It would be further eroded in the French game and soon enough his fate would become an increasingly and passionately debated national issue. However, twenty-four hours before he walked out on to the pitch at Wembley and into the first phase of the great, unfolding crisis of his career, and, perhaps, his life, another story of threatened grandeur had already reached a brutal climax. It was the terrible sight of Pelé, the world’s greatest player, being kicked out of the World Cup.
The tawdry, violent story had started a week earlier when the Bulgarians targeted Pelé in a series of shocking tackles, most of them launched by Dobromir Jetchev, who was eventually booked after pushing the great man to the point of retaliation. Pelé was bruised and battered so severely he was unable to play in Brazil’s next match, a 3-1 defeat by Hungary, and he was clearly far from fully fit when he returned to Goodison Park as his nation’s last hope of survival against Eusébio’s Portugal.
There was an awful certainty that it would end badly for the great man, who I had watched invade the imagination of the world in 1958 as the eighteen-year-old sensation of the Sweden World Cup and who, less than a year later, redoubled the awe I felt for him when we faced each other before a vast crowd in the Maracanã. On that occasion, Johnny Haynes and I both hit the woodwork but it did little to make us believe that we could overcome the genius of the nineteen-year-old who performed with such poise and authority it was as though he had invented a new way of playing. He was so quick and so strong, he worked astonishing patterns in alliance with the great midfielder Didi, and always there was the sense that he would create more time and more space than anyone around him.
It was a mystique the Portuguese, a team I had come to admire not only for their talent but their decency, were allowed to kick to pieces that dreadful night on Merseyside. Pelé hobbled off the field, shaking his head, it seemed to me, with a combination of anger, frustration and sadness. The Portuguese moved on to the quarter-finals and Brazil, authors of the beautiful game, went home with their wounds and their disillusion.
Back in the Hendon Hall Hotel, I could only mourn the meaning of their departure – and fear for the future of the game I loved if a team as gifted as Portugal could so shamelessly assign their defender João Morais the job of, effectively, crippling the world’s best player. Of course, there is a line that will always be drawn between the best ideals of the game and the most cynical reaction to the highest of talent.
Before the end of the tournament some would say there were times when England crossed that line – indeed, soon enough the claim would threaten the place of my friend Nobby – but I would always believe that what we saw at Goodison Park, first from Bulgaria, then Portugal, was something more than excesses of zeal and some misjudgement. For me it was a systematic attempt to subvert the point of the game. It was anti-football prosecuted by a team possessing the shining lights of such as Eusébio and Coluna, and certainly it was impossible to imagine as I went to my bed that four years later in Mexico Pelé would once again be anointed as the probably eternal claimant to the title of the world’s best player.
Better still would be the fact that Pelé did not have a protection unit around him as he achieved the most stunning resurrection. He was accompanied by the beautiful talent of such as Gérson and Tostão and Jairzinho. That would have been greeted as a fantasy had the possibility been aired when Pelé was being helped out of Goodison Park.
I still see him on his travels around the world and it is still the same old sharp excitement when he appears in any room, usually fashionably late and quite conscious of the impact he still carries. He’s had a tumultuous life, a number of marriages, and from time to time you hear that he is still obliged to go out to earn some money as he flies from one continent to another.
Given the meaning of his career, you sometimes wonder how that could be so but then Pelé, who was playing brilliantly among the best and the hardest of his football-obsessed country when he was just fifteen, had maybe more reasons than most to believe he deserved to enjoy the fruits of his success.
He was born in poverty, he worked as a servant in a tea shop before becoming, along with Muhammad Ali, one of the great men of the twentieth century, and so today he remains a symbol of what can be achieved if you have the will, and the passion, to go alongside the highest talent. There will always be challengers for the mantle of a Pelé in a game which has found its way into every corner of the world and today there are many believers in the historic supremacy of Lionel Messi, as there were for that of Maradona after his extraordinary domination of the 1986 World Cup, but for me Pelé will always occupy the highest terrain.
