1966

by Bobby Charlton

  As we went into the training session, Alf said, ‘I want you all to go to the positions that you would take up naturally before the start of the game.’ After we did this, he said, ‘Right, now I’ll tell you where I want you to be.’

  Position by position, he worked through the team. No one was left in any doubt about what was expected of them. Banks had to be aware of every possibility provoked by a Brazilian free-kick. Every defender could never for a second be unaware of his position and his immediate duties. Before a match I had to familiarise myself with the sweep of the pitch, make myself feel at home.

  But then there was nothing of the schoolmaster about the style and delivery of the instructions. The practicalities, the good of sense of them, were in their way not a burden but a kind of liberation.

  He was always at pains to say that each player he had called up had already proved to him his capabilities. Each had gone beyond the need for any refreshment from him on the basic demands of his job. What was happening now was a honing of individual responsibilities and how they could best benefit the team.

  What we were all working on now, he never stopped stressing, was a swift understanding of the needs, and the nuances, of a newly assembled team – and one that because of the demands of club football could never work together frequently enough for his liking.

  Some old habits had to be dropped, some new ones had to be installed. It was a development, in calmer circumstances, of the point he had made so angrily to Gordon Banks, a player who had already convinced him of his value, when Brazil scored their goal from the free-kick at Wembley. The attitudes that created the climate for error, for needless mistakes, had to be eliminated, one by one.

  Many years later he made an assessment of George Cohen, which threw considerable light on the way he judged the potential of all candidates for a place in his team. George had just suffered his career-wrecking injury at Craven Cottage and Alf reflected on what proved to be one of the most valuable contributions to his winning campaign.

  He said, ‘I was told that when George came back from an Under-23 tour in 1960 he said, “That’s me, finished.” He knew that by the time the next match came along he would be overage and the conclusion was that he was not considered good enough for the senior team. How wrong he was.

  ‘He had all the qualities required of an international player, particularly in defence. When he went forward his finishing was perhaps not all that could be desired. However, this was not how he should have been judged. He was a serious-minded young man, dedicated to his task. Playing against him must have been a very frustrating experience. I was always grateful to him for the job he did for me. His injury cost the game an outstanding player while he was still at his peak.’

  By the time we reached Rio, Alf had already resolved some important challenges to the power of his assessment of individual players and they were embodied in that tribute. George had made his mark with some impressive performances and, not least, in the determination he showed when he refused to follow the doctor’s advice and strode out with his team-mates for the second half against Brazil. It was an unforgettable example of one player’s absolute resolve to get to the end of the road.

  George had a few odd ways; he was the warmest of team-mates but often he could be, well, just a little unfathomable. One of his most unshakeable habits was to take his clothes off and have a shower as soon as he walked into the dressing room before every international game. At first I would say, ‘George, what on earth are you doing? Surely you shower after the game. You are doing something none of us understand.’

  He would frown and say, ‘Bobby, this is what I do, it is part of what I am and it has worked very well for me so far.’ He would then go off for his shower and when he returned he would immediately launch himself into a private ritual of preparation. He would do a series of push-ups and when they were over he ran on the spot, very vigorously and for quite some time. With each new contact I grew increasingly fond of him. It is an affection which survives strongly to this day and whenever I’m in London I try to see him and his wife Daphne.

  He is an unchanging presence in my life and when you reach a certain age this becomes the most precious of contacts. It reminds you of some of the best of your experience – and that which was so vital to any success you might enjoy.

  I still see him about his rituals, disappearing into the shower oblivious to the cries of ‘bloody hell, George, what are you up to now?’ As he would be in later life, when he had to fight so hard for his health and his business life, George was unswerving. He ran so hard and if his finishing skill was not the greatest he was never discouraged – even when a team-mate said something like, ‘George, I never had an idea you were going to do that’ and quite often it wasn’t something anyone would have been proud of. Nor when his Fulham team-mate said that when he crossed the ball he hit more photographers than Frank Sinatra. But then no one doubted that George would march triumphantly through such ribbing.

