That was the detail of the moments which made us believe we had reached the final, a conclusion which in the strangest, and as it turned out most illusory, way the Portuguese seemed be confirming when Augusto raced up to me before the restart and offered me his hand in congratulation. Slightly stunned, I accepted it.
When Eusébio scored his penalty almost immediately after, and the Portuguese made their last and threatening push, Augusto’s gesture became a suddenly faded, even ancient memory. But in the next few days it came back to me so strongly, and said so much about the good feelings that can build between opponents who bring a certain mutual respect to the most demanding situations, that I sought out a jeweller’s shop and bought some gold cufflinks. I planned to present them to José at a banquet to be attended by the players of the top four teams but in the last hours before the final I regrettably mislaid them. Later, I reflected that what we shared on the field would surely be as enduring as any small piece of gold.
Alf set a mood of quite measured celebration when we came back to the hotel after the semi-final victory. He said that we had reason to congratulate ourselves – but not too extravagantly. By then I had called home and got a strong sense of the enthusiasm – and the expectation – that was building around the country. This was confirmed for me by the fact that after Norma had said, ‘Well done, Bobby, you couldn’t have done better’, my mother-in-law came to the phone and added a few words of praise. Norma said that there had been great excitement in front of the black and white television. I said how much I would have liked it if she had been in the stadium but, as she pointed out, she had our daughters to care for and a home to keep. She was already, she assured me, making her plans for the London weekend.
In the hotel bar Alf wore a broad smile and said that, most certainly, we deserved a celebratory drink but at no cost to anyone’s understanding that the hardest work, and pressure, was still to come. There would be no repeat, he insisted, of the ‘tiring emotionalism’ that developed in the bar after the Argentina game. Nobby remembered this command, and the way Alf dressed it, very precisely because he had assumed, glumly, that he would be sipping a fruit juice while his team-mates once again did a little serious drinking after such an important victory.
This was because, in that last desperate phase, Gordon Banks had attempted to punch away a Portuguese cross while only succeeding in landing his fist on Nobby’s ear. When the team doctor examined the damage in the dressing room he decided that he needed to give Nobby an injection against the risk that he develop a cauliflower ear. ‘This means,’ said Alan Bass, ‘you can’t touch a drink for twenty-four hours. If you do, the injection will not work.’
Thus, Nobby’s precise recall of Alf’s announcement is, by his own admission, that of a man suddenly released from a sharp pang of envy for team-mates whom he expected to be allowed to do something he had been denied.
‘Alf said,’ reported Nobby, ‘ “Gentlemen, congratulations on a fine performance and on making the final. You have done well for yourselves, for me and, most important of all, for your country. But tonight I want you to have just two pints. After the Argentina game you were, well, how can I put it, rat-arsed. But not tonight, gentlemen, you have a World Cup to win on Saturday. When you do it, I will make sure you are then, and for quite some time, permanently pissed.” ’
It was maybe a speech unlikely to be encountered on the pages of Shakespeare; it was not Henry V before Agincourt, but the effect was impressive enough. Alf’s words brought a rousing cheer in the bar.
The feeling of wellbeing was only strengthened by the reaction of a previously sceptical world press. Most agreed it was the showpiece game of the tournament, an exhibition of strong, flowing football played in a superb spirit.
The applause could even be heard on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Russian news agency Tass was so lyrical it might have been discussing the latest policy statement by the Supreme Soviet. They declared, ‘England gave their finest showing in the championship. The match came like a spring of clear water breaking through the wave of dirty football which has flooded recent games.’
Maybe the most heart-warming sentiments came from Lisbon and the newspaper A Voz, which asked the Portuguese team, ‘Why tears, boys, unless they are out of emotion? You carried out your mission bravely, and we are proud of you in this defeat as we are proud of you in your triumphs.’
My own performance provoked a considerable response, some of it rather more fanciful than the message from a wine-importing company saying they were sending me a case of the best port. A Stockholm newspaper speculated that my goals might just earn me a place in the House of Lords, if not a statue to replace the one of Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square. However, a Czech sports paper stayed much nearer the ground and, it is not falsely modest to say it, a little nearer to one of the most important reasons for a successful campaign. Commenting on the resistance of the defence to that late surge of Portuguese aggression it said, ‘The English backs are almost indestructible.’
That was hardly an overstatement. When Eusébio drove home that briefly destabilising penalty it was the first goal we had conceded in the tournament and in our previous seven matches, which is still a record unlikely to be threatened at any time soon.
In Fleet Street, though, much more attention was being paid to the ever-intensifying speculation concerning the fate of Jimmy Greaves. Would he be brought back for the final, would his ghostly scoring touch be Alf’s last tactical stroke, another, maybe surreal dimension to the work that had disposed of Argentina and Portugal? In truth, within the team, and certainly in my mind, it had become a phantom debate.
It meant that in the burst of cheering in the Hendon Hall bar Jimmy was, inevitably, one of the least voluble contributors. In truth he had moved deeply into the margins of the drama.
