He had played a vital part in the qualifying drive for the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 and no one doubted that he would have given England so much more authority and impact in the finals. In 1966 that sense remained strong in the minds of many leading football men. Stanley Matthews, no less, had once described him as a ‘rock in a raging sea’, and many years later Terry Venables, a midfield star of Chelsea and Tottenham who would become England manager, said, ‘Had he lived it would have been Duncan not Bobby Moore leading England in 1966.’
Tommy Docherty, a future manager of Scotland who had felt the force and the scale of Duncan’s game out on the field, was most emphatic of all. He declared, ‘There is no doubt Duncan would have become the greatest player ever. Not just in British football, with United and England, but the best in the world. George Best was something special, as was Pelé and Maradona, but in my mind Duncan was better in terms of all-round ability and skill.’
Looking back, I suppose Duncan was bound to invade my thinking on the day that signalled what seemed certain to be the defining phase of my career, which had started in the shadow of his greatness – yes, greatness, because if it was unfulfilled along the peaks of club and international football, it had been established, come what may, in a way that I knew would never wither in either my mind or my heart.
There were so many people who accompanied me that day through the rituals of preparation – I took optional training on a nearby pitch because I always believed it was vital to loosen up at least a little – and in all the reverie that can come when you try truly to concentrate your mind, I should not have been surprised that Duncan’s presence would be so pervasive.
Most of all, I suppose, I reflected on the fact that fate had denied him the chance to finish his work. It was his tragedy, and English football’s terrible loss, but maybe tonight we could make a start on filling some of the place he had left so empty.
His inspiration, I prayed, might just keep us safe.
10. Staying Alive
IT WAS NOT as I hoped it would be that first night at Wembley and perhaps not as the nation had been led to expect. Still less was it a monument to the spirit and meaning of Duncan Edwards, but then the Uruguayans, as anyone might have guessed, were in no mood to usher me or anyone else towards any swift confirmation of our highest hopes
Easy rides have never been offered by South American football teams, never have and never will be, it is not in their nature, and the Uruguay we encountered had come – you could see it in their eyes even as the opening ceremonials unfolded – with a single, ruthless purpose. Plainly, they intended to delay, if not utterly wreck, the party.
Alf had been careful to play down the pressure on us before we had to make our first statement of the World Cup. Defeating Uruguay would be a good, positive start, it would enliven the hopes of the nation and calm the media, but it was not something we had to pursue at all costs. It was important to go forward with a degree of caution.
We also had to remember that his first selection was not an indicator of anything more than his instinct for what might work best against the inevitably, and classically, loaded Uruguayan defence.
Because it was so obvious they would retreat en masse behind the ball, Alf had decided to invest in the width of attack offered by a traditional winger, John Connelly, rather than the tactical inventions of Martin Peters. And if chances were going to be sparse, and had to be seized upon hungrily and with maximum efficiency, Jimmy Greaves had shown enough of his old sharpness to keep his place at the expense of Geoff Hurst.
As always, Alf had announced the team on the eve of the game. He always said it was crucial that a player had plenty of time to compose himself before any challenge, and certainly that of greeting the start of a home World Cup. He stressed that the work had been done, nothing had been left unattended. He was pleased with our preparation, our response to all that he had asked.
Now we just had to play, with discipline and an understanding that we would have an extremely long time to regret any failure.
For me it was another instance of Alf striking the right note between gung-ho optimism and any excess of self-doubt. Certainly I felt that along with my team-mates I had been brought to a proper understanding of what was in front of me, and what I was expected to deliver. It was, I suppose, a final underpinning of the trust that had been built, brick by brick, down the years.
Indeed, by now I had reached the point where I saw in Alf all the most important qualities which had been lacking in the leadership of England since the Football Association had deigned to accept an invitation to compete in the World Cup of Brazil in 1950, by which time it had grown from the first tournament hosted by Uruguay twenty years earlier into the competitive pinnacle of the world’s most popular game.
Alf knew the game so deeply, understood the demands it made on all the different personalities who often had in common only the degree of their talent and the insecurities placed upon it by the pressure of the highest level of competition. Alf could relate to the fears of a player because he had known them so well. They had kept him awake in the night, brought beads of sweat to his brow. This didn’t make him anyone’s idea of a favourite uncle – he wasn’t made like that – but you always knew there wasn’t anything you feared as a footballer that was unknown to him.
His understanding was a huge asset for us all and, again, I mean no disrespect to the knowledge and intelligence of Walter Winterbottom, something that had been so plainly missing in Chile four years earlier, when always you searched vainly for a breath of the unity that was now so implicit in all we carried towards the game with Uruguay.
I felt this most strongly when, after my workout and writing a few letters back in my room and then a brief stroll among well-wishers in the Hendon streets, I joined my team-mates for my favourite light meal of poached eggs at 4.30 p.m., a time ordained by the team doctor Alan Bass as it permitted optimum digestion in the three hours before the Wembley kick-off.
