1966

by Bobby Charlton

  But, of course, it did happen – and even when it was supposedly over, when the game was won and lost and we faced our next challenge against a strong and brilliant Portugal – we could still hear them beating at our dressing-room door and someone saying, ‘Bloody hell, it’s the Argies – they want to come in.’ And my friend and room-mate Ray Wilson, with a very hard expression on his face, responding, ‘Let them.’

  Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised that the match slipped so quickly beyond the control of the German referee. There were strong rumours that the South Americans were convinced that Fifa had urged on match officials a certain tolerance of the more robust style of the European teams. The battered Pelé was said to have believed the rumour – and more firmly when he came to inspect his wounds.

  It was also true that in terms of fouls awarded, we had the higher count. However, I will always insist that if we played aggressively, and in our traditionally physical style, we never attempted to subvert the values of the game. We didn’t litter our game with sly nudges and kicks and torrents of spit. Our captain Bobby Moore, unlike Rattín, did not attempt to referee the match from the first whistle.

  After watching Argentina draw with West Germany in a goalless group game, Bobby later reflected, ‘We accepted in our guts it was going to be hard, maybe brutal.’ For Geoff Hurst, tasting his first World Cup action, there was swift justification for his captain’s foreboding. He reported, ‘At any moment, for no reason, you thought you might be attacked from behind. Twice I was kicked on the ankle, off the ball, and when I swung round there was a ring of blank faces.’ Bobby’s account would be equally horrific. He said, ‘They did tug your hair, spit at you, poke you in the eyes and kick you when the ball was miles away and no one was looking.’

  A more philosophical quote was attributed to Nobby, who was still rejoicing over his emergence from the Jacky Simon convulsion. He was reported as saying, ‘Apart from the violence, I came through with no problems.’

  My own perspective was somewhat different and perhaps best illustrated that, in my anger and frustration, I made a rare visit to a referee’s notebook. The truth – at least my truth – was that in the ten years since I had made my debut for Manchester United against Charlton Athletic I had never seen, close up, such a corruption of what I believed to be football’s true meaning.

  In my travels with my club and my country I had certainly been the victim of foul play and been obliged to wipe spit from my face. But never before had such offences arrived so quickly or so relentlessly. What I found so appalling was that this was a team so plainly capable of producing all that was best in the game. They had a wonderful rhythm on the ball and then they could explode into the most brilliant action.

  They had a clutch of players unquestionably of world class.

  Rattín, as I had seen in the Chile World Cup four years earlier and in the match against Brazil in Rio, was one notable example. He was tall and commanding and had a lovely touch and the sharpest vision as he sought to dictate the flow of the game from midfield.

  Silvio Marzolina was a defender of the highest class, strong in the tackle and silky on the ball. Ermindo Onega had subtle craft and a biting instinct. Oscar Mas gave them width and pace. With Rattín devoting himself to his superior game, and marshalling his impressive resources, rather than arguing with Kreitlein so constantly, there is no doubt we would have been stretched dangerously close to our limits. As it was, even with Rattín gone it was a great relief when Geoff Hurst settled matters with thirteen minutes to go.

  After the game, and ironically enough in view of his inflammatory use of the word ‘animals’ and his attempt to stop the swapping of shirts, Alf made strenuous efforts to prevent any more spillage of anger, especially any physical expression of it.

  When Ray suggested we should swing open the dressing-room doors and let the afternoon reach its natural conclusion, my brother Jack was clearly of the same mind and no doubt there would have been plenty of support for that approach from Nobby and Bally.

  George Cohen might also have been drawn into an affray. He later admitted that already that afternoon he had gone beyond the line he always tried to draw separating emotions and a strict professional control.

  With his usual precise recall, he reported how quickly the match had degenerated – and how, in the end, he had, against all his best instincts, found himself part of some of the worst of it.

  He said, ‘There was no question in my mind that this game against Argentina had the potential to be a classic but knowing their style, their extreme cynicism, you could only fear the worst, and especially now that the stakes had become so high with the brutal expulsion of Brazil by Portugal.

  ‘The man I had to mark, Oscar Mas, was difficult. He was quick, mobile and clever and in the early going he administered a nasty shock. He gave me the slip as he went inside and I was perturbed to see that Jack Charlton didn’t have him covered. Gordon Banks had to make a save, fortunately not a difficult one because Mas mishit his shot. It didn’t happen again but it was a sharp warning of the need for total vigilance. You couldn’t break your concentration for a second because they were playing it slow, slow, slow, and then very quickly indeed.

  ‘They were niggling from the start. They made everything difficult, arguing with the officials, stalling over free-kicks and at the heart of all the mischief was Rattín, a tall, domineering figure who spat out his disgust – frequently literally – when things didn’t go quite to his satisfaction.

  ‘The first confrontation of the slight and, to me it seemed, timid referee and the swaggering Rattín warned of the problems to come. Rattín towered threateningly over the referee and increasingly he was voicing his complaints. Rattín was a natural bully, you could see that, along with his beautiful ball control and excellent positional sense.

