1966

by Bobby Charlton

  We would have to subdue the impact of Eusébio and in this hugely pivotal matter it was clear that Alf saw another vital role for Nobby. There was a burst of ironic laughter when my friend reacted to his manager’s matter-of-fact statement that his job was to remove the great man’s potential influence on the game. ‘For this one match or his whole career?’ Nobby asked, straight-faced. The dismay he had displayed so deeply just a few days earlier was, we were all reassured to see, already consigned to ancient history.

  There were, apart from Eusébio, new points of danger now. Portugal had a fine combative midfield, shaped majestically by their captain Mário Coluna, another football prize from their African dominions, and Jaime Graça. Along the flanks, José Augusto and António Simões could be relied upon to supply the tall and always threatening José Torres with plentiful opportunity in the air.

  Alf pointed out that there was one more certainty. Despite the shocking surprise of their bruising assault on Pelé, Portugal would not make the Argentine mistake of shunning the value of their own marvellous gifts.

  In many ways, Alf suggested, we had overcome our greatest challenge. Argentina had taken us to a strange and potentially treacherous place. But we had survived. Now we could play, to our strengths and on our own terms. It was a bit like taking a great gulp of fresh, invigorating air.

  14. Reaching for the Light

  FIRST, THOUGH, BEFORE the exhilaration of a real game against real opponents, and the adrenaline surge that would drive away all the bad feelings, there was a need to pause, to walk not just to the corner stool but back through the ropes and into the crowd. It had become an overriding imperative on the Sunday morning after victory over Argentina.

  In truth, that still felt more like an escape than a triumph, one that left me gripped by an extremely intense desire to get away from the World Cup, if only for a few hours.

  Alf had permitted us more than the usual post-match nightcap when we returned to the hotel; indeed, if not explicitly but in his demeanour, and his swift ordering of a drink for himself, he gave the clear impression that we were all in need of something extra to take away the hard edge of our mood. But then soon enough it became clear that what we had experienced, and been so bewildered and angered by, was not so easily left discarded at the bottom of a spent beer glass.

  It kept welling back into our minds and emotions and filled each stage of the rising pitch of the bar-room exchanges.

  Many attempts were made to lighten the atmosphere with that frequently rough humour of the professional footballer and in this, inevitably, Jack and Nobby and Bally were to the fore. Most of the jokes, though, had a tough, sardonic element and whatever laughter they brought was brittle. It could, I suppose, hardly have been otherwise with the anger still so raw.

  Nobby was especially emotional. He had carried into the game all the additional weight of his Jacky Simon ordeal and many years later his account of the day was no less vivid than it had been in the bar. He recalled, ‘The manager’s team talk was low-key, practical. “Don’t get involved in anything off the ball,” he said. “Walk away from everything. Just get on with the game: remember at all times what you have to do – win the World Cup for England.”

  ‘There was quite a lot to walk away from. Argentina had wonderful skill and a technically brilliant captain in Antonio Rattín but they were spoiling from the first seconds. We had to face a tide of petty needling – and spittle. The spitting never stopped. Time after time they gobbed in your face and when you went down in the tackle they were grabbing your boots and yanking your legs. You just had to keep telling yourself not to take the bait.

  ‘I remember how, after I had hit the ground and was getting up, the Argentine I had gone down with got hold of my boot, lifted it and then fell back as though I had hit him. You knew then it was going to be a very hard day and this was confirmed when Bobby Charlton got booked.

  ‘For me, of course, it was the day of all days when I couldn’t lose my head. The need for self-control had been reinforced by Alf’s assistants Harold Shepherdson and Les Cocker. Separately they got hold of me before the game – Cocker even pushed me against the dressing-room wall – and told me that I just couldn’t let Alf down.

  ‘Shepherdson said, “You’ll never know what Alf has gone through for you.” I said he shouldn’t worry, I knew what Alf had done and there was no way I would let him down now.’

  Nobby had been encouraged in the pre-match talk when Alf invited opinions on how we should deal with the clever playmaker Onega. The overwhelming reaction was that he should be man-marked and that the job should go to Nobby. My friend was particularly pleased that the ever-astute Ray Wilson led the vote on his behalf.

  Now, we all knew that Alf was right to speak of the semi-final with Portugal as a great and thrilling opportunity as much as a challenge.

  Yes, they would have those wonderful attacking players Eusébio, Coluna, Simões, Augusto and Torres but then a few months earlier in their own Lisbon citadel they had also been supposedly key figures in the Benfica team torn apart 5-1 by Nobby’s and my Manchester United.

  George Best did most of the damage that extraordinary night – and had been promptly elected to the status of the fifth Beatle by Fleet Street – but I had been pleased enough by my performance against a side that had twice been champions of Europe earlier in the decade and were still one of the most formidable forces in the game.

  I scored the final goal and left the beautiful Benfica stadium convinced that we were about to write a new and less anguished chapter in our European Cup history. Though that hope was confounded, with the most bitter irony, in Belgrade by Partizan in the semi-final, now, as I prepared for another one in the World Cup, there did not seem to be compelling reasons for self-doubt.

