The fact that I felt so concerned, and saddened, for my friend in his desperate situation might be seen as something of a contradiction, if not downright hypocrisy, following my expression of revulsion for the treatment received by Pelé. However, I did feel able to make a distinction.
Though I would never, playing in the style that I did, be able to close my eyes to the destructive force of violence in football, I could still see a difference between that which was cynical and programmed and something else which came from a certain style of playing, a physical aggression which was certainly part of Nobby’s professional make-up – and absolutely central to the role in which he made his living.
No doubt it was also true that Nobby had acquired the reputation of being an extremely combative player, someone to place along such formidable figures as Norman Hunter and Tommy Smith. The reality was that every First Division club had at least two such players. Yet, as Nobby waited so fearfully to know his fate, I could say quite emphatically that in all the games I had played alongside him I had never seen him doing anything that smacked of the vicious or the vindictive. Yes, he was willing to get his hands dirty, as he did so crucially in Madrid, but the truth of that case, as in so many others, was that he was returning a transgression in kind.
Above all his other virtues he had a superb and unshakeable competitive honesty. Indeed, I would have sworn in any courtroom that I had never seen him do anything designed to injure a fellow professional. He played a hard game and he never whined on the rare occasions an opponent got the better of him. Malice had no place in his nature.
It was an appraisal that Alf shared quite implicitly – as he proved in an exchange during that training session on the eve of the great quarter-final challenge against Argentina.
All you could hear was the sound of distant traffic when Alf walked across the Roehampton training field to Nobby and went straight to the heart of the issue in his most succinct style.
He looked Nobby in the eye and asked him, simply, ‘Did you mean it?’
Nobby replied, ‘No, Alf, I didn’t. I mistimed the tackle.’
Alf nodded and said, ‘You’re playing tomorrow.’
Had he switched on an electric current he could not have created a more stimulating impact among the players on that training field. Here, surely, was the conclusive evidence that Alf had a belief in his players that was beyond any compromise.
George Cohen, the most precise and eloquent witness to the episode, would say later, ‘Nobby said that he would never forget the day the manager of England stood shoulder to shoulder with him against the FA and their Fifa friends. Nor would any of his team-mates. Ramsey had talked so many times about the value of loyalty to the team and now he had showed us what he meant. At that moment no team in the history of football’s greatest tournament had ever been so united behind the man who led them into battle.’
For Nobby his deliverance had come on a huge and warming tide. After recounting his brief conversation with Alf, he reflected later, ‘It was an unbelievable wave of relief that swept over me when Alf said I was playing against Argentina. I was training again rather than going through the motions. And then Alf made a statement to the football world and the nation. He said that Nobby Stiles was a great young Englishman who was proud to play for his country and had done it very well.
‘He said I was not just a good player but a great player. I saw him on the television and heard him saying it. I felt tears coming to my eyes and my skin felt prickly and I thought, “Alf, thank you very much.”
‘Later I called my wife Kay, who was staying with her family in Dublin and she wished me all the best for the Argentina game. Her brother Johnny Giles and their father Dickie, a very prominent figure in Irish football, also came on the phone to tell me that I had now to just concentrate on my performance in the next match and put all the other stuff out of my mind. All that was over now and the most important thing was to play to my limits. These were surely among the most important days of my career – and my life.
‘Kay reinforced her phone message with a telegram and many years later I found it, faded and crumpled at the bottom of a drawer. It sent her love and said, “You can do it.”
‘The day after Alf had given me the all-clear, as the team bus went up Wembley Way, I felt another surge of my spirit. Alan Ball nudged me and said, “Nob, look at that banner.” It was a huge one that declared, “Nobby for Prime Minister.” Another one was less lofty. It said, “Go and get the bastards.” I felt I had been reinstated in the eyes of the nation.’
That was the wonderfully restored mood of my friend Nobby and I couldn’t have been more delighted. I’d felt at least a little of his pain and now I could see all of his love of life, and his natural optimism, flooding back.
Yet even as I rejoiced with my team-mates over Nobby’s survival there was reason enough to be reminded of football’s habit of giving to one while taking from another. This truth was now deeply etched into the pensive expression of Jimmy Greaves. His reality was that if Nobby had come back from the crisis created in the game against France, his own position had worsened seriously.
At the end of the match against France he discovered, after rolling down his socks and removing his shin-pads, that he had sustained a deep gash in his shin. The team doctor administered five stitches and with each one Jimmy had fresh doubts about his ability to stay the course. The injury would certainly cost him his place against Argentina and, coupled with his failure to score in any of the group games, plainly weakened his prospects of withstanding the challenge of Geoff Hurst.
Geoff had been very impressive in training, reinforcing the good impression he had made in his flurry of outings in the run-in to the tournament, and with Alan Ball also recalled in place of the last of the auditioning wingers, Ian Callaghan, it was clear enough that Alf had returned, and perhaps permanently, to the 4-3-3 juggernaut that had purred so impressively in Madrid.
