1966

by Bobby Charlton

  It flowed powerfully from the fact that we both felt that in some small but identifiable way we had in the end managed to honour the memory of the players who had been lost.

  There is so much to remember as I walk beneath the trees, sometimes in the company of my grandchildren. So much to savour again and be grateful for. So many places which will never lose their charm or their excitement, so many people who touched my life in ways that I knew would always be with me.

  But then sometimes I ask myself another question. If I could have one day back, if I could go to a football field and relive the most thrilling and satisfying time of my career, which one would it be?

  Of course, it would be 30 July 1966. I have called it the diamond of my days, and so it was. Memory burnishes it still. More than anything I cherish the fact that all those who shared with me the day and the triumph – Gordon Banks, George Cohen, Ray Wilson, Nobby Stiles, Jack Charlton, Bobby Moore, Alan Ball, Roger Hunt, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters – had the most overwhelming sense that the most wonderful opportunity had been put in our path.

  When I think about this, suddenly it might have been yesterday when I boarded the bus at the Hendon Hall Hotel in north London and saw the people in the street, the boys on a football field who stopped their game and waved to us, and then, as we passed the fire station, the men lined up to salute us in their full dress uniform.

  There wasn’t much talk on that ride to Wembley because we had gone beyond the imperatives of tactics and the need for the greatest, most secure performances of our careers. If we hadn’t grasped it before, the salute of the firemen was especially symbolic in that it told us we did indeed carry the hopes of our nation.

  So mostly we were quiet. Even the irrepressible Alan Ball was subdued; he too seemed to be running back through the days that had brought us there and reflecting on what he had to do when the issue would finally be settled.

  It was not necessary to spell out the question that faced us to a man more deeply than ever before, and in the years that followed no one was more eloquent than George Cohen when he returned us to the heart of the mood that gripped so tightly as the flags waved us towards Wembley.

  He said, ‘In some ways the spectacle in the streets, the excitement of the crowds, broke the tension that had been building inside us – but it didn’t divert any of us from the biggest question of all. Could we deliver? Could we play our part?

  ‘When the Union flags were not being waved, they hung limp in the still, heavy air and it was as if you could hear the beating of your own heart. You didn’t need telling that for the next few hours you would be occupying a patch of terrain located squarely between heaven and hell. You bloody well knew that it was no time to unravel because, as never before, hell might just be around the corner. And if you didn’t know before you set off for the stadium you knew it now.

  ‘Lying around in some archive are newsreel shots of the England players in the dressing room an hour or so before the start of the game. I looked haunted. You get the impression that you could have come up to my face and peeled it. The sound of the five-minute buzzer went through me. The one-minute sound had the same effect.’

  George says it for all of us. There was so much to catch our eyes on the road to Wembley, so many uplifting sights, as the sun flitted between the clouds. But none of them quite took you away from that conversation with yourself. However, I also have to say that no doubt was so great it undermined my belief that I shared the company of the players best able to justify and preserve the excitement and the hope we saw in the streets.

  A huge controversy had swept the country in the days before we rode to Wembley. Jimmy Greaves, one of the greatest goalscorers in the history of the game, had been omitted and that had torn at his spirit in a way which, many years later, some who knew him well said he could never quite put behind him. But if I am very honest, and state the obvious when I say I felt sympathy for the disappointment of a brilliant fellow professional, I also have to declare that I felt not a single qualm about the men with whom I would take the field that day.

  I knew in my heart then that this was indeed a team of prospective champions and that in charge of our destiny was a man who, like no other before or since, had understood so perfectly what it would take to beat the world. Alf Ramsey once gently chided my brother Jack who, in his wonder, asked him how it was he had come to be selected. The manager said that the mysteries of selection were his domain and that it was not simply a matter of which player had most talent. No, there were other factors and perhaps the most vital of them was the grasping of what it took to be truly a member of a team.

  In his often laconic and sometimes ruthless way he never tired of stressing that the lifeblood of our quest was a willingness to subvert all pride in our individual ability, all our different vanities, and put everything we had at the disposal of the men around us.

  It may have been quiet in the bus as we passed the crowds that grew so much thicker and more demonstrative as we neared the stadium, but that confident belief resided firmly in my heart. And the closer we got to the moment when we had to prove it was true, the more it carried the sound and the force of thunder.

  1. Another Side of Alf

  WHEN I FIRST saw the look on Alf’s face in the half-light of the cabin I knew straightaway that something had gone from his life and those of the players he had led for so long with such apparently unbreakable conviction.

  Looking back, I suppose what I was seeing more than anything was the unwelcome evidence that none of our certainties, however hard won, are free from the risk of ambush. Certainly that moment on the flight back from Mexico in 1970 provoked in me a broad reflection on the football life.

  If a few seconds can change a game, a career and sometimes even make you reappraise everything you attempted to do, maybe it had been too much to imagine that we could hold the unconquerable mood we took into that summer’s day in London, if not for ever, at least for another four years.

