1966

by Bobby Charlton

  In Oslo we overwhelmed Norway 6-1 and the restored Jimmy Greaves scored four goals, which made him England’s top scorer with a remarkable forty-three in forty-nine games. It was a strike rate which said everything about his superb facility in front of goal and though the Norwegian defence was less than obdurate, Jimmy, understandably enough, felt that he had achieved a full-scale resurrection. He said that whatever the opposition you still had to put the ball in the net, adding, ‘I felt after Oslo that I had cracked it, and when we beat Poland at the end of the tour I was sure that Roger and I would be the front two.’

  Before the win in Chorzów we had beaten Denmark comfortably enough in Copenhagen and as we turned for home – and the start of the World Cup in six days’ time – there was a powerful sense that we had announced ourselves as serious contenders. Not the least encouragement was another superb performance from Martin Peters against the tough, quick Poles. Ray Wilson, who was generally more voluble on the pitch than off it, confided, ‘The last few days have convinced me that we can do it. I think we have moved into a different league.’

  That was the message, and the conviction, Alf had sought to implant for three and a half years and often in the face of widespread and strident ridicule. But now he had believers in the most crucial place of all, the dressing room. The prize of a place in a team of champions had never seemed so real. It was as though we could close our eyes and almost touch it.

  9. The Legacy of Dunc

  THAT URGE TO reach out, to take hold of something made tangible by all the work and the self-examination which had followed the abrupt awakening on that winter night in Paris, was for me quite overwhelming in the early morning of Monday 11 July 1966 – the first day of the World Cup.

  I opened the curtains of the room I shared with Ray Wilson, looked up to a cloudless blue sky and then quickly drew them together again because Ray was sleeping like a baby. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could and went down to the breakfast room.

  I wanted this day to fly, I wanted to be in command of all of it – and the twenty days that followed – and to be able to say that this indeed was the time of my football life, one from which I didn’t take a single regret.

  I was twenty-eight years old and had played sixty-eight times for England, seventeen times more than the closest to me in experience, Jimmy Greaves.

  I spanned the epochs of Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney, two of the greatest players the world would ever see, and this one newly inhabited by youngsters like Alan Ball and Martin Peters, who carried no other weight of memory, or disappointment, beyond their own freshly minted ambition.

  By the sharpest comparison, in an England shirt, and in the company of such as Johnny Haynes and Billy Wright, I had known moments of great hope often but invariably consumed by another reality – one of futility and despair that we would never move on to a truly competitive level in the World Cup, never know the surge of conviction that we had created new horizons that really could be achieved. On so many occasions I’d had reason to wonder if I was packing my bags on a road leading nowhere.

  So, yes, this was my time, England’s time. It had to be. Too many possibilities had been created, too much hard work done, for it not to be.

  Our ancestors had introduced football to the world, rightly considered it a gift of great value, but the generations that followed made the critical misunderstanding that we would always own it, always be the arbiters of what was right about it and what was wrong.

  One result, which in the next weeks had to be reshaped and swept away, was that we had barely scratched the surface of the game’s greatest tournament, and if anyone needed some perspective on this scandal of waste and arrogance it was surely provided by Uruguay, whom we would be facing at Wembley in a few hours. Perhaps not just Uruguay, though; maybe we also had to beat the worst aspects of our football nature and chief among them was that complacency which came with the misapprehension that we were in some way innately superior, that if success had been delayed for so long it was, ultimately, still inevitable.

  Four years earlier in Chile we had ‘celebrated’ our first appearance in a World Cup quarter-final with, as I have already reported, a conspicuous lack of honour and self-belief. Some of us had believed that the goalless draw against Bulgaria in a match utterly lacking in character somehow represented a significant milestone on the way to redemption. Uruguay, with a fraction of our population, had by then been champions of the world twice.

  Now, my team-mates and I could tell ourselves we would never have a better chance of taking the title before our own people in our national stadium; this was something for me to reflect upon at some depth over my morning coffee. At the heart of it there was more than anything a nagging feeling that a large debt had to be discharged.

  We had, finally, the chance to deliver to the vast but long-frustrated following of English football something they could treasure, something which had long been the property of their counterparts in Uruguay, Italy, West Germany and Brazil. And if we couldn’t do it, if we couldn’t take this chance so generously proffered by the football gods, well, we would have the rest of our lives to ask how it was we failed our people and ourselves.

  It meant that if the breakfast room was still to be filled by the chirruping of Alan Ball, the clatter of Nobby’s cutlery or some debate launched boisterously by my brother Jack, I did not lack for companions.

  They jostled in from my past. There were the schoolteachers who helped me along the way, Jimmy Murphy inviting me to have a sherry as he talked – sometimes it threatened to be endlessly – about football in his little office at Old Trafford.

  There was my other mentor, Tanner, still exhorting me to do well, still demanding to know the Saturday afternoon results even as his life slipped away in that dimly lit bedroom.