  Much as I respected the quality of men like Eusébio and Coluna, I also believed Alf when he said, ‘Unlike the last one, this is a game in which you can look forward to expressing all of your ability.’

  Yet, still, it was only one thing to emerge successfully from a Wembley which had been turned into a dark and potentially treacherous place and believe for some very good reasons that your return there would be bathed in a quite different light. It was quite another to reflect that there had been times that afternoon against Argentina when it had been hard not to question the very purpose of what we were doing. Those kind of musings, I found, could not be so easily dismissed.

  Had Argentina progressed, if the streets of Buenos Aires and Córdoba had filled with joyful fans, what really would there have been to celebrate? A brave stride towards the peak of world football? The perfect expression of superior skills? No, it would have been a triumph for sleaze, a ticker-tape parade celebrating nothing so much as sharp practice.

  I thought of that footballer I so admired, Alfredo Di Stéfano, and I knew what he would have thought of the performance of his former compatriots. He would have seen in it so much that he despised in the game to which he had brought great power and courage in his urge to compete.

  Such thoughts had brought me to a rare but unshakeable edginess when our hotel filled up with English and Portuguese journalists and throngs of local people drawn to the growing drama of the great tournament. No doubt it would have been the last thing I would have admitted to Alf – our conversation in the Rio bar would always linger – but perhaps most deeply I craved a Sunday in the company of my wife Norma and daughters Suzanne and Andrea – a few hours that were not dominated so completely by the need to win still another football match.

  Maybe we would have taken a walk in the Cheshire countryside around the village of Lymm where we had set up home and I once saw Bill Shankly, who was staying with Liverpool at a nearby hotel, peering over our garden hedge. I invited him in for a cup of tea and he had been charmed, this great football man who was alleged to have taken his wife Nessie to a reserve match by way of a wedding anniversary celebration, when Norma sought his opinion on the value of 4-3-3. It was only when the Liverpool team arrived at our gate
that he got up to leave. But then even someone as passionately driven as Bill Shankly could invest only so much time and thought and obsession into a single objective before the weight of it threatened to become crippling. When I think about that now, I have to recall there were some who said that in the end that was indeed a tragically sad aspect to his wonderful career. When the game was over for him, and he came to agonise on lonely walks around the walls of Liverpool’s training ground over the fact that it was by his own decision, many who knew him well had to conclude that something had gone from the core of his life.

  Another who found that his existence became so much more complicated when he stepped back into the realities he left behind for a little while when he crossed the touchline, came to our house in Lymm. It was George Best, the joyful young conqueror of Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz.

  We had played in a Uefa representative match in Cardiff and on the homeward train journey I asked him what he would do when we parted at the station in Manchester. He said he didn’t really know beyond the fact that he would find somewhere to have a drink and while away a few hours.

  Norma was away with the girls and I remembered that she had told me she would leave some scampi in the fridge for me to cook for my supper. I invited George to share it with me and was rather amazed when he accepted the invitation.

  Throughout the meal – the scampi, as I remember, wasn’t so successful – he seemed eager to know about my experience of married life, the rhythm of it, the demands and the pleasures. He also made a fuss over our new pet, a chow, and soon after that he bought a dog of his own. He also had a house built and became engaged to a Danish girl he met when we played in Copenhagen.

  It led me to speculate, rather too hopefully, that one of the most brilliant footballers I would ever know might just be finding a little secure contentment away from the great public stage that his life had become. Sadly, it never happened for any sustained period of time and the memory of that night we spent together came poignantly to mind when I travelled down to see him shortly before he died in a London clinic.

  George never got the break from the pressure that built around the image that he created so early in his life, never got the release from it that I needed, in admittedly hugely different circumstances, so keenly that Sunday morning in the England team hotel.

  Much to my relief, Ray Wilson said that not only did he understand my mood, he shared it. And though it wasn’t practical to seek the solitude and peace of his beloved moorland, or make some foray into southern hills, he did agree to come with me to the nearby South Herts Golf Club where earlier Alf had allowed us to play a round on a rest day.

  Then, we had been told by members that we should consider their pleasant surroundings a safe refuge if in the next few weeks we felt the need for one. Now was the time to take up their offer. For a little while we could retreat from the frenzy building in the hotel lobby and that increasing sense that we had become the property of much of an expectant nation.

  We sat on the clubhouse terrace and, as was often the case when we retired to our room, we didn’t say a lot. We didn’t really have to because we knew each other well enough by now, how our minds worked and our emotions played.

  As the golfers came in from their rounds, joking about winning and losing side bets, we surely had reason to reflect that if professional sport was such a hugely important part of our life, it wasn’t quite all of it. Alf might have suggested otherwise at times down the years but not at this point. Sometimes, even he allowed, the pressure had to be lifted, and that was why he had relaxed his normal vigilance in the hotel bar when we arrived back from Wembley.

  Ray and I agreed on the value of this, especially now when we were less than a week away from the end of the World Cup, and that in forty-eight hours we could, if we achieved everything we set ourselves, be just one step, one regathering of confidence and ambition, away from making it to the final which had been at the centre of our hopes and our work for more than three years.

