As Bonetti fumbled Beckenbauer’s weak strike that Sunday evening, senior Tories were meeting and appointing Willie Whitelaw as the man to carry the box containing the asp to Ted Heath. On the Labour side, according to Crossman’s diary, the expectation of victory disappeared within an hour of the first result being announced on election night. It came from Guildford, where the Conservatives took the seat with a swing of more than 5 per cent. Wilson’s nightmare had become a reality. It appeared at the time to be the most surprising of election results, which probably gave the Board of Trade announcement on the Monday morning more importance than it deserved. Certainly, Peter Hennessy discounts the significance of the trade figures, preferring to concentrate on what had happened in the months leading up to June 1970:
Elections measure the flow of a stream that has been long in the changing and I think you can trace the Labour defeat in 1970 back to the unpopularity following the devaluation of October 1967 along with the cuts that followed and, of course, In Place of Strife. Harold was setting his stall out as the transformer of Britain’s economic performance and in all the areas where he did that he did badly on the terrain on which he had chosen to fight in 1964 and 1966, and I think that’s far more important than Germany stealing the 1970 quarter-final. It was an unpopular government by this time. It had lost badly in the local elections the previous year. From devaluation onwards Harold was being done over by the very factors where he claimed his supremacy lay. Ted wasn’t any good at working the public so the forty-four-seat majority was in spite of rather than because of him. It was because people were disillusioned with Harold. Losing to West Germany put people in a bad mood but why should they vote for Ted because they’re in a bad mood? I was in Luton on a council estate in 1970 trying to get the core Labour vote out late in the evening and it was very hard.
People continued to draw a parallel between Ramsey and Moore and the Labour party for a few more years. For manager and captain, professional glories now lay in the past. Moore was still in his twenties; Ramsey was just fifty. Both would continue to play a part in England’s football history but, like Harold Wilson and his party, they were, in the title of the infamous BBC documentary that followed their journey into the wilderness of the first year of opposition, Yesterday’s Men. Wilson would come again, briefly, but for Ramsey and Moore there was only the sad spectacle of decline in prospect.
Bobby Moore leaves the field, followed by Alf Ramsey, after England lost 3–2 to West Germany in the World Cup quarter-final, Mexico, 14 June 1970 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).
That decline came as a surprise to everyone who sympathised with the unlucky heroes as they flew back to England without the trophy they most cherished. There was a belief in the minds of Ramsey and Moore that the England team had performed so well in the match against Brazil that the scoreline was unjust and irrelevant. Similarly, the defeat by Germany was simply unfortunate and could be explained away entirely by Gordon Banks’s ill-timed illness. If the match had been played two days later England must surely have won. Drastic surgery on the England team seemed unnecessary. Such was the strength of the English First Division and the quality of the squad of players available for selection that alarm bells did not ring again until the match against West Germany in April 1972. Bobby Charlton retired from international football after Mexico but, to Malcolm Allison’s relief, Colin Bell was now ready to stake a claim for a permanent place in the England midfield. The Tottenham Hotspur forward Martin Chivers made a strong start in an England shirt, as did Derby County’s Roy McFarland, but the World Cup veterans Banks, Peters, Hurst, Moore, Lee and Ball continued to play in the England campaign for the European Championships of 1972.
Ramsey was a cautious, conservative man and he made his selections accordingly. It wasn’t just that he was loyal, arguably for too long, to the players who had served him so well in the 1960s, it was more that, as Wilson gave way to Heath, the Beatles broke up and Britain prepared to join the Common Market he found his outlook, shaped by depression, war and austerity, out of tune with the mood of the country and, more importantly, with the changing attitudes of English footballers. In most cases, managers are always a generation older than their players but the gap is not unbridgeable. The manager might affect distaste for the musical preferences of his players or their hairstyles or their choice of clothes but it is usually expressed in tolerant and good-natured banter. Indeed, when managers are too close to their players in age or wish to be ‘one of the lads’ they are usually unable to exercise the necessary measure of objectivity. Distance can lend enchantment.