However hard he sought to maintain his normally jaunty and self-confident front, Jimmy’s eyes said that he saw some discouraging writing on the wall and events would soon enough give substance to his sense of foreboding.
Later, Alf confirmed that Jimmy’s injury was an irrelevance to his selection decision, saying, ‘Jimmy Greaves had not shown his true form to substantiate his position in the team and would not have been selected for the Argentina match even if he had avoided injury in the French game.’ At today’s distance it seems so much clearer. Jimmy’s disastrously timed injury was for Alf, however harsh this sounds, something of a convenience. In retrospect, it seems so obvious. Alf had by then decided that Geoff Hurst was indeed his man.
Soon enough there would be another national debate about the fate of an England player but again it would be Alf, and he alone, who would conclude the argument. He had saved Nobby even, looking back you have to believe, as he decided that Jimmy’s time had come and, almost certainly, gone.
The situation left me with difficult and contradictory feelings. As I saw it, Jimmy’s failure to make any significant impact in the three group games had left Alf with a choice between two or maybe three players as we moved into the challenging terrain occupied by the front-line contenders. There was a common belief, cultivated particularly by London-based sports writers, that in the end it would be a question of Hurst or Greaves. But the reality was that Alf had also put Hunt into the equation.
According to this theory, Hurst had qualities which might reanimate the scoring genius of Greaves, the restatement of which might just ultimately be the decisive factor in our becoming world champions.
Anyone who played with Roger Hunt knew that behind all the selfless running, the endless graft, there was also a tremendous instinct for finding a weakness in the opposing defence. Jimmy had given him his own vote of confidence after the victory in Poland and Roger had only built on his reputation for strength and reliability in the first three games of the tournament.
Reviewing his career record from the distance of today, it seems
all the more odd that so many observers, from inside and out of the game, were so inclined to damn him with the faint praise that he merely owned strong legs and a willing heart.
His scoring rate for England would have been impressive without his vast accumulation of work on behalf of his team-mates, all those times his selfless running and aggressive inclinations had opened up a defence to plunder by someone like Jimmy or me. There was, of course, the most recent shining example of that in the game before Jimmy was injured, when Roger helped me so vitally to score the goal that broke Mexico.
His own scoring record was excellent. For England he scored at the rate of more than one goal every two matches (eighteen goals in thirty-four games) and in helping Liverpool to become one of the great forces in the English game he scored 245 in 404 appearances. Always he played with an abiding passion, a refusal to ever accept the possibility of defeat.
Against this impressive body of work – and the clear evidence that the particular skills of Geoff Hurst might have been made for the 4-3-3 system – it was no surprise that behind his breezy manner, his tendency to play the joker in the company of his closest companion in the squad, Bobby Moore, Jimmy became an increasingly brooding figure. When he scored four goals against Norway, he might have believed that he had put the weakening effects of hepatitis behind him, and even that his aura was fully restored.
His great problem, of course, was that he was required now to operate in a system which could hardly have been less sympathetic to the special needs of a supreme individualist who offered one specific contribution without any other guarantees. Jimmy lived by goals, they were his glory and his justification, and without them he was making no contribution to the system – Alf’s system.
If Jimmy didn’t score, as he didn’t in those three group games, he became the most vulnerable of us all. Without the lifeblood of his goals, his very existence as a contender was in peril.
This must have been so hard to accept – and I could certainly understand his pain as it became increasingly obvious to him that playing a part in the climax of this World Cup, something which perhaps more than most of us he had come to see as a defining moment in his career, was no longer an assumption he could comfortably make.
Yet there was no way anyone could dismiss, dislike or devalue Jimmy Greaves. With United I had played against him so many times and I had always thought what a great man he would be to have on your side. You would have someone you knew could conjure a goal from nowhere.
He proved that when he came on to the international scene with a facility to score goals that was simply stunning. He scored two in his first game for the England Under-23 against Bulgaria in front of his own fans at Stamford Bridge. There, it was accepted as another formality in his swift invasion of the records set by his legendary predecessor Tommy Lawton.
The inevitability of his success was broadcast again when he played his first game for England in Lima in 1959. Jimmy alone escaped criticism on that tour of Latin America which saw us beaten by Brazil, Peru and Mexico. He scored our goal in the 4-1 defeat by Peru and not for one moment of an experience which might have been so discouraging did his performance suggest he was out of place.
In the end, though, it seemed that his misfortune was that if he had so many times proved himself a decisive factor for his teams Chelsea and Spurs (and even in his short, unhappy misadventure in Italy he scored nine goals in twelve games for Milan) he was not a Ramsey man. He had a genius for scoring goals but Alf, in his ultimately stubborn way, wanted something more.
He wanted another, less sublime but more consistent contribution. He wanted someone who had the humility to understand that nothing he could do would take him beyond the system that he believed was our best chance of success. On reflection, I suppose, humility did not come so easily to someone who could make the game’s most difficult – and important – art seem so effortless.