On the bus to the stadium there was, as usual on the approach of the most important matches, rather more reflection than talk but the tension grew swiftly enough when we reached the stadium, saw the banners and the expectant faces, and filed into the dressing room. It was then that my pal Ray Wilson and I put in place a ritual that would serve for the rest of the tournament and, when I think about it, was in some ways quite as bizarre as anything contrived by George Cohen.
As room-mates we piled all our gear in the same bag, which Ray would always carry to the dressing room. Twenty minutes before the start, after my rubdown, Ray handed me my boots, one at a time. He then passed me an ammonia inhaler, a sniff of which I liked to think had the effect of clearing my head. It had to be the same one with the top broken and I was obliged to use it just once. Then, when the buzzer sounded, we all shook hands, and some like Nobby and Bally yelled some exhortation, before walking out into the corridor and up to the pitch.
Finally, the waiting was over. The trial runs in South America and Europe and here in the great stadium were done and evaluated and Alf had reminded us of his first stirring declaration, ‘Gentlemen, most certainly we will win the World Cup.’
We, like so much of the nation, were primed for the launch of a great adventure and, as I had when I looked out on to the day that morning at the hotel, I longed for a first confident, impressive stride, quick evidence that we had the means to move forward more positively than we had ever done before.
Unfortunately, Uruguay had their own and quite different picture of the immediate future. It was one which would go some way to explaining the extraordinary achievements of their past.
From the first kick they announced their intention to create blanket defence and no football nation on earth, except perhaps Italy through the ages, have such a vocation for draining the life and the optimism out of their opponents. For them it is not a brutal matter, an unbroken chain of destruction; it is a branch of art – a dark one no doubt – but, coupled with an ability to strike suddenly and with the
most polished skill, it had not only twice made them world champions but was also central to their belief that the possibility of a third triumph was never too far away.
They had lovely skills but their method was both cynical and brutal. It said you just had to swarm behind the ball, make your tackles, cover the dangerous ground, needle the opponent next to you in any way you could, a crack on the ankle, a judiciously aimed stream of spit, and wait out the moment when you were able to sweep through the anger and the frustration that you had built in the opposition with your version of torture by a thousand cuts.
I fancied before the end of this game that the Uruguayans, like all the South American teams I had encountered at home and abroad, were producing something they probably practised in their sleep. Indeed, before the end of this World Cup I would once again be haunted by how it was that some of the most gifted football nations, who could unfurl passages of beauty that might have graced the Bolshoi, saw systematic skulduggery not as some desperately contrived intrusion into the game but an implicit part of it. If football was a reflection of life, they seemed to be saying, it had to have all of it, the good, the bad and the downright ugly.
But then it seemed that when the game was over they also believed that, unlike in real life, the worst of the behaviour, the direst of the crimes, could easily be washed away.
Naturally enough, we were all disappointed by the goalless draw but Alf was quick to point out that if we hadn’t covered ourselves with glory, nor had we significantly weakened our chances of qualifying from the group. Uruguay were always going to be the toughest opponents at this stage of the tournament and his biggest fear, he confided, was that the attacking skill which lurked in the trenches of their defence might just produce a killing counter-attack – and a huge increase in the pressure which inevitably rested on a host nation. As it was, we had survived such a disaster – and could anticipate rather easier pickings against our other group opponents, Mexico and France.
In this sense we hadn’t dropped a point but gained one and that argument was strengthened considerably two days later when the teams considered least likely to make it to the knock-out stage from our group, France and Mexico, drew at Wembley.
We could also take some satisfaction, against the background of considerable national disillusion, that Uruguay’s deeply entrenched defence had not totally disguised the fact that some wearers of their blue shirts were players of certifiable world class. Most notably these were Julio César Cortés and Pedro Rocha, who in their next game scored the goals in the 2-1 defeat of a French team which had gone ahead with an early goal – and then paid a heavy price when the Uruguayans were obliged to abandon their tank-trap defence in search of at least two goals.
John Connelly came closest to penetrating the Uruguayan cover when his header dropped on to the crossbar. That would be a poignant memory for him because had he scored he might have profited from the extra space that in all likelihood would have been conceded in Uruguay’s need to hit back. As it was, he felt the life of his game being stifled quite relentlessly and later he spoke wistfully of his growing sense that he was playing his last game so early in the tournament.
He said, ‘We really gave their full-backs stick in that match but somehow we were not getting over the crosses. I was surprised and glad to be back in the team because I knew Alf had an admiration for Peters, who was a very good player. I’d played fairly well in my matches against Scotland, Norway and Denmark – you know when you’re going well. But Uruguay was a bad one to come back for. They were determined they weren’t going to lose.
‘I hit the bar and scraped the post. I was told later I got a bit of criticism on television, that the commentators had some laughs. It’s all right for them, they stay on. The crowd had applause for Bobby Moore, playing at the back with Jack, and I remember thinking, “He should try it up here.” Up front we were three against eight some of the time. I couldn’t believe it: in the next match against Mexico there were so many people going forward. If we’d scored against Uruguay, maybe the team would have stayed the same.’