Ramsey knew and liked the character of the men who had won the World Cup. They were, by and large, modest and mature at an early age, nearly all having been through the rigours of National Service. They had started their careers when the maximum wage was still in force and they felt privileged to be allowed to earn a living by playing professional football when their fathers had probably struggled to find a job at all. They might have grumbled at the poor wages but they knew that almost every young man of their age in the country would have willingly swapped places with them. They were not well treated by their clubs, but they recognised the hierarchical, class-ridden nature of English society and they knew their place in it. They loved Alf Ramsey because they knew he was loyal to them and they reciprocated that loyalty. They respected his knowledge of the game and, even when his tactics were not working, Bobby Moore would not change anything on the field until the team had specific instructions to do so from the manager. They might find Ramsey’s strangled enunciation and social gaucheness a subject for mockery but they knew who was in charge of the England set-up. Moore was the captain but Ramsey was the boss.
At the start of the 1970s some of these attitudes were changing as the idea of deference started to come under threat. A gap was opening up between parents and their children that previous generations had not known and parental authority was diminished accordingly. Schoolteachers had to work hard to elicit the respect that had previously been automatically their due. The police in the turbulent 1960s had become ‘pigs’. Wild youth were not a new phenomenon in the 1970s. The 1950s had produced cosh boys and Teddy boys; the 1960s gave us the bank holiday coastal town battles between Mods and Rockers but the majority of law-abiding people sympathised with the police. In the 1970s the troubles in Northern Ireland were played out on the streets of England in the form of bombs which killed innocent people and the authorities seemed incapable of doing anything about it. The police now seemed as helpless as the rest of the anxious population.
Wilson’s lauded white heat of technology did not produce the classless, meritocratic, modern Britain he so desired as relations between labour and management worsened. The balance of power between them swung towards the trade unions as industrial action now simply meant strikes. In the nineteenth century Britain had been known as the workshop of the world. In the second half of the twentieth century British industrial production was immobilised by the chaos which culminated in the three-day week.
Ramsey did his best to move with the times, but the sort of footballers who stole the headlines in the early 1970s were simply not his sort of men. It wasn’t just the common criticism that he distrusted flair. There have been plenty of English managers who have distrusted players who were more intent on performing party tricks for the instant gratification of the crowd than doing the hard, unselfish work that successful teams need. Ramsey felt deeply reluctant to select crowd and press favourites such as Stan Bowles, Alan Hudson, Peter Osgood, Charlie George and Rodney Marsh. When Frank Worthington, the tricky forward from Huddersfield Town, was selected to play for the England Under-23 side in the summer of 1972, he arrived at Heathrow Airport dressed in black leather trousers, a red silk shirt topped with a lime velvet jacket and walking in high-heeled cowboy boots. Peter Shilton later reported that Ramsey was palpably astonished by the player’s appearance. He turned to his trusted aide Harold Shepherdson and said, ‘Oh shit, what have I fucking done?’ The idea o
f Bobby Charlton or Roger Hunt turning up to play for England in such attire was simply inconceivable.
To the extent that so many of the 1966 World Cup winners had done their National Service, they had more in common with their parents than they did with this new generation of players who were starting to take their places at club and national level. The last National Servicemen had been called up in 1960 and many of them went to basic training reluctantly. There seemed no good reason to give up a relatively comfortable domestic life and the start of a financially rewarding career for two years of boredom, allegedly serving Queen and Country. That attitude automatically made them different from the men who were called up at the start of National Service in the late 1940s, and who understood that the preservation of a hard-won peace required their temporary inconvenience and commitment to a cause and an idea more complex than their own physical comfort. In the late 1960s there was an anxiety among the student population that Britain would be dragged into the war in Vietnam by its economic and military dependence on the United States, and the young men whose parents had gone off to war to defend their country’s security and honour now marched through the streets yelling ‘Hell, no, we won’t go!’ There was no idea big or important enough to convince them that dying in the jungles of South East Asia was to be meekly accepted as their patriotic duty. The end of deference entailed a new definition of patriotism.