  He was simply locked into a commitment which became one of the staples of our effort. You could no more shake it out of him that you could get him to alter his pre-match formula or intrude into his self-absorption in that vital mental preparation before the kick-off. No one could have been more part of the team but, first, he had to be himself.

  He still represents to me the very essence of what Alf was striving to achieve. It was a total immersion in the idea that we all had to push ourselves harder than we had ever done before and he would do it his way. He knew that if Alf was emphatic about how a player should perform on the field, he wouldn’t dream of interfering with a rhythm of personal preparation which so plainly worked.

  And so George pounded his way to the greatest day of our football lives. He had his shower, he did his push-ups, he ran on the spot, and then in the moments before we were called to the field he would take off his vest, put it back on again, and then slip on his shirt and shorts. Sometimes he would say, with a small smile, ‘I’m ready now.’

  George’s assessment of Alf, his understanding of what made him so effective, has always chimed perfectly with mine. This was never more so than when he said, ‘What was so impressive about Alf when he took charge of the England squad was that there was no player bigger than him, unlike Haynes with Winterbottom or Keegan with Revie and Greenwood. He was strong on discipline – but it was subtle. He advised you to go to bed early but he never demanded. But when he said, “I’d like you to be in by such and such a time” it was like paying the rates. You couldn’t avoid it. He could be a very kind person and thoughtful and he displayed a dry wit. Most of the time it was easy to like him. He was very fond of his jellied eels and brown ale.’

  Much later my United team-mate John Connelly, who for all his ability and competitive character would never make himself as integral to Alf’s plans as the late-challenging George, delivered a similar verdict. He said, ‘You could never truly weigh him up, never reckon him. Yet I always wished I could have played under him at a club. He brought the best out of you. He had different ways of getting to you – and sometimes they could be quite gentle. Other times, less so.

  ‘Once when the ball ran out when we were playing at Hampden I went and fetched it and threw it to a Scot. They took a quick throw, went down the line and damn near scored. Watching the video afterwards Alf said to the rest of the lads. “Just watch this pillock. What do you think of that, running after the ball for an effing Scotsman.” ’

  That lingered powerfully in John’s mind, plainly, and for me it was another reminder of the difference between Alf and Walter Winterbottom. The language was not the same – and nor were the competitive instincts.

  That was the most fundamental difference between the two men. Alf talked about the game always with a hard edge – like a real club pro. Alf had been one, he had immersed himself in all the nuances of being a pro, of thinking a little harder than the man he faced. He honed his own strengths, the greatest in his case being an ability to open the play for some very creative te
am-mates with passes of the highest quality, and he worked slavishly to obscure his greatest weakness, which was a lack of true pace.

  He never said an opponent was good unless he had proved that to him completely. He put so much thought into his verdicts and this sometimes made him very difficult to approach with opinions. But this was almost certainly right. It is so often true that the players don’t know best. Their ideas are so often shaped by a single perspective – their own.

  It meant that I never saw him influenced by the view or the pleadings of an individual player. The growth of individuals was never his priority. He always assumed that would be the inevitable result of the growth of the team. He was always after what made a team rather than individuals and as the weeks slipped into months and then the years which separated him from the dawn of his challenge to its possible completion, this was always the growing pressure even such a great player as Jimmy Greaves had to deal with.

  For myself I just could not imagine being outside of Alf’s chosen ones. If the possibility arose even in a corner of my mind it would bring the fearful chill of a great, impending loss.

  One certainty was that if Alf was going to be hanged, it would be as the result of his own decisions. I have seen managers influenced by players and I’ve never thought of it as healthy.

  He made you feel that you had been picked because you were a good player and he always talked more about what you needed to be successful. In Bratislava he insisted on my training on that part of the pitch on which I would be playing. I should get in some corner kicks to get the feel of the run-up. He was meticulous. Yet although I respected him, and liked him, I’ve never really known anyone, apart from perhaps his wife, who really knew him. He could be so obstinate you knew right away that you had no chance of shifting him.

