That had to be the ultimate conclusion. Busby had marshalled superb quality in his fabled Busby Babes and when the heirs of that team went on to be champions of Europe, George Best, Denis Law, before he was injured, and I were given a large portion of the credit for our football skills. Yet what Nobby displayed that night at the Bernabéu, and Busby countenanced, was something not possessed by the West Ham team which made such a huge contribution to England’s World Cup hopes. Denis, Nobby, Paddy Crerand, Tony Dunne all had terrific talent in their different ways, but in Denis and Paddy’s cases particularly it was often wrapped in the most silky of football skill.
Paddy was not quick – he once declared ‘if I get any slower I’ll be arrested for loitering’ – but no one ever passed the ball with more beautiful and meaningful effect. Denis’s instincts were ferocious. United also had the huge and often ruthless physical presence of Bill Foulkes at the centre of defence, where no one had a better, more acute helpmate than Nobby.
What I hope I’m presenting is not a picture designed to diminish any of the qualities brought to England by the West Ham trio – that would be impossible for any fair-minded judge – but one merely indicating their extraordinarily smooth absorption in Alf’s grand plan. Their fusion in the England team was a huge factor in our belief that we could beat the world.
First Geoff, then Martin, gave us so much added buoyancy as we moved into the final phase of our preparation for the World Cup – and in the process made it abundantly clear to any discerning judge that, having made his defensive plan, Alf faced a few months of the most intense decision-making as he considered the claims of such strong new contenders for a place in his attacking scheme.
Ball and Peters had announced their threat to the corps of wingers, offered a new way of playing, and Hurst and Hunt had brought similar pressure to the great finisher Jimmy Greaves. As spring turned to summer, Jimmy, when out of the managerial earshot, could sometimes be heard humming the theme tune of the Michael Caine movie, ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’
Though he had reminded Alf, in the unlikely event of it being necessary, that his draining bout of hepatitis had not diminished his superb and often uncanny scoring touch, he was also aware that the challenge he faced had its roots as much in Alf’s philosophy of football as his assessment of individual skills.
The problem for Jimmy, it was becoming apparent enough, was that in Alf Ramsey’s mind it was not so much all about how one player could from time to time hit sublime notes but perhaps how another, or maybe a pair of them, could strike a more consistent rhythm of effort and integration with his team-mates. Here, first Hunt, now Hurst, had proffered the most formidable credentials. Neither captured the imagination of the press box, neither threatened to surpass the exquisite mysteries of Jimmy’s ability to ghost into the penalty area and pick a killing spot, but their promissory notes could be taken to any bank. Notes moistened by the sweat of non-stop and unswervingly relevant commitment.
Very quickly I made an assumption about Geoff which I never had to revise. It was that he had the ability to receive the ball in a forward position however heavy the attention of defenders, hold it for just quite as long as was necessary for reinforcements to arrive. He was, like Hunt, inexhaustible both physically and in terms of awareness of the movement of his team-mates.
His greatest threat to Jimmy’s hopes lay, I had no doubt from when he arrived for the match against West Germany which followed our tactical triumph in Madrid, in how much he could contribute to the 4-3-3 system. Many years later the rise of Eric Cantona at United, in so many ways a quite different player, gave me a sharp reminder of one of Geoff’s prime assets. It was that ability, aided by two good feet – his left one was always much more than passable – and an assured touch, to hold up the ball in an advanced position while taking all manner of punishment.
It was very clear that Hurst immediately felt at home in the team atmosphere that Alf had worked so hard to develop. Later, he recalled, ‘Alf had this terrific ability to bring the team together, and that was partly due to his authority. He was the common denominator, the cement that bound us all together. He was all powerful and one of the things which made his job possible was the willingness with which we all accepted his authority.’
It was an understanding which quickly became refined to the point of becoming utterly implicit in almost everything we did on the final stages of the march into the summer of 1966.
There were many indicators that Alf’s determination to finish the job, to make all of the hard work worthwhile, all the riding of criticism and doubts which had swirled up like sandstorms whenever our performance slipped below what was considered an acceptable level for potential world champions, had reached a new level of intensity. It was as though he already sniffed the aroma of success and some ultimate vindication and occasionally his deepest feelings erupted with great force.
My United team-mate John Connelly felt this strongly when he and Nobby Stiles and Alan Ball overstepped the line drawn by Alf so clearly much earlier in his England reign. I felt it when I was involved, relatively innocently I thought at the time, in that curfew-breaking foray into the West End in 1964.
John, Nobby and Alan had their critical moment after we assembled at the Lilleshall training centre for two weeks of something I can only describe as total immersion in the requirements that would be demanded of us if we were chosen to walk out into the World Cup final.
We reported for duty, and it is a phrase I do not use lightly – appropriately enough, Jimmy Greaves cracked – on 6 June, the twenty-second anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Our lives were not at risk, of course, but Alf had made it abundantly clear that our reputation for competitive honour and patriotism was.
