreme commitment was assumed to be an endless personal resource, reported his shock at a command he received from Alan midway through one particularly hectic phase of action. ‘I had just made a couple of big, really draining runs, I was exhausted, wondering where my next breath was coming from, and for a second I had my hands on my hips. Bally ran up beside me and yelled into my ear, ‘Run, you bastard.’

  ‘Bally’ never tired of telling the story of one of his early encounters with Alf. He swore that his account was true in every detail and there was no doubt it did smack of an authentic example of Alf’s sometimes brutal teaching style. This, anyway, was Alan’s version of the conversation . . .

  ‘Alan, what happens when a man takes his dog for a walk?’

  ‘The owner throws a stick and the dog runs after it and fetches it back and drops it at his master’s feet.’

  ‘Quite so, Alan. Now I want you to think of yourself as the dog, the stick as the ball and the dog’s owner as Bobby Charlton.’

  Bally would shake with laughter when he told the story, which he did long after he had proved himself one of the outstanding creative midfielders in the history of English football and had broken the British transfer record along the way when he moved from Everton to Arsenal in 1971 at a cost of £220,000.

  My response to Alf’s parable of the dog and the stick was that I liked to think of it as not so much a comment on his exaggeration of my standing in the game and his team, but his refusal to leave anyone with the smallest illusion about one of their essential functions in his grand plan. At the same time I was always eager to say that Alan had quickly outgrown anyone’s idea of merely a potential champion at Crufts.

  Bally had come in seven games earlier in another formidable stronghold of European football, Belgrade. Then, he was still a few days shy of his twentieth birthday but Alf had seen all he needed. He believed that the young player had enough natural-born nous and competitive steel to prosper in the place which eight years earlier had created a road block in my own international career and, effectively, kept me out of a World Cup.

  Alf made the announcement of his selection directly to the player during a training session the day before the match. Again he had studied Ball’s game, his mannerisms, intently and when he took him to one side he said, ‘Are you all right, young man?’ Ball chirped back, ‘Yes, I’m fine, boss’, to which Alf replied in classic fashion, ‘Well, in that case stop kicking the ball around, I want to talk to you. Do you think you are ready to play for England?’ Again Alan responded, unblinkingly, ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Then you are playing tomorrow,’ Alf said. First Jack and Nobby, now Alan Ball; Alf was gathering his people, his elect, together with a growing certainty – and a necessarily quickening pace.

  My enthusiasm was no less in this latest case than in all the others. It was, plainly, another instance of Alf being very sure of the instincts and the character of a player who for some time had been under quite exhaustive examination. Also, it was one more emerging example of mutual trust, Ball saying at the end of his career, ‘Alf was complete. He was tactically aware, thorough, had his own idea of how the game should be played, was approachable and could always put you right.

  ‘I never found a flaw in him and I’ve played with a few managers: Ron Suart at Blackpool, Harry Catterick at Everton, Bertie Mee and Terry Neill at Arsenal, Lawrie McMenemy at Southampton. That day in Belgrade Alf told me not to worry about how I played, “just play,” he said.

  ‘He promised me I would play enough times to see if I would make it. He dispelled the idea that anyone would get only one chance.’

  I first encountered Bally while playing for United against Blackpool at Bloomfield Road. I had heard a lot about him, how vital he was to his team’s momentum, and all of it was confirmed.

  He was fascinating to watch, so alive, so aware of everything that was happening around him. It was amazing to see these qualities in someone so young. He wasn’t naturally fast, he was denied that great asset, but the compensations he produced were huge. He was a less elegant, but no less impressive, version of Bobby Moore in his instinct to always be in the right place at the right time

  In this he also reminded me a lot of Nobby. His football brain worked overtime at moments of maximum pressure and if he wasn’t quick he was aware of the speed of those around him and he played off it beautifully. He was never at a loss for an option, however tight the situation.

  In the course of the next few years I was disappointed when he didn’t join United, as much indeed as when we failed to sign Gordon Banks. His energy, his football intelligence, would have made him quite integral to our strength. Although our styles were quite different, in a way I suppose he reminded me quite a bit of myself when I made my first steps into football, though my passage was no doubt easier. He was rejected by his local club Bolton Wanderers, who considered him too small, too easily brushed aside. There can rarely have been a greater miscalculation in the history of the game.

  Football was for him, as it was for me, more than a calling. It was his life. His father Alan was besotted by the game, someone who seemed never happier than when talking about and, indeed, inhaling all of it quite whole. The influence he exerted over his son was very strong. It was a rare day when Bally didn’t call home for a council of war.

  Apart from his natural balance, and his ability to control his performance despite its unvarying passion, he had an extraordinary combative nature. He saw points of conflict incredibly early, he anticipated them and responded ahead of the rest. But never stupidly. You could be in a very tight situation, needing a little time and space, and you looked up and he was there.

  If Alf was assembling a team of champions, here was a substantial portion of both its heart and its intelligence. In the build-up to the World Cup this became increasingly clear and it was dramatically evident in Madrid.

  At the Bernabéu it was the most striking single indicator that we were indeed moving towards establishing the core of our team. Nine World Cup finalists started the game and there is no doubt that in one way or another all the claims on that status were strongly enhanced in the ensuing ninety minutes.

  Only sympathy, rather than any small degree of reproach, could be dealt to the two who didn’t make it: Joe Baker and George Eastham. It was not that they failed, and indeed Baker had been particularly impressive before he was hit by injury, simply that in Alf’s relentless analysis the counter-claims of Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters would eventually triumph. And who could say that errors of judgement had been made?

  Appropriately, when you considered the style and the manner of their impact on the team, it could be said they came with late and, I certainly believed, unanswerable runs.

  Soon enough, though, it was clear that whatever line-up and set of tactics Alf unfurled for the raising of the World Cup curtain in six months, there was no question that the victory in Madrid would be presented by him as prima facie evidence that he may have found a way to win the tournament and that henceforth wingers, extremely talented individuals like Peter Thompson, Terry Paine, John Connelly and Ian Callaghan, were banished from his sight. No, he insisted, the performance against Spain did not amount to an indelible blueprint. It simply gave him, and the core of his team, an option that in the right circumstances might prove not only workable but potentially devastating.

  He could hardly have been more explicit about th
is in the wake of Madrid, saying, ‘I think it would be quite wrong to let the rest of the world, our rivals, see exactly what we are doing. I think it is my duty to protect certain players until the time we need them most. In Madrid it was a step, and a very big one, in our education as a football party. My job will be to produce the right team at the right time and this does not always mean pressing ahead with a particular combination just because it has been successful.’

  Sometimes football managers are playing games when they make such pronouncements, throwing up smokescreens and hoping to send rivals haring off in wrong directions. But Alf’s football dogma did not lend itself to such diversionary tactics. He was more concerned with building his own body of evidence in the matter of his best options, and all that he did between Madrid and the announcement of his World Cup squad of twenty-two the following June was confirmation of the truth of his assertion that he remained flexible about who and how he would play.

  He didn’t, as some imagined he might in the first flush of his triumph in Spain, abandon wingers. Three – Terry Paine, John Connelly and Ian Callaghan – would get into the squad and there was a place for one of this endangered species in three of four games we played before gathering in the Lilleshall training centre in Shropshire.

  There, we worked intensely and under strict discipline before making the four-game sweep through Europe which carried us to the dawn of the tournament. Before the fleeting visits home Alf allowed us almost begrudgingly, and with perhaps an echo of our conversation in Rio two years earlier, and the first of the tour games in Helsinki, five players were told that they hadn’t made the cut.