Maybe it would; maybe the same piece of football history would have been written in another way with a slightly different cast of characters.
Certainly John Connelly was a fine player and a good colleague and when he died in 2012, the third member of the squad to leave us after Bobby Moore and Alan Ball, it was no less wrenching because he hadn’t played a more prolonged part in the tournament.
I liked his honesty, his straight manner which came so clearly from his roots in South Lancashire, and that was as evident on the field as off it. And, of course, he was right to reflect on what might have happened had he launched England’s World Cup campaign with a goal prised out of the steel jaws of Uruguay’s defence.
None of us, after all, had been encouraged to believe that we were immovable parts of the grand plan. Bobby Moore had his brief convulsion of concern in Scandinavia when his name was missing from the team-sheet. Martin Peters, who had taken his chances so superbly in the last strides of the build-up, and played so well in the final friendly in Poland, no doubt must have secretly felt that he had done enough to make the opening game. Similarly, Geoff Hurst might have believed that his hard running, his swift understanding of Alf’s priorities, had earned him the chance to set the ball rolling. For myself, I couldn’t count the times over the years when Alf had given me a chiding word, a frown of reproach for mistakes I had made, especially on the defensive side of the game.
So, yes, there was a fine line we all had to walk and none of us could make any presumptions about our status until the team for our last game of the tournament was picked. When I think of this reality, I have also to say once more that it was one of Alf’s achievements that he installed this fundamental understanding so surely. He never said that if a John Connelly was overlooked in favour of someone like Martin Peters, it made him a lesser player or someone who had failed a crucial test. No, every situation threw up new demands, new situations, and if you had made it into his final squad, if you were there to be called into action at any stage, well, you had proved yourself a footballer worthy of high regard. Most certainly, you had won his confidence.
John Connelly also had the warm regard of all his squad-mates when, three years before he died and forty-three years after he played against Uruguay, and came so close to making a breakthrough against the most defiant and technically accomplished defenders, he went to Downing Street to receive his World Cup winner’s medal from the prime minister Gordon Brown.
This was the result of pressure on the world authority, Fifa, that such medals should be awarded not just to the winners of the final but all those who had contributed on the field.
Those of us who had already been recognised in the honours system felt the same pleasure in the year of the millennium when Alan Ball, George Cohen, Roger Hunt, Nobby Stiles and Ray Wilson arrived at Buckingham Palace on a spring morning to be presented with the MBE by the Queen. We also applauded George’s adherence to protocol when the Queen, while handing him his medal, said, ‘It’s been a long time.’ He later reported that the response he suppressed was, ‘Yes, Ma’am, and quite a lot has happened.’
What he had in mind, no doubt, was that he had three times been required to fight cancer with great courage and, along the way, rebuild a business that he had gone into when his playing career was cut short with savage abruptness two years after the World Cup. He had also had to sell a beautiful house in Kent and fund a pension plan with the sale of his World Cup medal. He had to deal with the tragedies of losing his mother when she was run down in a Fulham street by a juggernaut truck and his brother in a violent incident at the night club he owned, a tragedy over which George fought a long and frustrating battle for legal redress.
Yet in all my many and always warm meetings with George since 1966 I never once saw him with his head down or his shoulders slumped. Always he had, along with his wry sense of humour, the demeanour of a man determined not to let the worst of fate
get the better of him.
That was the kind of attitude which, to my mind, typified the spirit of the team. I also recognised it in John Connelly, when I travelled to see him in Burnley, where he enjoyed the best part of his club career and then returned as the amiable proprietor of a fish and chip restaurant. He never moaned about his World Cup fate, never dwelled for more than a fleeting moment on the personal glory that was lost when he so narrowly failed to beat the Uruguayan goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz.
He said, ‘What really have I got to complain about? I had a good career in football and I have plenty of reasons to feel proud. How many lads out there would have been pleased to have had a few of my experiences?’
The briefest glance back at John Connelly’s career provides an emphatic answer to that question. He played twenty games for England, scored seven goals, and right up to that last game against Uruguay, one that could not have been designed less favourably to the needs of an orthodox winger, he played as if all might still be before him. Along with the World Cup medal he received at Downing Street, he won championship medals with Burnley and Manchester United.
As it happened he was England’s first casualty of the World Cup but it was not a status to weigh down a man who played his football, and lived his life, with everything he had.
Certainly he wasn’t alone in his disappointment as we travelled back to Hendon Hall bracing ourselves against an inevitable tide of criticism. In the morning the papers were apparently filled with extreme scepticism over our prospects, making the flamenco snap and high praise of Madrid a forlorn and distant memory. I say apparently because Alf was adamant that no one should so much as glance at a newspaper at breakfast, let alone digest the considered opinions of such as Desmond Hackett in the Express, Frank McGhee in the Mirror, or even the toastmaster of Madrid, Geoffrey Green of The Times.
1966 Page 16