  ‘The catalyst for a sporting disaster was a minor dispute over a free-kick. Rattín spoke aggressively to the referee. He was stoking the fire. The game was running out of control when Rattín was sent off. He was hellishly awkward but some of his play coming out of defence was just heavenly. It was Bobby Charlton’s job to cover his breaks into midfield but Rattín was in the mood to take on the entire team.

  ‘If you went anywhere near an Argentinian there was every chance he would just fall down. Tackles were flying in – and so was the spittle. Our front men, Hunt and Hurst, were taking most of it. There were some amazing things going on up there and even in defence we were getting hit late and dangerously.

  ‘Nothing particularly nasty happened between Mas and me. The truth was that when necessary I could do a bit of the naughty stuff myself. I never wanted to be that sort of pro but sometimes circumstances force you into behaviour you wouldn’t normally even consider.

  ‘In fact, I did put the boot into one of the Argentines. It was Artime, who had been one of their more intimidating characters. I caught him hard and he almost did a cartwheel – right in front of the Royal Box.’

  George was right about the threat Rattín might have legitimately presented, and the difficulties he could have made for me, had he simply got on with his naturally accomplished game.

  Unwittingly, I was part of the ultimate flashpoint. Rattín fouled me twice in a few minutes, the second time with an absolutely undisguised trip. He was booked and I could see clearly enough he was on the point of losing all control. That happened when Kreitlein also booked his team-mate Alberto González. We later learned he was demanding, in Spanish, the presence of an interpreter and Kreitlein was dismissing his request, in German.

  It was now that my bewilderment was complete. Here was a superbly equipped team, smooth in their skills, clever in their tactics when they applied them to the business of playing football, who appeared to be caught in some collective hysteria. Where was the authority of their coach, Juan Carlos Lorenzo? I couldn’t imagine that for a second Alf would have tolerated such anarchy.

  Some apologists for the Argentine behaviour stressed the fact we had the higher f
oul count but that for me was never more than a grotesque misnomer. They were a quick, highly skilled team eminently capable of inducing mistimed tackles and no doubt we were guilty of some such mistakes. No doubt we also sought to follow the old Busby principle of letting them know we were there. However, the referee was quick enough to reach for his whistle and on this issue Rattín could have had no reasonable complaint.

  Much more significantly, there was no semblance on our part of a conspiracy to intimidate the opposition. We played in our own way but always acknowledged the laws of the game. Rattín and his men seemed to think they could run everything over the heads of the officials and once again we had seen an example of the classic disconnection between the beauty of the South American style and some of its more ruthless expression.

  Some accused the referee of being weak to the point of incompetence but to me his reading of the situation, and his reactions to the approach of the Argentines, was sound enough. If he didn’t bristle with physical authority, that was no reason for anyone to assume that he could be easily brushed aside. In the most vital matter, the question of who would have the last word on who controlled the match, there was no question that he won the argument.

  One consequence of that was that it helped us to win – and make a massive stride forward. Again, though, Alf was less than ecstatic about our performance, though he did agree that we had kept our heads well enough and if our execution was sometimes less than perfect we did show the best of intentions.

  For me, though, and I’ve no doubt some of my team-mates, there would always be the unanswered question of what might have happened if a wonderfully gifted team had borrowed a few of the instincts of their neighbours Brazil. They had already shown that they had the beating of the world champions of 1958 and 1962 and they had done it in Rio. What they hadn’t produced, though, was anything like the Brazilian faith in their own quality, their own ability to play the game not just more beautifully but more effectively than any other team on earth.

  That philosophy had foundered under the brutal treatment Brazil had received from Bulgaria and Portugal but as they took home their wounds they could at least tell themselves that they had not compromised their belief in how football should be played. By comparison, Rattín’s team left England shamelessly donning the clothes of martyrs. Rattín, I was appalled to learn, had on his return been invited to the presidential palace, where he was received as a hero who had been denied his just reward.

  That, in my opinion, would always be a travesty of the truth. Nor would I forget an apprehension, which was at its strongest before Rattín was dismissed but lingered on up to the moment I heard the final whistle. It was that at some point Rattín and his talented colleagues would find the grace to remember that they had been given a destiny to play football at the very highest level with confidence and great flair – and not to cheat, not to seek out every cheap advantage they could find, not to scavenge through one of the most important matches they would ever play like a bunch of muggers lurking in a backstreet.

  When the game was over, along with the first rush of anger and disbelief, I could only be grateful for the kind of leadership I had received with both United and England. The game plan of Argentina was an abomination which would have been thrown out of the nearest window by a disgusted Matt Busby or Alf Ramsey. In their different ways, they lived by one great article of faith. It was that you had to build a team you could trust.

  Busby, the Old Man, said the greatest joy in his career was to send out players he believed in utterly, and then sit in the stand with the assurance that he had done his work as well as he could. He once reported that he felt sorry for some of his rivals who seemed so anxious before a game, so uncertain about the outcome. Some of them, he noted, would perhaps take a shot of Scotch before a big match, but though he was partial enough to a ‘wee dram’ he never felt the need for such a recourse.

  ‘It was calming enough,’ he said, ‘to know that nothing was beyond the ability of your players and that, whatever the result, you could tell yourself that they had played to the limit of their abilities.’