Unlike my friend and hero, Duncan Edwards, Pelé was able to complete the course he had set himself. It was one on which he proved he was equal to every legitimate challenge. That the one that besieged him fifty years ago in England could not be so described was a passing sadness for me as we strived to win the World Cup. However, what he achieved for himself and, in my opinion, the rest of football four years later was, as I look back, nothing less than the brilliant cleansing of one of a few rather large blemishes left by the year of 1966.
It would, however, be wrong to suggest that I was weighed down too heavily in the wake of the Brazilian exit. Alf, of course, had been convinced they would not be a threat after seeing them labour against Argentina at the Maracanã two years earlier. He said that, Pelé and Garrincha apart, they were a team which had grown too old on the vine and was in desperate need of some judicious pruning.
Pelé plainly nursed not only his wounds but also his agreement with the Ramsey theory. Before flying home, he declared with a rare bitterness, ‘I suppose our directors put their faith in the old dictum “God is a Brazilian”, forgetting that God also helps those who help themselves.’
Alf, as always, believed that certainly there was still more we could do on our own behalf before the collision with the French.
He did not see them as a potentially deadly threat, and certainly not the kind of team which, five years before embarrassing us in Paris, had moved fluently to the semi-finals of the 1958 World Cup before encountering the emerging Pelé’s Brazil and then, thanks to the prodigious finishing touch of the tournament’s top scorer, Just Fontaine, overran the newly deposed world champions West Germany 6-3 for third place. But this new France were quick and this was something we had to consider in our preparation.
Alf said we had good stamina and it was an advantage we should attempt to further develop. There was an echo of his message at Lilleshall; we needed to bring more speed, more intensity to the training field. We also had to work on the building of our defensive wall when facing free-kicks from dangerous positions.
It was the same old Alf in the same old routine and for me this was less of an imposition than a comfort. I had the heightened encouragement of the breakthrough goal. I also had a still-strengthening faith in the judgement and leadership of the man in charge.
For at least two of my team-mates my feeling of wellbeing would very soon be a most enviable state of mind. One of them was Jimmy Greaves, fretting that his superb overall scoring rate had again tailed off in World Cup finals action. Now it stood at just one goal in six matches.
For a man who lived his football life to score goals, and had been doing it so brilliantly, so instinctively, since he scored as a seventeen-year-old making his debut for Chelsea against Tottenham at White Hart Lane, this was the most unwelcome and untimely pressure. How could it happen to a man who would finish his England career on the stunning mark of forty-four goals in fifty-seven games? It was a question that lay just below the surface as Jimmy went into the French game – and Geoff Hurst ached to get his chance.
Another issue was also about to emerge, though this is maybe a mild way of putting it. It was more in the way of a detonation. It concerned the further involvement of Nobby Stiles and, as a potentially devastating repercussion, perhaps even that of Alf.
This meant that while we would, thanks to Roger Hunt’s two goals, bru
sh past France, there was none of that inclination to celebrate that came after the defeat of Mexico. Then we talked about deliverance. Now we contemplated the threat of a major disruption – and maybe even a hint of doom.
12. Nobby’s Trial
HEAVEN KNOWS, IT was not one of Nobby’s most secure tackles and no matter how many times you played it back in your mind, or however much you loved him, it was impossible to disagree with George Cohen’s account of the incident which brought our first full-blown crisis of the World Cup.
Nobby – there was no way around it – was in trouble and that was very bad news not just for him but us all. Apart from his work on the field, he had become a barometer of the mood of the squad.
The big question was both moral and practical. It asked whether he had committed on the fine French player Jacky Simon a huge but innocent (at least relatively innocent) miscalculation or a crime just as heinous and as calculated as those that had been inflicted by Bulgaria and Portugal on the great Pelé.