For the men of 1966 the meaning of patriotism was quite clear. If your country needed you, you packed up your things and served. Alan Hudson was selected for that Under-23 tour of Eastern European countries in the summer of 1972 for which Frank Worthington arrived looking more like Jason King than Bobby Moore. However, Hudson telephoned the England manager and told him that he preferred to spend the summer at home and on the beach with his family. The England manager was incandescent with rage. Such insouciance was an insult to his country as well as being an insult to the country’s football manager. Hudson was never selected for any England side as long as Ramsey was manager. When Don Revie took over, Hudson played superbly in a 2–0 win over West Germany, took part in a 5–0 demolition of Cyprus and then, in contradiction of the strict orders of the manager, indulged in the sort of refuelling that finished off the career of Paul Gascoigne. Greaves and Moore might climb out of their bedroom windows and down the drainpipe to consume a few pints before returning by the same route but neither would have flaunted their disobedience. Greaves and Moore had the added benefit of being world-class players. Hudson was talented but not in their class. Ramsey knew that he could do very well without Alan Hudson but most of the seven players whose passports he laid out on the beds of their hotel rooms in 1964 were fundamental to his plans for winning the World Cup. They did not need more than that one warning. Ramsey knew his players, their qualities and their essential reliability.
It is understandable, then, why five of the team that won the World Cup in 1966 were still playing for England six years later. In the first leg of the European Championship quarter-final at Wembley against West Germany, Ramsey chose three creative players – Bell, Ball and Peters – in midfield, but there was no Stiles, no Mullery, no Storey. It was certainly a team full of good players but, worryingly, Bobby Moore had been chosen at centre-half with Norman Hunter playing alongside him in the role Moore usually took. Moore had started at West Ham as a centre-half but his career had only taken off when Ron Greenwood switched him to the defensive left-half position he made his own. Günter Netzer ran England ragged that night. Germany won 3–1 but it could have been six. Moore had a stinker, robbed while dribbling in his own penalty area for the first and conceding the third when he tripped Siggi Held inside the box. For the second leg in Germany, Ramsey chose Peter Storey in place of Martin Peters, pushed Hunter into midfield alongside him and played 4-4-2 instead of 4-3-3, including, surprisingly, the dilettante Rodney Marsh up front with Martin Chivers, dropping both Lee and Hurst. The goalless draw and an exit from the competition was the most England deserved.
The European Championship had not yet imprinted itself on the mind of the English football public. Defeat in a European Championship quarter-final was hardly welcome, but it wasn’t as if they had been knocked out of the World Cup and when the draw was made for the 1974 tournament, England would only have to finish ahead of Wales and Poland to go to the finals in Germany. The difficult game was away to Poland in Katowice in June 1973, but England had emerged unscathed and triumphant from many such matches over the course of the previous ten years. This time, however, there was to be no such happy ending. The Poles took an early lead when a free-kick deflected off Moore’s outstretched leg and was turned past Shilton. In the second half, Moore received the ball square from McFarland with plenty of time to clear and casually made as if to turn and pass back to Shilton, but his first touch was uncharacteristically poor and the Polish striker Lubanski caught him, robbed him of the ball, ran on and drove it past Shilton to clinch a famous victory. Ball got himself sent off and relations between the England team and the English press hit an all-time low. Ramsey tried to take the blame for the defeat himself and that loyalty to the players that made him such a popular manager was repaid a few nights later in Moscow when the England party unanimously decided to ignore the performance of The Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi to which they had been invited. It was unfortunate that it was seen as a snub to their hosts but to the players it was a way of showing solidarity as a unit. Instead of a night at the ballet they opted to seclude themselves in the British Embassy and watch the 1969 feature film version of Till Death Us Do Part.