  There was the large cast of relatives, led by my mother Cissie, with my father Robert, quiet but I liked to think proud at her shoulder. And there were all the uncles, the football ones who gave me first understanding of the challenges that I would have to conquer if I made it as a professional. I thought of the days visiting with one of them at Chesterfield and the insights that accumulated so quickly, not least a sense of the tension that was so palpable around the fight for first-team places, which when relieved by the sight of their names on the team-sheet reminded me, at least a little, of the heady mood of the lads bursting out of the colliery lift at the end of their shift.

  There were the other uncles, too; the ones who gave me so many glimpses of lives that had to be waged beyond the football field. The most colourful of them, without doubt, was Uncle Buck. He didn’t follow his brothers into football but that didn’t prevent his achieving his own degree of stardom. He was a poacher who enjoyed legendary status along the river banks and some said, though it was never confirmed to me with any certainty, that there were times when he used dynamite. That was enough to provide me with an extraordinary image: a river exploding with an array of beautiful salmon.

  On my father’s side I had the uncles Tommy and Dave. Tommy was gentle and extremely kind. He took me to a shop to buy me my first football boots, Playfair Pigskins, and as I pulled them on to my feet so eagerly I thought, ‘This must be the best day of my life.’

  Dave had a little boat which he moored on the Wansbeck River, where he ran out fishing lines and one day he ran aground, much to the consternation of Tommy, who was dressed in his best clothes, including the baggy pants that were in fashion then, and was supposed to be on his way to a wedding. He had got into the boat with grave misgivings after we had met Dave in the street.

  Tommy had been right to be apprehensive when Dave told him that we would just have a small outing on the river. He made a bedraggled sight on the river bank after Dave had started to carry him through the water on his shoulders, then promptly discarded him when I shouted that the boat had shifted and was in danger of floating away. Dave and Tommy were just two of the characters who came teeming into my memory as I thought of who I was and all
those who had helped me along to this day which would do so much to shape the rest of my life, one way or the other.

  I thought of three lads in a boat – and another one who was still, eight years after his death, the one I always came to when I thought of who had inspired me most vividly and explained what you could do on a football field if you were blessed with great talent – and determination.

  I thought of Duncan Edwards. Big, incomparable Dunc. I thought of him hauling that bed he had picked out in the national service army billet we shared in Shropshire after deciding the one I had been allocated was simply not good enough. Big Dunc, who I couldn’t help believing with every fibre would have made a mighty contribution to this day. He would, I speculated, have been around the peak of his physical development and experience. He would have carried so much into England’s most promising campaign to win the World Cup.

  Inevitably, I suppose, my thoughts on this summer morning turned again to Munich, reminding me once more of what a crazy, hard and cruel world it could be. How sometimes it was near impossible to fathom or accept; but, then, what was the alternative to making the best of what was left, pressing on to the point where, if you were strong enough, and lucky enough, you might have a day like this filled with the greatest opportunity? There wasn’t a serious option, of course. You accepted the worst of it, however painful and bewildering, and fought to make the best of the rest.

  In this I knew there could be no better example, no brighter light, than the shining legacy of Big Dunc.

  It was an inspiration that had served me so well, helping to lift me away from those first days when I struggled so hard and so painfully to know how I should react to what had happened in Munich. Then it was so overwhelming, so oppressively on top of you, squeezing the breath out of you, creating a horror so surreal you could never have imagined it waited in ambush. Not any of it, and certainly not the sight of my great friends and team-mates laid out in a neat row where they had been carried from the burning wreckage. Or the great man of football Matt Busby, bloodstained and terribly pale and me putting my jacket around his shoulders before I was guided into the back of a pick-up truck which was partly filled with coal and being driven to the hospital, with just a small graze on my head, and then passing out when a doctor gave me an injection. And then waking up in the ward and asking a German patient in the next bed who spoke a little English to read from the newspaper he held before him the names of those who had lived and those who had died.

  I was back in England when the news came in that Duncan, whose strength in his fight for life against such heavy odds had staggered the German doctors, had lost his battle two weeks after the crash. My mother told me and it was as though all the lights in the house had been turned off and I would never see the sun again. I went to see a doctor and he talked about what would, I suppose, be described today as grief management but it is a phrase that I still find difficult to understand. You do not manage grief because in my opinion there is no way you can do that. It comes over you in waves and you just have to hope that there is a day when it no longer engulfs every moment of your existence. Old friends came to the house. Young lads brought their footballs and on occasion I went out into Beatrice Street for a kick-around. And all the time I wondered if the game would ever have again its old and joyful meaning.

  There were so many to grieve over but at the heart of it there was always Duncan. When my mother gave me the news of his death I knew straightaway I would spend every day of the rest of my life honouring him, and that dedication was never as concentrated or as strong as it was at the dawn of this World Cup.

  I could see him lugging on his shoulders that great bed across the barracks dormitory. And I could feel again the emptiness that came when he took his regular leave for first-team duty with United and sometimes, when I saw a plane in the Shropshire sky, I would say to myself, ‘Maybe that’s Dunc and the boys’, and I longed to be with them.