Clearly, it was now about the energy and force and constant relevance of Roger Hunt and Geoff Hurst up in the trenches. It was about the endless combativeness and sharpness of Alan Ball and the seamless versatility of Martin Peters. In my view, and more importantly in Alf’s, they had become indispensable in our ambition.
Indeed, if there was a single element in those cheers it was the sound of conviction, of a belief that there was no sliver of doubt about the identity and the purpose of those men who in four days would stride out for the final of the World Cup.
If Hurst and Hunt and Peters and Ball had made unanswerable claims for themselves, so too had Gordon Banks, who was already being nominated as the natural successor to the world’s best goalkeeper, Lev Yashin. George Cohen and Ray Wilson had grown ever stronger as the tournament wore on. Bobby Moore and my brother Jack had formed, in their sharply different ways, a superb fulcrum at the heart of defence. Nobby had justified, magnificently, Alf’s willingness to go to the brink on his behalf.
Me? Well, I had scored some important goals and it was said I had just enjoyed my best performance in seventy-three appearances for England. Maybe I wouldn’t be called to the Lords, or see my statue rising in place of Horatio Nelson’s, but now I would have football’s biggest stage to express all that I considered the best of my game.
Or so I thought.
16. A Date with Franz
AS I WENT up the Wembley tunnel and heard the roar of the crowd and walked out beneath the racing clouds to meet the Queen and play the most important football match of my life, I had reason to see in a new light the leadership of Alf Ramsey.
I also had cause to re-examine the depth of my understanding and acceptance of his most fundamental principles. The starting point was that, while it was all very well admiring a man for the strength of his decisions, the fearless independence of his thinking, how much easier this is when you are not touched personally by the unexpected weight of them.
When a hard word is going into someone else’s ear, when it is not you being pushed into a corner and told you have to do something quite specific and utterly vital and measurable in a way you had never been asked to contemplate before,
or considered part of your nature, it is one matter. But then, when it is you having to stare at the biggest challenge you have ever faced, and with consequences that might well colour the rest of your life, it is, I had just discovered, quite another.
So, yes, though I had felt some compassion for the broken hopes of team-mates and friends like Jimmy Armfield and Jimmy Greaves, it was also true I had come to accept implicitly the judgement of Alf. Brick by brick, he had built his team and even when criticism of his style and his most basic beliefs about the game was at its highest, both inside and out of the squad, I would say, perhaps to Ray Wilson in the privacy of our room, ‘What on earth are these people talking about, can’t they see that in so many ways he is doing a sensational job? He is making a team, a strong team. He knows what he has to do to make us more effective and he has the courage to do it.’
My luxury, I had grasped finally, was that none of it had touched me directly, none of it had been threatening to me, still less had it invited me quite harshly to reassess every aspect of my claim to a place in his plans.
Indeed, if I am honest I have to say that if the idea of my being left out of the side, of finding myself after so long on the outside looking in, had crossed my mind it was only as some vaguely considered and unaccountable disaster. My role, I didn’t need to be told, was in many ways enviable. I played my game, I did that which I was best at. Nobby did my tackling, he minded me. Hunt and Hurst foraged for opportunities that I had been able to exploit at telling and much celebrated moments in this campaign.
This is not to say that I never heard a cross word, the occasional rebuke for something Alf thought smacked of a little self-indulgence. But nor had I been obliged to fret like young Bally about my chances of being involved in the climax to all that we were attempting to achieve. I didn’t get the shock of Martin Peters when, to everyone’s surprise except Alf’s, a string of superb performances failed to win him a place in the opening game against Uruguay.
Alf was so many things to so many people in so many different places and situations. However much you admired him, or ultimately came to love him, you could never be sure about quite what was going on behind his inscrutable gaze. It might be the forming of a dry aside – or an announcement that would wreck the dreams of a Greaves or an Armfield and so many others on the way from a winter night in Paris to a summer afternoon in north-west London.
Yet if his mood and his deepest thoughts could sometimes be elusive I was always sure we were in the most dependable hands. He would, I came to believe, always get it right in the end. And as for me, well, I didn’t have to twist or turn or question too deeply who I was, what I was doing or where I was going.
At least this was true until twenty-four hours or so before I was due to play in the World Cup final.
Alf would tell ten members of the team that their places were secure in the evening before they filed into the local cinema to watch his latest film selection, the First World War flying epic The Blue Max. But by then I knew my situation. It was one I had never faced before in all my appearances for England.
My assumption had been that I would play the game that had worked so well against Portugal, that while Hunt and Hurst ran at the defence, while Bally and Peters gave width and bite and ceaseless energy, I would use my running ability and attacking skills to a largely creative purpose. But this was before Alf sat down beside me and said that my job was to mark Franz Beckenbauer.
Without any kind of preamble, he told me, ‘Bobby, I want you to do something for me. I want you to stick on Beckenbauer for every minute, every second of the match. This boy is the only German player who can beat us. They have some other very good players but I can plan for every one of them except Beckenbauer.
‘I don’t know what he’s going to do from one minute to the next – and I don’t think he does. So I can’t lay plans for him. I don’t know when he’s suddenly going to try to get behind our defenders. It means that I have just one plan for him – and it is you. I want you to stay with him throughout the whole game, don’t go anywhere else. He is your responsibility. I know he’s young and he can run, but then you can run. You have a good engine. If you do your job he will not do any damage and I’m sure we will win the World Cup.’