  Some said it was an overreaching confidence – especially in Alf when he made the decision to take me off that was aimed at a semi-final place still to be confirmed on the field – that did for our ambition to retain on foreign soil the World Cup title we won before our own people.

  Others decided more generously that we were caught in a set of freakish circumstances. They agreed that the arrival of such accomplished and aggressively inclined players as Francis Lee, Alan Mullery and Terry Cooper had made the class of ’70 in some ways stronger, and certainly more adventurous, than the one that graduated so triumphantly in 1966.

  Whatever the cause of our downfall, there was no doubt that when Alf came down the aisle of the plane and sat in the empty seat next to mine there was something about him I had never seen before.

  It was more than a hint of uncertainty, of self-questioning. Something very sure and strong and ultimately persuasive seemed to have ebbed away from him. It showed in the way he carried himself. For once, he didn’t look ready to fight the world on the issue of how a football team should be prepared and the values it should be given.

  Of course, I had known him under fierce pressure from time to time. Some of the sharpest of it had no doubt been created by the cussed streak in his nature. But always he had been implacable in his determination to separate in his own mind football right from wrong. If he could be unforgiving of others, those he believed had in some way let him down, he always made it clear that he was prepared to stand hard by his own actions and attitudes, however much angst and controversy they left in their wake.

  He had, most enduringly, inflamed all of Latin America when he called the Argentinians of Antonio Rattín ‘animals’ after coming on to the pitch of the old Empire Stadium, his dark eyes blazing with anger, to prevent George Cohen exchanging his shirt with Alberto González, the winger he had been marking in that notoriously cynical and desperately fought quarter-final of 1966.

  His remark put us under immense extra pressure when we attempted unsuccessfully to defend our
crown in Mexico and another England team were still feeling some of the repercussions when they returned to compete in a second World Cup there sixteen years later. Diego Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ ended that English challenge and all of Latin America seemed to believe that it was not so much a nefarious act as one of historic revenge.

  Alf was always defiant when the flak flew about his head and it was only now, with the taste of failure, that he made little attempt to conceal a mood of vulnerability. Before, he might concede a degree of pressure with a rough phrase or a rueful, brooding expression. But this, clearly, went deeper.

  In the past he could be angry, and ultimately unforgiving, over the details of a rare defeat, but it was never at the price of something that might be described as dogged resistance to any viewpoint that opposed his own.

  His stance might signal the end of an individual’s international career but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be put right for the team by a new player or a new tactic.

  The seed of Jimmy Armfield’s failure to withstand George Cohen’s challenge for his right-back position in the 1966 team lay in a mistake he made in one of Ramsey’s first games as manager three years earlier. It was a reckless pass which led to the conceding of a goal, and it didn’t help that the beneficiaries were Scotland and their brilliant, swaggering star Jim Baxter.

  Armfield, of Blackpool, was a finely skilled, adventurous full-back, and would remain a wonderfully supportive member of the squad, but he could never quite repair the damage of that one critical error. It lingered too powerfully in Ramsey’s mind, spoke to him a warning about an approach to the game which would always make him uneasy.

  Ron Springett, the experienced and talented Sheffield Wednesday goalkeeper, made the same crippling mistake of an unconvincing early performance, conceding five goals in one of his poorest displays at the highest level. The manner in which he conceded each goal was an irreparable hammer blow to his international future.

  When Alf spoke to his players – or maybe a sceptical sports writer posing potentially inflammatory questions – in his peculiarly clipped tone of voice, it was not an invitation to debate, it was a statement intended to be written down in stone.

  I knew this better than most because, as the senior player, I was sometimes persuaded, against all my wiser instincts, to register with him some passing complaint of the team.

  Invariably it was an exercise in futility. He gave what I had to say – which mostly concerned such relatively minor matters as pleas to wear lighter, more casual clothing on long plane journeys into hotter climates and make quicker trips to and from training grounds – the most cursory consideration, then, usually before I left the room, he said no. Each time I said to smirking team-mates, ‘Never again am I going on that fool’s errand.’

  As for the world at large, it could take him or leave him and then wait for the results out on the field.

  Now, suddenly, he was like the rest of us. He was carrying the weight of a beaten man. He had always insisted we would achieve our goals. We simply had to trust ourselves, our talent and determination, his judgement – and for the first time he had been proved wrong in international football’s most important tournament.

  We had believed strongly, or at least we had thought so, that the four years since that thunder had come to our game at Wembley was time enough to get used to the idea of being world champions.

  Time enough to control the urge to feel too happy with ourselves, to understand our ability to compete with the best in the world. And that the only way we would lose this conviction that permeated everything we did was to compromise the values we had built together down the years.

  The new problem, though, was that this state of mind, which we had come to wear like a well-cut, familiar uniform, had been ripped away in the most devastating circumstances.