  It seemed to me that the Argentine coach Lorenzo had at least half a dozen reasons to embrace such a philosophy but there was not a sniff of it as the match wore on and the accomplished, if often shameless defence of his remaining ten players seemed geared to the possibility of exploiting rules which today seem quite incredible. Had Peters and Hurst not worked the breakthrough, we would have played thirty minutes of extra-time and, if there was still deadlock, we would have tossed for the right to a place in the semi-finals.

  When Rattín left it meant that more than ever Argentina concentrated their greatest efforts on preventing us scoring. However, this did not banish all of our anxiety when they got hold of the ball. They had such talent that if one of us made a mistake, left a little unguarded space, they might yet bring the heavens crashing down on us. Sure enough, they conjured the heart-stopping prospect – with just fifteen minutes to go. Onega, whose skill and perception had given me concern from the start, sent the flying Mas away with a beautifully weighted long pass. I could hardly steal the courage to look as the winger flashed his shot just wide of Gordon Banks’s goal.

  Mostly, though, it was attrition and on occasion dangerously so. Rafael Albrecht, who had come back from his suspension for a bad foul on West Germany’s Wolfgang Weber in the group game, hit Jack dangerously from behind when he was jumping at a corner and Hurst also raised the temperature when he stopped Roberto Ferreiro with a high tackle as he ran strongly out of defence.

  When the match was over, when deliverance came, there was a sight amid all the rancour and tumult that would never lose its power to move me. It was of Jimmy Greaves embracing his squad-mates and, most significantly and graciously, Hurst the scorer and Hunt, his magnificently committed helpmate. Jimmy knew, surely, the implication of their performances. They had gone relentlessly into those Argentine trenches, they had turned and battled, held up the ball and taken the hits. They did it without a whimper of complaint and each time they emerged with the ball Jimmy must have known that his greatest hopes were receding a little further.

  He must have known he was heading for some of the most difficult days of his life. Yet whatever his private thoughts, and perhaps even a growing resentment of the ultimate judgement of Alf, they were suppressed in our moments of triumph. That was something, forged in the great crisis of a superb career, I would always respect.

  Perhaps in retrospect the most damningly acute assessment of Jimmy’s fading prospects came from Ray Wilson. My friend was among the least publicly voluble members of the squad but when he spoke most of us tended to listen and this was also true of Alf. His head would turn when Ray made a telling aside. Now his personal perspective on the Greaves–Hurst debate could hardly have been more explicit.

  He reflected that while Jimmy was no doubt a great player, a unique scoring talent, he was also ‘bloody useless in the air. The chances we were going to get at Wembley were going to be mostly in the air because the other teams were so outrageously defensive. There comes a time in that situation when you have to start hitting 50-50 balls. And that’s where Geoff was so good.

  ‘You could hit balls to him and he would hold on, or knock them down for people like Martin Peters or Bobby Charlton. The change from Jimmy to Geoff certainly suited me because it meant that if I was under pressure, with two opponents against me, I could get it to Geoff and he would keep it, putting their defence under pressure. Jimmy couldn’t do that.’

  Ray’s full-back partner George Cohen also came out of the Argentina game with redoubled respect for the efforts of the men in front – and he noted that for Alf it had been one of the most crucial aspects of our success.

  George said, ‘Alf knew we could play better but he also recognised the extraordinary and at times sickening nature of the challenge we had faced. He said he was very “gratified” by several aspects of our effort. He particularly liked the willingness of Hurst and Hunt
to keep going into the trenches where their markers were behaving so atrociously. He also recognised the difficulty we had faced in maintaining any decent tempo when the Argentines so cynically stopped the play whenever we moved into anything like a dangerous position. His mood for several days after the game was more than anything a mixture of rage and bewilderment. Rage that our players had been placed at such risk by Argentina’s methods – and bewilderment that the South Americans should so disfigure – and reduce – their own luminous talent.

  ‘That latter mystery ran most deeply in my mind – and it still does. When I think of the whole extraordinary affair one strange little incident always comes back. The memory is of Oscar Mas, the man who had given me that anxious moment at the start of the match, tapping me on the shoulder and pointing to the big scoreboard. It showed the score from the Portugal–North Korea quarter-final at Goodison Park, one that had brought a great gasp from the crowd: Portugal 0 North Korea 3.

  ‘Mas’s expression said to me, “Oh, no . . . it’s a strange game, a strange life, isn’t it?” It was indeed. Here was a potentially great Argentine team selling itself, and the game it might have graced magnificently, so desperately short and at Goodison Park, my favourite ground, a bunch of obscure North Koreans were running through one of European’s most powerful football nations. If we got through this Wembley ordeal, would the North Koreans be waiting, without fear, to spring another ambush?’

  No, George’s nightmare scenario was pushed back along with Rattín’s warring, unscrupulous troops. Eusébio’s power and skill and ambition returned the world – and its great football tournament – to its axis and those amazing shock troops had to return to their misty, mysterious land north of the 38th parallel content with the scalp of only one great football nation, Italy. Portugal would be our last obstacle on the road to the World Cup final.