  Once I went back with him to his home in Dudley in Worcestershire and as we went through the front door his mother said, ‘Duncan, I’ve just attacked someone who came in here to do some burgling.’ She had whacked the fellow and while she had none of the power of her son she obviously had more than enough of his will. I realised now that Duncan had got so much of it from his formidable mother.

  She had a chart on the wall which listed all of Duncan’s games, his movements of the past and future, and the details were prodigious. Once, with army games, too, he had played 100 games in a season.

  I have been back to Dudley many times to speak of their hero and mine, and sometimes when I’m told he was one of the greatest players I think to myself, I suppose almost jealously, yes, but do you realise quite how good he was, do you have any idea of how great he would have become?

  That feeling came back to me so strongly on that day in July 1966. England would have so much strength at its disposal in the next three weeks. We had the security provided by Gordon Banks in goal. We had the superb leadership of Bobby Moore. We had the calm but also fierce defence of Cohen and Wilson and Jack Charlton and the radar-tactical perception and tackling of Nobby, the insatiable appetite of Alan Ball. Jimmy Greaves, arguably the most acute finisher in the history of English football, still believed it was his time. Martin Peters had brought the promise of new and brilliantly innovative talent. Roger Hunt and Geoff Hurst had made it clear that they were prepared to run for ever.

  Unfortunately, though, we didn’t have Duncan Edwards, which, as I ran back once more through all the great players I had seen, and played with and against, I had to conclude was a loss which could scarcely be measured. He would have given us so much going in against the knowing, obdurate defenders of Uruguay. He was, I kept coming back to it, the best player I ever saw.

  Today, it is still astonishing when I bring back into focus the profile of his brief, meteoric career. He was sixteen when he played in the First Division for the first time in April 1953, against Cardiff City, the youngest in history. Less than two years later he was an England player and there is a picture of him taken in training before the game against Scotland which astounds me in what it says about the confidence he carried on to the international stage. Astounding, at least for someone like me, who, three years later when Duncan had been lost in Munich, joined the great names of the English game with such trepidation. Duncan is portrayed laughing in the company of Tom Finney and Billy Wright. It is not the picture of two legends and a boy. It is of three men going about their business, relaxed and utterly sure of themselves.

  Duncan was twenty-one when he died. Now, in 1966, he would have been twenty-nine and running the show, at least that part which came after Alf sent us on to the field. He really was a beast of a player. Beast; yes, that is the word that always came into my mind when I saw him play. From fifty, sixty, even seventy yards, he could send the ball wherever he wanted it to go, right foot, left foot. One pass might go like a perfectly thrown lance, direct and to the inch of his target. Another might curl beyond a defender and into the path of a team-mate who had made himself space. He was huge in defence and always creative and strong in midfield but in my book he was always a striker, always filled with the power and the skill to destroy a defence.

  Thousands of British servicemen saw perhaps the ultimate evidence of this in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in May 1956, when England beat the reigning world champions West Germany 3-1. Still only twenty years of age, the scale of Duncan’s performance was quite breathtaking. At the end the army lads ran down to the field to touch their hero, to celebrate one of the most thrilling performances, no one needed to tell them, that they would ever see.

  Duncan was England that day. He was their power, their drive, their ability to take apart piece by piece the team which had shocked the world with their ambush of the sublime Hungarians in the World Cup in Switzerland two years earlier. Fritz Walter, who had led the Germans so forcefully to that triumph, scored a late goal but it had been made as inconsequential as all else the Germans did after Dun
can struck twenty minutes into the game.

  He collected the ball on the edge of his own penalty area and beat five Germans before driving the ball home from thirty yards. It was the kind of intervention which destroys the will of opponents and by then it had become an integral part of Duncan’s modus operandi. He made anything seem possible and when I thought of the degree of command he showed in the stadium where the great black American sprinter Jesse Owens once spread-eagled Hitler’s master race theories, I also recalled with a smile the change of strategy Duncan once imposed on the normally uncompromising Jimmy Murphy.

  Apart from his stunning feats in the senior game, Duncan had three times led United to winning campaigns in the FA Youth Cup. Before the end of that extraordinary run, Jimmy became concerned that the rest of the team were becoming overly dependent on their masterful captain. This led him to a decision which amazed the team before a tie against an impressive collection of young Chelsea players at Stamford Bridge.

  Said Jimmy, ‘I think it would be good if on this occasion when you have the ball you look for some other option than simply passing the ball to Duncan.’ At half-time we were trailing by a goal and Jimmy said, a little sheepishly, ‘Remember what I said about finding other options, well, forget it. Give the bloody ball to Duncan.’ So we did – and we won.

  I always felt safe when Duncan was around, on and off the field, and on this morning when I had such optimism about England’s chances I also thought how much less of a challenge we would be facing if he had been spared to lead us.

  In the years that followed I learned that conviction went much wider than I imagined. I have been involved in many ceremonials dedicated to honouring Duncan, including opening a museum in his name in his home town and placing a blue plaque outside his old digs around the corner from Old Trafford, in Stretford. I have seen statues unveiled and his name evoked countless times when the talk has been of supreme football achievement, but perhaps it was the intensity of the feeling triggered by his absence in 1966 which touched me most.