George Cohen has admitted that from the moment Jimmy lost his place against Argentina, ostensibly because of his injury sustained against France, he found it hard to hold eye contact with his fellow Londoner. He explained that he had a strong sense that however quickly Jimmy recovered he would find that the die had been cast and he was the loser. When I consider this I do wonder if I might have been more understanding, and felt more compassion for someone whose talent I admired so much – and whose problem of alcoholism, many of his closest friends believed, was only deepened by the great crisis, and disappointment, of his professional life.
Certainly in all my subsequent meetings with Jimmy, with whom I played for England for seven years before the parting of the ways, I was saddened by the knowledge that he had sustained hurt which clearly he could never quite put aside, even in his years of great success as co-host with Ian St John of their hugely successful TV show.
Now, as I look back once more I have to return to an earlier conclusion. I repeat it here because, in all honesty, any changes or modifications would at best be merely cosmetic, if not hypocritical.
I said, ‘The truth is that when he came to decide on the fate of Jimmy Greaves, my faith in the judgement of Alf Ramsey had become virtually unconditional. I also have to confess that when I look back I feel I might have been more sensitive to the pain of a great player who had been my team-mate for so long.
‘My reserve at the time was rooted in the trust I had developed in Alf’s instincts and judgement on form and ability, and if that sounds like an easy stance to take, given my rarely interrupted run of seventy-two caps for England to that point, I can only say that under Ramsey I never believed my selection was automatic.
‘I know too that when he stood at the front of the bus on the way back from the Roehampton training ground and said, “The team for tomorrow is . . .” I never heard mumblings of disbelief or outrage. No one ever said, “Alf, can I have a word with you?” Of course, I would have been disappointed if my name had been included but I do not think I would have felt outrage or betrayal. My uppermost thought would probably have been frustration that, in the opinion of a tough but extremely analytical football man, I had failed one of the many tests he had set us all.
‘Most of all I believed that without Alf we could not have been standing so close to the ultimate prize. He had made us winners and in this process there would, inevitably, be deep personal disappointments. That Jimmy should suffer one so deeply, and carry it down the years, is a sadness that I came to understand, maybe because of my own charmed position, only when the first anger had gone from his wounds.’
What was not in doubt, as Nobby picked up his stride again and Alan Ball called his father to tell him so joyfully that he would be returning to the action, Geoff Hurst prepared for his first World Cup experience and Jimmy, nursing his gashed shin, could occasionally be heard humming his plaintive tune, ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’, was that we now faced our most demanding test.
Argentina, dangerous, superbly gifted and deeply enigmatic, had come through their group with West Germany and promised to test more than our skills and our organisation. They would stretch us to our limits, from our ability to play football all the way to our understanding of what was right and what was wrong.
13. Tango in Hell
WHEN WE BEAT Argentina, when Geoff Hurst read perfectly the intentions of Martin Peters and got in at the near post to score our goal, we knew, finally, that we could win the World Cup.
If we could get by a team that was a combination of all that was beautiful and ugly in the game, one that had marvellous skill and apparently bottomless cynicism, we could indeed go all the way. We could see it clearly now. Once we had wiped the spittle from our eyes.
My feelings of bewilderment and eventual relief over the events of that Saturday afternoon of 23 July 1966 have never left me – and never been more intense than during meetings with Antonio Rattín at football occasions in his impressive home city of Buenos Aires and across the world.
The captain of Argentina, who took so long to leave the pitch after being dis
missed by the German referee Rudolf Kreitlein in the thirty-sixth minute, made a most poignant gesture of departure as he finally allowed himself to be shepherded towards the dressing room before his final act of defiance: sitting down on the red carpet reserved for the Queen.
He reached out a hand and grasped a corner flag, then slowly released his grip. It is an image that speaks of a thousand regrets and whenever I see it played back it only increases an old confusion. How, I ask myself once more, could such a richly gifted team – one capable of outplaying Brazil in the Maracanã – make such a travesty of a quarter-final of the World Cup?
Rattín, I have discovered down the years, is a man of charm and natural friendliness. He made a political career when his football days were over and sat in his nation’s parliament. He speaks of his love and reverence for the only club he played for, his boyhood heroes Boca Juniors, who once had the young great Alfredo Di Stéfano in their ranks.
I tell him of the time Di Stéfano gave me a tour of his home town, showed me the bridge in the poor neighbourhood of his youth from where he would jump on to a passing train and then alight, often perilously, at the Boca Stadium before climbing over the barriers to see his beloved team. I tell him of my admiration for so much of Argentinian life, the style and tango rhythms of Buenos Aires, and when I do he seems not to retain a hint of animosity over the extraordinary breakdown of values that so besmirched the game’s most important tournament and triggered fifty years of enduring bitterness. It is as though, when he embraces you, he is saying that it never happened. Or, at least, that it was just a passing episode made inevitable by the pressures of the game at the highest level.
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