I took a deep breath as a thousand thoughts swirled in my head but the most dominant one – and looking back I have to be thankful for this – was that it was no time to withdraw trust in a man who had been right so many times, one who had indeed convinced me of the value of the concept of the team always coming first. It was a principle which I recognised quickly enough had gone right to the heart of our brief conversation.
If I had not demurred when a striking talent as luminous as Jimmy Greaves had been cast aside, if I accepted that Alf had a case when he opted for the strong defence of George Cohen over the more rounded skills of the former skipper Armfield, how could I possibly challenge his decision about the best contribution I could make to the winning of the World Cup? This, of course, remained the whole point of what we had all been working on for more than three years.
So I said, after a few torturous seconds, ‘Okay, Alf, I’ll do that.’ He nodded and walked away, another decision made and accepted. I sat for a while, still stunned by the scale of the role reversal he had just imposed upon me. I didn’t do man-marking. Other people had always done that to me. But then Alf had, as usual, not shown much inclination to debate the point. He had reached a decision. Yes, maybe I had other assets, like passing and shooting, but the most relevant one now was that I could run fast and strongly and as long as was necessary.
Alf didn’t say it in so many words but the implication was plain enough. I’d had my taste of glory, now I had to do a job for the team and if this meant I might not get the opportunity to do something spectacular, well, it was simply too bad.
This wasn’t a hunt for personal glory. It was the pursuit of the most important prize in football. It was the final expression of a winning team. This was something I had to come to terms with. He had, after all, given me all of twenty-four hours.
There was also the huge responsibility. I certainly agreed with Alf that Beckenbauer was, at just twenty, the outstanding German player. He was quick and poised and had carried the precious quality of surprise. Of course Alf had most thoroughly assessed the strengths and the weaknesses of the Germans.
He had reason to respect the smooth and clever passing of Wolfgang Overath and the attacking menace of Sigge Held, Uwe Seeler and Helmut Haller. But Beckenbauer was the man with the imagination – and the killer touch. We had been very impressed by him in the 5-0 defeat of Switzerland in Germany’s opening group. He had scored twice and his play had brimmed with the sharpest of authority. He also stood out in the quarter-final defeat of Uruguay, when he scored again and had been a constant worry to the South Americans even before they had two men sent off.
For Alf it was a simple enough equation. If I could neutralise Beckenbauer with my running, if I could make myself his sole preoccupation, the calculation was that any negative effect on my own productivity would not be too significant. We had enough elsewhere in the team to get the job done. It was not what I had in mind and inevitably I had a sense that my wings had been clipped as I watched those aerial dogfights on the silver screen.
No doubt I would have been more philosophical had I known that around the time Alf was handing me my assignment an almost identical conversation was going on between Beckenbauer and the German coach Helmut Schoen.
Schoen had identified me as the greatest single threat to the German defence and, he said, it was Beckenbauer’s job to be my shadow at every stage of the game.
Some years later Franz gave a gracious and, to me, extremely flattering account of the German thinking. He said, ‘Before the match our manager Schoen and his assistant coaches decided that I should mark Bobby Charlton. They knew that if I did it would reduce my own strength for attacking but they were insistent. “It’s very important,” Schoen said, “because you’re fast
enough to stay with him, to control him.” ’
Down the years we have laughed about our irritation at being denied the positive roles to which we had been accustomed, but we have also agreed that there was compelling logic on both sides of the strategy.
That kind of understanding was not so readily available on the eve of the final, however, and there were, no doubt, other members of the cinema audience who were rather more exhilarated than me, and not least Martin and Geoff as they hoarded the confirmation that they would be playing in the final. Martin revealed later that when they returned to the room they shared they gave great cheers of celebration.
Along the corridor, Ray and I were rather more restrained. We had a cup of tea and we talked about what was in front of us, how well we would deal with the pressure and how we had come too far to let such an opportunity slip away. As we talked, I wondered how it was possible to sleep the night before such a challenge.
How did you put a brake on all the thoughts and the possibilities that teemed into your mind? In my case, I began to think through the challenge presented by Franz Beckenbauer. I remembered what torture he had inflicted on the Swiss player who had been given the job I faced in the final. But then Ray, as always, was calm and reassuring. He pointed out that I had the pace and the experience of big occasions that the Swiss player had lacked. ‘You’ll be all right, you’ll see that the moment you go out on the field. We’ll all be all right. We can get this job done.’
Whereupon, we got into our beds and slept like babies.
There had been occasions, perhaps provoked by the enduring memory of Munich, when I had wondered whether I might be in danger of placing too much importance on the outcome of a single football match, but when I woke from the good night’s rest I knew immediately that this day would not be one of them. I was extremely pleased that before it was out I would again be in the company of Norma, I looked forward very much too to seeing my daughters, but first I had to help in the winning of the World Cup. It brought the familiar edge that comes to any competitor whose ambitions and talent and character are about to be tested more intensely than ever before.
1966 Page 23