What was certain in the wake of it was that Nobby, who had so quickly become such a force in the team, such a point of intensely concentrated ambition, was walking around with the face of a condemned man. Where before he breathed conviction, now he was passive, almost as though he was resigned to seeing all his hopes crash around him.
The explosive eruptions between him and my brother Jack were in abeyance. So in training were his yells and exhortations. He was as glum as his room-mate Bally fretting about his chances of a recall to the team against Argentina.
Nobby had always played on the edge, always accepted that if he was to perform his difficult trade successfully he had to live with certain risks. Now the worry was that he might just have fallen the wrong side of the line.
George, who could never be counted among the squeamish in even the most challenging of situations, was not able to offer much comfort, no more than any of his team-mates. He was quite clinical in his recall. He said he winced and uttered a blasphemy when he saw the tackle go in.
Revisiting his account is the most vivid reminder of how one split-second misreading of time and space by a player in whom Alf had come to place so much faith – and affection – might just have made us leaderless at a most pivotal stage of the long campaign.
The drama, reported to the public in shocking headlines which included ‘Stiles Horror Tackle Brings England Crisis’, would take several days to unfold and as it did so it became increasingly clear that Nobby was fighting for his World Cup place and, perhaps ultimately, his international career. It also emerged very quickly that in Alf he had an ally who was prepared to risk, both on the player’s behalf and that of the principles he had shaped for himself over the years, all that he had worked for since being appointed England manager.
George’s evidence, while scrupulously accurate and quite dispassionate, hardly challenges the belief that there was immense pressure on Alf as he made the case for the defence.
George said, ‘He was in trouble with the authorities for a foul on the Frenchman Simon which, whatever its intent, looked horrible. Earlier he was involved in a collision which left Simon’s team-mate Roby Herbin limping.
‘Nobby was playing his usual game, committed and sharp, but when he lined up Simon for a tackle while the Frenchman was waiting to control a throw-in which just seemed to hang in the air as though shot in slow motion, you had the sudden apprehension that Nobby was coming in terribly late.
‘Simon was a good, skilled player and he must have seen in the corner of his eye that Nobby was bearing down on him. A less confident player would have tried to lay off the ball more or less anywhere but Simon was more ambitious than that and he attempted to sell Nobby a dummy. Unfortunately, he didn’t sell anything. He just bought himself the tackle from hell, one that from the moment of its inception was destined to land somewhere between the Frenchman’s thyroid gland and his crotch.
‘I remember grimacing and saying to myself, “Jesus – that looked bad.” ’
Not bad enough, however, for the Peruvian referee Arturo Yamasaki to reach for the red card we all feared. More remarkable still, Yamasaki also kept the yellow one in his pocket while administering a brief lecture to Nobby. Meanwhile, Simon got to his feet groggily and played on, much to everybody’s relief, because if the referee had shown the same kind of tolerance displayed by his colleagues at Goodison Park towards the Bulgarians and the Portuguese, there was no Pelé limping away from the scene of the crime and so, as we breathed again, we could say the consequences were not so dire.
At least it was pretty easy to think so before we learned that the Fifa observer sitting in the stand had made his own decision to caution Nobby.
That was the trigger for an escalation of the problem which was confirmed the following day when Alf was called to the FA headquarters in Lancaster Gate and told that he had to jettison one of his favourite players. With that tackle, said the FA committee men, Nobby had gone beyond the pale. The FA could not countenance such behaviour – and nor should the England manager. There was no alternative: Nobby, who had brought so much passion, energy and tactical nous to the team, had to be banished.
Could it really be that the little lion of our team was about to become a sacrificial lamb, a victim of Fifa’s belief that the great tournament was on the point of being irretrievably scarred by a sub-text of violence and intimidation?
Alf had woken up the morning after the defeat of France with the idea that his major challenge still lay in the need to sharpen our overall performance. Though Roger Hunt had again produced a major contribution, with both goals in the 2-0 victory, and was pointedly excluded from any criticism, the rest of us were left in no doubt about the manager’s dissatisfaction.