The errant trio realised they were in trouble only when confronted by Wilf McGuinness, who had been recruited by Alf to the training camp staff, partly out of recognition of the brilliant way he had responded to a career-shattering injury with his work for both United and the England Under-23 team. They had slipped away to a nearby pub for a pint but had returned quickly in what they considered good order and also reassuring themselves that Alf had not imposed a specific ban on leaving the manorial Lilleshall premises. However, they were told by Wilf, ‘You’re in big trouble, lads, the boss knows you’ve been to the pub and he’s blazing.’
Both Nobby and Bally were desperately contrite. They said they didn’t realise they had gone out of bounds and had been in the pub only for the time it took to down their pints, which was just a few minutes. John’s approach, though, was sharply different.
His feistiness was no doubt one of the reasons that had first made him appealing to Alf – and why he was still contending for a place in the great tournament as an orthodox winger – but Wilf, Nobby and Alan all believed he had horribly misread the situation when he declared, ‘For heaven’s sake, Alf, we’re just talking about a pint here. We didn’t realise we were doing anything wrong.’
Alf simmered for a moment, then rasped. ‘All of you, get out of my sight.’
That marked the end of any socialising not expressly approved of by the manager and I always thought that it said a lot for Alf’s respect for John Connelly’s talent and combativeness that he survived his miscalculation and made it into the group stage of the tournament.
On reflection, it should have been clear enough to all of us that Alf had reached a fine point of disciplinary zeal. While discussing our pre-tournament programme – after Lilleshall we would have some fine-tuning on a three-match tour of Scandinavia and a final friendly against Poland in their gritty citadel of Chorzów in the minefields of Silesia – he told the press, ‘I will take them out to the country and brainwash them about what we are going to do.’
His faithful trainer Harold Shepherdson, who had come to know him so well, later confirmed that Alf had now moved on to another level of resolve. He said, ‘If there was a time when Alf could be said to have changed from second gear into top, and faced up to the last and h
ardest lap of all, it was when he met his team at Lilleshall.’
No one had a harder understanding of what it took to make a top professional than Wilf McGuinness. Before he broke his leg at the age of twenty-two, he was in the foothills of what was already shaping into an outstanding career. He played for United’s first team before his eighteenth birthday and, despite the competition provided by the Busby Babes, he played enough games to qualify for a title winner’s medal at the end of the 1956 season and when the injury disaster occurred he had already laid the foundation of an international career with two England caps. He was a ferociously committed player, a natural predecessor to my man Stiles. So Wilf knew a little bit about preparing yourself for the highest ground of football competition and he could not have been more enthusiastic about what he saw at Lilleshall.
Wilf recalled, ‘The training was strong and physical for the end of the season. The players were all divided into groups and we passed on each group after fifteen minutes of hard slog. Every group was trying to outdo the other in the circuits and in the ball work. It was punishing work but the players really took to it. By the end of it they really knew they were fit. Alf wanted it that way. He wanted everyone to give everything they had. Les Cocker and Harold Shepherdson were ideal for what was needed. Les came from Leeds United and was a bit of a hard man. Harold had been in the job since Walter Winterbottom’s time and was very experienced and well respected.’
The work was extremely hard – but, as Wilf said, it was also extremely rewarding. For me it was a little like approaching the end of a long journey, one that I knew deep down had made me a better footballer and, I hoped, a stronger man.
The mornings were devoted to the hard physical work and ball practice and a substantial amount of the latter was concerned with polishing tactics. If there was quite a bit of player participation in the debates surrounding that tactical approach, with Nobby and Jack particularly voluble during and after the action, there was never any argument about who had the final word. Alf delivered it with ever-increasing urgency – and precision.
In the afternoons we had no-contact sport before a soak in the bath and an early dinner, which was followed by either a lecture or a film. We went to our dormitory-style rooms around 9 p.m., where the beds were comfortable enough and by the second week far more tempting than any rash ideas of breaking curfew.
By this stage we had also gathered the nerve to fulfil Alf’s demand that our practice sessions were played at something close to the intensity of real matches. This development came when Alf suddenly halted a practice game to complain that we simply weren’t playing hard enough. We told him of our worries that we might risk ourselves or our team-mates so close to the World Cup. Wasn’t this, we wondered, not evidence of our concern that at this late stage nothing should come needlessly between us and our best chances of success?
Alf was singularly unpersuaded and still less impressed. We were not, he pointed out, attending a holiday camp but the most important testing ground of our careers. What happened on the training pitch was not so much an aid to superior performance but its very foundation. So we fought harder for every ball, we picked up bruises and we accepted Alf’s hard dogma that we had to go full out – and take our chances.
All twenty-seven of us were left standing and so Alf had to draw the fine line between those five who returned to their families, and whatever consolation that might bring in what would surely be the emptiest summer of their professional lives, and the twenty-two who packed for what amounted to the last of the most demanding auditions of their football careers.
Alf passed his regrets to the fallen and told the rest of us that we still had everything to play for and, by implication, that he didn’t have to dwell on, everything to lose.
The final cut – I believed with some pride and relief – delivered the best-prepared group of players in the history of English football – right down to their toenails, in the care of which, the team doctor Alan Bass discovered with alarm, he had to educate the majority of the squad.
Here were the players who travelled to Heathrow airport for the flight to Helsinki for the start of the final reckoning . . .