England’s participation in the 1974 World Cup now depended entirely on defeating Poland at Wembley on 17 October 1973. It was the most important fixture since León, particularly since Netzer’s match had already been erased from public memory. Bobby Moore was left out of the starting eleven, McFarland and Hunter forming the defensive pairing and the captain’s armband being worn by Martin Peters. Moore sat on the substitute’s bench, outwardly uncomplaining and dispassionate – but inside he must have been shrouded in misery. If Ramsey wouldn’t pick him for a match of this importance, his time as captain of England must be over. England failed to win but that failure had little to do with the omission of Moore other than the fact that Poland’s goal stemmed from a mistake by Hunter on the touchline that Moore in his prime would never have made. The problem was that Moore was no longer in his prime. Still, when the match started there would have been few among those present at Wembley or the millions watching on television who would not have been confident that England would eventually go through.
The conviction that the hapless Poles had arrived as sacrificial lambs had been confirmed by Brian Clough speaking on ITV on the Saturday before the match. The former Derby County manager, who had been sacked the previous day, had told the nation in no uncertain terms that the Polish goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski was a clown. Besides, the England side was packed with goalscorers. In addition to the prolific midfield of Peters, Colin Bell and Tony Currie, Ramsey played three reliable strikers in Martin Chivers, Mick Channon and Allan Clarke, with Kevin Keegan and Derby’s Kevin Hector on the bench.
Predictably therefore from the kick-off England poured forward, shots rained down on the Poland goal but the clown was equal to all demands. A goalless first half raised some anxieties but it was still believed that it was only a matter of time before the dam was breached. Unfortunately it was Clough not Tomaszewski who turned out to be the clown. One down after an hour to a goal by Domarski after a build-up that included bad mistakes by both Hunter and Shilton, England threw caution to the wind. Channon hit the post, Currie hit the bar, Bell and Clarke had efforts cleared off the line. Peters was obstructed on the edge of the area and in the only piece of luck that England had all night, the referee pointed to the penalty spot. Allan Clarke equalised with a calm that nobody else felt. With ninety seconds left, Kevin Hector came on and made a chance for Bell which Poland yet again scrambled off the line. The whistle went and England, who had neve
r stopped attacking for the whole ninety minutes, were out. They must have created twenty decent chances. A reasonable score would have been 10–2. At the end Norman Hunter and Emlyn Hughes were in tears. Bobby Moore, who had watched helplessly from the bench, trudged sadly back to the dressing room. The next World Cup qualifying matches were three years away. He was thirty-two now and he couldn’t even get into the team for a match of crucial importance. There was one more game for him, a friendly a month later against Italy which was lost to a goal scored by Fabio Capello, giving Italy her first ever win in England, and so Bobby Moore’s international career ended.
The draw against Poland which meant England could not qualify for the finals in West Germany was, if possible, a greater blow to the national psyche than the defeat in León. When England flew back home in 1970 they could argue with some credibility that if Brazil were the best team in the world, they were not far behind. Nobody would have thought it odd if the World Cup final of 1970 had been contested by Brazil and England. In 1973, however, England’s decline was only too plain to see, and for all the excitement generated by reaching the semi-final in 1990 it could be argued that England have only ever been quarter-final material ever since.
Moore himself was not only in decline as an ageing player in the early 1970s but the teams he played for were also on the way down. West Ham had never challenged seriously for honours since winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965. They became a soft touch away from home and in 1970 they sold Martin Peters to Spurs in exchange for cash and a rapidly declining Jimmy Greaves. Just after New Year’s Day 1971, the team travelled to Blackpool for what was a tricky FA Cup third-round tie at Bloomfield Road. The weather was dreadful and it seemed more than likely that the match would not go ahead on the Saturday afternoon so on the Friday night Moore, along with Greaves, Clyde Best and Brian Dear, slipped out of the Imperial Hotel and went to the boxer Brian London’s nightclub called 007. They stayed for an hour and drank four bottles of lager, except Best who didn’t drink alcohol at all.
Four Lions Page 21