  Alf’s expression seemed to me to be registering something more than sadness and regret, and the still raw disappointment of surrendering a World Cup quarter-final to West Germany – despite the fact that for much of the game we had produced football quite as biting and composed as any of that which had carried us to victory against them in the ’66 final.

  The look of him also suggested a certain resignation, a suspicion that the best of his times, and those of the players he had made into both his foot soldiers and his disciples, had passed twenty-four hours earlier on that sweltering field in the Mexican city of León.

  Even in such a painful situation, though, it was strange, even shocking, to see for the first time an element of self-reproach, which up to then had always been concealed so effectively.

  It was as though he was opening a door he had kept shut for so long.

  I come to this so early in perhaps my last account of the greatest days of my football life because the conversation I had with Alf in the dim light of that plane cabin, it struck me then and still does today, went to the heart of the relationship which had transformed my career, lifted it into a place of fulfilment and confidence I had never known before and, indeed, for some years had seemed quite beyond my hopes.

  It was a relationship which had never wavered, never prompted a flicker of serious doubt, since the moment he took charge of England on a snowy night in Paris seven years earlier.

  The essence of our talk, as far as I was concerned, was not to do with the fine line between the success we had at Wembley and the sourness of failure under the Mexican sun. That, after all, is a high wire all professional sportsmen are required to walk.

  No, it was about the force of trust, the impetus provided by good faith which comes when you know you have the best of leadership, and when that has been established there is a perspective which is always secure in the face of whatever fate might bring.

  I tried to impress on Alf when he joined me on our retreat from Mexico that for me, at least, this was still the case. I said that I knew what he had done had come from the best of intentions. It was a call of judgement, one that could be argued about endlessly, not a breaking of trust.

  Implicit in our talk, though left unstated, was that I had just played my last game for England. I would be thirty-five by the time of the next World Cup in Germany and though my great friend and rival Franz Beckenbauer once said that I had the lungs of a horse, it was clear to me that it was time to leave the international stage.

  It was surely the end of the journey that had started twelve years earlier when, still reeling from the Munich tragedy, I joined England for my debut international against Scotland at Hampden Park.

  So much of what had followed now played back in my mind as I listened, as I always did and always would, for the unbroken purr of healthy plane engines on the homeward flight.

  It was all there, accompanying the rhythm of the engines. All the elation – and the pangs of regret – that came with 106 games and the World Cup finals of Sweden, Chile, England and Mexico.

  One by one, all the way to this last disappointment which crowded into a match – and a tournament – that had promised so much, I ticked the games away. I retraced those endless summer days of Sweden, the colour and the passions and the frustrations of Chile, the great triumph of Wembley and, finally, the misadventure of Mexico.

  First, I remembered that when I went up to Glasgow to wear the England shirt for the first time I was the most publicised survivor of Munich. I was supposed to conquer a world which for me had never seemed so harsh or confusing.

  Some said I was the young hope for the future but if anyone had asked me in a way that would have made me comfortable responding to such a prophecy, I would have said I was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened at the snow-covered airfield. Somewhere, in all the pain, was the belief that I must play on, but at times it was buried deeply amid the new, and sometimes unfathomable, trials of daily life.

  I recalled vividly being driven from the hospital in Munich, where I had seen the stricken Duncan Edwards for the last time, and he had said in one fleeting bout of consciousness, ‘What kept you, pa
l?’ Jimmy Murphy, fighting back his tears, accompanied me on the journey to the Hook of Holland, where I took the ferry to Harwich. There, my brother Jack and mother Cissie were waiting to take me home to the North East.

  Home? Yes, it was home. I recognised easily enough the narrow cobbled streets, the colliery workings, and I saw many familiar faces who came to the house to try to offer some comfort. I even kicked a ball around the street with some young boys. But then everything, and not least these foundations of all my experience, were now touched by new realities that coloured in a most sombre way everything I did and saw and felt. Apart from the impact on some of my deepest personal life feelings, and the battle to find a little equilibrium and some of my old purpose, I was especially aware that whatever expectations had been placed on my shoulders, England’s future prospects had been desperately, maybe irreparably, undermined by the loss of such as Duncan, Roger Byrne and Tommy Taylor.

  In my heart I believed that with these men had gone England’s most serious chance of making an impact in the World Cup later that year; that it had been reduced as profoundly as all those high hopes surrounding United’s Busby Babes. I felt that a great opportunity had vanished along with a generation of the highest quality.

  Still, for all those saddening thoughts I was thrilled and a little amazed when told I would be sharing a room with the captain of England, Billy Wright. He could not have been more sympathetic when he grasped how deeply the tragedy had torn into my confidence, even perhaps my enthusiasm for the football life that had previously been so all-consuming.

  He said, in a gentle way not so common at the hardest edge of the professional game, that I should not worry about performing in front of the Scottish crowd that on first sight resembled a vast flock of perching, noisy birds. I would be playing with some fine and talented professionals who knew my situation, understood the rawness of my feelings, and they would all look after me.