Goalkeepers: Gordon Banks (Leicester City), Ron Springett (Sheffield Wednesday), Peter Bonetti (Chelsea)
Full-backs: Jimmy Armfield (Blackpool), Ray Wilson (Everton), George Cohen (Fulham), Gerry Byrne (Liverpool)
Half-backs: Nobby Stiles (Manchester United), Martin Peters (West Ham United), Jack Charlton (Leeds United), Ron Flowers (Wolverhampton Wanderers), Bobby Moore (West Ham United), Norman Hunter (Leeds United)
Forwards: Terry Paine (Southampton), Ian Callaghan (Liverpool), Jimmy Greaves (Tottenham Hotspur), Roger Hunt (Liverpool), Geoff Hurst (West Ham United), Bobby Charlton (Manchester United), Alan Ball (Blackpool), George Eastham (Arsenal) and John Connelly (Manchester United).
Everything was in place, including agreed financial rewards which seem so flimsy now when you set them against the ambitions we carried that summer and the levels of expectation building in the nation. The Football Association proposed that each player received a bonus up to £1,500 on a sliding scale, depending on the number of individual appearances in the tournament. We rejected the suggestion in the briefest of debates. We had travelled along the same road, made the same commitments – and if anyone doubted this they had needed only to watch a random work session in the Shropshire meadows – and the FA took our point. They accepted that each member of the squad should be paid £1,000 from a pot which today seems so bizarrely modest, and which would soon enough be confirmed as such when it was reported that the FA were required to pay a quarter of a million pounds of corporation tax from their net profits.
George Cohen, who had a better idea of business affairs than most of us, was also irritated later in the year when he received a summons to collect a case of Bollinger champagne and two others containing red and white wine which had been stored in the underground car park of the FA at Lancaster Gate in London. He reported, ‘I remember driving into the car park and thinking, “My God, where is all this booze going?” You could have fitted the entire players’ allocation into a couple of car spaces but the rest of the car park was filled to the gunwales. That was the kind of thing that came along regularly and it did put you on edge.
‘Players played and took what they were given and the FA rode a gravy train which on this occasion had taken on a massive supply of champagne and the finest burgundy. All in all, I reflected, it was quite nice of the FA to remember us.’
Yet George’s old outrage had reason to be fanned down the years – and maybe not least in 2002 when the England team flying to the Far East for the World Cup were given a week’s stopover at a luxury hotel in Dubai with their families or girlfriends, and this after much clamouring for bonuses stretching into the millions.
However, George, like the surviving rest of us when we gather for our annual reunions, readily accepts that we inhabited another world back in 1966, and that not one of us would give back a day of the adventure which is still at the core of our experience. No, we say, we wouldn’t trade it for the £200,000 a week commanded by today’s Premier League stars.
It was, though, an experience which by the time we landed in Helsinki we knew well enough was likely to bring a twist or a tremor with almost every step along the way. Alf provided still another in the Finnish capital when he announced the team. He had promised to make changes, insisting that indeed every player still had plenty of time to make, or undo, his case, but it was something of a convulsion when the name of Bobby Moore was missing from the team-sheet.
It was unthinkable – at least to me – that Bobby should stumble out of contention at this late stage but then it was also true that he had contractual problems with West Ham and, technically at least, this might just have left him an unregistered, and thus ineligible, player at the start of the World Cup.
Bobby later theorised that Alf might have been prodding him towards a swift concentration of his mind on a diffic
ult situation, one which had been complicated by a report that the Arsenal manager Billy Wright, aware of discord between the player and his manager Ron Greenwood, had made West Ham an offer.
If that indeed was Alf’s intention, Bobby confirmed that his omission certainly had a cautionary effect. He said, ‘Everyone in the squad was aware that different players would get an opportunity because Alf had said he would be trying to play everyone if he could during the tour. Yet it was a warning and I thought, “Oh, right.”
‘Alf didn’t speak much about the captaincy, though he had asked, before I took over from Jimmy Armfield in 1963, whether I wanted the job, was I aware of the responsibility? It was a vote of confidence and support as much as anything when he appointed me. I didn’t really influence him as a captain, it was such a good era and we knew various players could have come in because the backbone was established. He would have a quiet word with me about what he intended, to keep me informed, but only after he had made up his mind. He never consulted me on selecting a player.
‘When he left me out in Finland he never said anything. Norman Hunter was playing well, his club Leeds were successful and I was in disagreement with West Ham. People, including Alf, may have thought my mind was on other things. It may have been his way of saying, “I know what’s going on, show me you want it.” It did create a doubt, showed me I had got to work at it.’
Bobby returned to the team for the next match in Oslo, which for me seemed like the last word in the way of a formality. But, then, I had never doubted Bobby’s role in the team, the reassurance his presence brought, and there was no doubt I had come to take him for granted. I never thought anyone should play in his place. He had so much vision, so much time.
Alf also left out Jimmy Greaves, while giving Ian Callaghan his first cap, but if he had created a few fresh headlines, the game itself provided little fuel for more controversy. We beat Finland comfortably, 3-0, Callaghan was lively on the wing and Martin Peters scored his first goal for England.
1966 Page 14