‘Against France we could get away with it – but if we put in another performance like that, teams such as Argentina or Portugal are capable of creating a much different story,’ Alf said. ‘We must increase the pace of our game – starting in our next training session.’
Instead, we went through the motions under the supervision of Harold Shepherdson and Les Cocker as Alf answered the urgent summons from the FA.
Nobby, the eternal activist, had never been so distracted. Later, he gave his own detailed version of the tackle that went so grievously wrong, saying, ‘As I first recalled the build-up, we were attacking along the right with George Cohen on the ball and Simon, a very good player, tracking him. When the French goalkeeper, Marcel Arbour, gathered up the ball and threw it out to Simon, I was already on the move, watching the ball looping down and lining up my tackle.
‘George remembers it differently. He said the ball reached Simon via a throw-in and I came in so late the Frenchman just collapsed in a heap in front of the Royal Box.
‘What I have to say in my own defence was that my intention was to hit the ball – and him – just as he turned. It is not a foul if you go through the ball (before colliding with the opponent), hitting it with all the force you have and that takes you through the player. That is a hard but legal tackle and it is what I intended to do.
‘Unfortunately, for Jacky Simon and me, on this occasion he did not dwell on the ball. He moved it on first touch and I steamed into a man without the ball.’
From whatever perspective it was viewed, the conclusion had to be that Nobby was indeed at risk, especially in the atmosphere left by the assaults on Pelé.
The much respected Joe Mercer, manager of Manchester City who eight years later would take temporary charge of England, was serving on the World Cup TV panel and he told the nation that Nobby had committed a tackle so terrible it shamed all of English football. His fellow panellists Danny Blanchflower and Billy Wright both nodded in agreement.
Only Jimmy Hill, who in the past had offered that withering dismissal of England’s World Cup chances, supported Nobby in his perilous position. Yes, he said, the tackle could not be condoned but he didn’t believe it was malicious. Nor should it be forgotten that the player had fought so hard for his country.
Plainly, Alf had a huge task as he attempted both to save Nobby and retain his own authority. As he faced the array of committee men, he was told that he had a duty to England – and to the good standing of the World Cup – to discard arguably his most committed player.
Alf’s response was consistent with everything I had come to see in him and believe about him. His most constant exhortation had been for loyalty to the team, to an understanding that if we did not work for each other, did not feel for our team-mates in their most difficult situations, we were nothing more than a collection of individuals destined to fail.
This was a lofty declaration but when it mattered most to one of his players he was as good as his every word.
I would come to believe that the ones he uttered to the FA hierarchy that summer morning may well have been the most important of his reign as England manager. He said, ‘Well, gentlemen, most certainly Nobby Stiles can be thrown off the team but I must tell you I see him as a very important player for England, one who has done very well for the team since he was selected, and that if he goes, so do I. I should tell you that you will be looking for a new manager.’
Some broad outline of Alf’s defiance did leak into the newspapers but it was only some years after he had retired from football that he confirmed the detail of it, saying, ‘It was quite extraordinary. It seemed that they could not accept Stiles as an international and made it clear that they didn’t want him. I just told them that if Stiles was to be dropped they could find a new manager. And I meant it. I would have walked out there and then.’
It was hardly the distraction Alf or any of his team, and least of all Nobby, needed before the challenge looming at Wembley against Argentina – the team that most of us, deep down, feared most, and especially those of us who had seen them play with such poise and skill, and their traditional ruthlessness, against Brazil in the Maracanã two years earlier.
Nobby’s face was increasingly taut and by the time we had our Friday morning training session – the prelude to Alf’s announcement of the team – I had never seen on it such a haunted expression. It was as if his whole life had reached a crossroads. In one direction lay the chance of glory, in another only oblivion and a degree of shame, a terrible fate for the former altar boy who each morning of the World Cup would go dutifully to mass.
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