  Around us there was the growing clamour of the nation – we would have fresh evidence of this on a shopping trip to Selfridges after training the following day – and, of course, we had to separate ourselves as best we could from this swell of mounting hopes. We had to do our jobs; we had to be good pros.

  But then, as the shoppers and the golfers and an increasing number of passers-by in the street reminded us all so strongly in those normally much less demonstrative days, it was also impossible to completely ignore the weight of support, even yearning, that had grown around our campaign.

  When I considered this, sometimes back in the hotel room when I found it hard to sleep, I went back to the weeks I spent with Norma and the girls on a Majorcan beach before returning to the final push of Lilleshall and the sweep of those final games in Scandinavia and Poland. And, inevitably, I thought of Trevor Atkinson. He had come most strongly into my mind on that first night of anti-climax against Uruguay. I hoped he understood then that it was a disappointment that my colleagues and I would fight to overcome with everything we had to offer, and that of all the factors that had been created there had not been the faintest shadow of indifference.

  Each day Trevor would appear at my side on that Spanish beach, a lean, fit figure with short-cropped hair and eager eyes. I might be napping in my deckchair, talking to Norma or helping the girls with their buckets and spades and sandcastles. He wanted to talk about every aspect of the World Cup and how important it was for so many people at home that England did well.

  In other circumstances he might have been regarded as a bore, even a pest, but I never thought of him in that way and Norma, too, seemed to understand something of what he represented – and his good intentions. He was a footballer from my part of the country, having started with Spennymoor United and then moved on to Darlington. He accepted that he had gone as far as he would ever go in the game, but that didn’t stop his imagining how it might have been playing for England in the World Cup.

  That reality was endearing enough in itself. It was also humbling, a reminder of one’s own good luck to be involved and how so many might dream of exchanging places with somebody like me.

  He always had a new question, a fresh exhortation, and long before the end of the holiday I accepted him as an extra presence, perhaps even a spokesman for the football nation I would so soon be representing. When he died many years later, I regretted that I hadn’t sought him out and let him know how much he had become part of my thinking as we moved towards the end of the campaign.

  He had, with his hopes, his enthusiasm, become almost a part of my professional conscience and so, in a way, he had taken his place beside all those extra companions of mine on the bus to the Roehampton training ground and to Wembley, all those who had helped me along my way, from Tanner and the footballing uncles, Jimmy Murphy, and, supremely still, Duncan Edwards.

  That Sunday at the golf club is maybe a faded snippet of memory now, but in it does linger strongly an old sense of time and place and that need I felt, as I’m sure so many of my team-mates did, to step for a little while away from some of those horrors – for that is the word – of the Argentina game and any hard consideration of the new challenge which came with facing Portugal.

  We did it in our different ways. Ray and I attempted to be flies on the clubhouse wall and, much less successfully, just faces in the crowd in Selfridges on Oxford Street.

  Nobby made his daily pilgrimage to mass, a ritual which gave some wry amusement to a George Cohen of Jewish heritage but not practising faith. George, on the way to the breakfast room, encountered Nobby as he walked into the street. He looked at his watch and asked where he was going. ‘I’m off to mass in Golders Green,’ said Nobby. And George said, ‘Good luck with that, Nob. It would be a little easier to find a synagogue.’

  Bobby Moore and Jimmy Greaves were like-minded companions in the off-duty hours and, when Jimmy wasn’t fretting about his dwindling chances of returning to the team, he was groaning about the ordeal of having t
o sit through still another John Wayne film.

  Bally was reanimated again. His daily phone conferences with his father were no longer laden with fears that his great chance, which had shone so brilliantly in Madrid and gave him such confidence before the opening deadlock with Uruguay, had passed for at least another four years. When Bally put down the phone he reported to Nobby, ‘Dad says I have a duty to enjoy every second from here on in. He says I have to make it something to remember for the rest of my life.’

  That indeed was the conviction shared by all of us in our different ways, Banksy and Ray in their quiet but hard Yorkshire commitment, Martin and Geoff happy in the belief they had so quickly adjusted to their new challenge, and George and Roger utterly sure about who they were and what they had to do.

  Above everything there was a sense that we had indeed moulded together at a most critical time and if this plainly worked against the hopes of Jimmy Greaves, survival against Argentina had the feel of a final statement of unity, of a settled force ready to take our final steps along the road that now wended all the way back to a wintry night in Paris.

  That, at least, was my mood of restored calm on the eve of the Portugal game. By then we knew the reward of victory: a place in the final against West Germany. We were not unhappy with the outcome of the other semi-final at Goodison Park. Much as we admired the talent of the prodigious young Franz Beckenbauer, the midfield craft of Wolfgang Overath and the leadership and predatory instincts of the captain Uwe Seeler, who had scored the decisive goal against Spain in their final group game, we had also come to watch the development of the USSR team with some growing apprehension.

  They had powered their way through the sensational turbulence of their group, winning all their games and putting down the North Koreans in their opening match with an authority which made the subsequent eruptions from that quarter all the more amazing. Italy and Chile also finished up firmly beneath the Soviet heel.