  Once he got over his exhilaration at being called to the squad, and playing his first few matches, my brother Jack was most impressed by Alf’s ability to shape a group of players into such a strong sense of a common effort – and mutual respect. He contrasted Alf’s style with that of Don Revie, his boss at Leeds United and the other most influential manager in his life.

  Revie was famous, or notorious, according to your turn of mind, for his elaborate pre-match dossiers and intense indoctrination of his players, one notable example being the time he told the great Scottish midfielder Billy Bremner to get down on his knees and thank God for all the blessings that had come his way. By comparison, Alf was much more economic with his words and his emotions.

  Recalling the time he asked Alf why he had picked him out, Jack said, ‘He told me it was because I was tall and good in the air and was mobile and could tackle. He knew how he wanted to play and he went out to get the right players for his needs – not necessarily the most gifted ones but those most right for his plans.

  ‘There was enormous pressure on him from the media, especially the London press. It’s easy to see how a manager’s mind can be inundated with the names of players he has not seen, or not had a chance to properly assess. But Alf’s reaction to this situation was always the same. “Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you,” he said.

  ‘He had a feel for players. In a real team you can’t have stirrers around. If there’s someone you don’t trust, you get rid of him. They were just about totally absent from his squad. I never ever heard one player questioning the merits of another, whether he should or shouldn’t be in. Alf was totally different to Don Revie, he achieved what he did with just a few words.’

  That, certainly, but also an increasingly ruthless willingness to make the hardest decisions. Now that Gordon Banks had surpassed Ron Springett in Alf’s mind, George Cohen had won his battle with the extremely talented Armfield and formed such a promising partnership with my pal Ray Wilson, the task was clear enough. Alf had to put in place the final pillars of defence – and then deal with the great dilemma of his reign, getting right the balance between players of creativity and those more mindful of other, less thrilling duties. Soon enough this would carry him into the agonies of Jimmy Greaves’s career crisis and the kind of controversial debate which might have unnerved, even broken, a less self-confident man.

  In the meantime, however, there was the accumulation of certainties which had names like Moore and Banks, Cohen and Wilson and Stiles and Charlton, J.

  As to Charlton, R., there was a never a moment right up to the last pages of the story when I was able to tell myself that I was guaranteed a place. I never had that assurance from Alf and I never expected it but then I could see clearly the value of the commitment the manager was asking of all his players. I didn’t want to imagine the devastation I would have felt if Alf had taken me to one side, perhaps in a corner of Hendon Hall or in the cabin of an aircraft, and said that I had failed my test.

  It would have been – I can see as clearly now as I did more than fifty years ago – the disaster of my football life. It would have thrust me into a very cold place indeed, one stripped of that which deep down we all most need from life.

  I didn’t want to contemplate the loss of that wonderful sense of expectation which comes when you feel part of something that may well have laid a claim on the future. I didn’t want to surrender the chance of being part of an achievement that would last for ever.

  That didn’t lessen my joy when I embraced my wife and daughter after that long haul through Europe and the United States and South America. But then maybe I also had to concede that Alf had been right to point out quite what it takes when you seek to elect yourself to a team of champions.

  5. Jack and Nobby

  WHEN JACK AND Nobby joined us so exuberantly in the April of 1965 – their eyes shining like those of boys out on their first adventure – England’s march to the World Cup had, we would know soon enough, reached one of its most significant milestones.

  The foundation of the proposed team of champions had been laid down and now it could be examined, shaken and pounded in its entirety. However many times Alf did this he made no attempt to disguise his confidence that it would hold.

  The first six names on the team sheet for the World Cup final fourteen months later would be the same as those for Scotland’s visit to Wembley, a challenge which would always occupy a special place in our manager’s competitive vision. It was a 2-2 draw despite the fact that we finished with just nine fit players and I was required to move to left-back, which was a brief development that Alf was quick to point out, and as dryly as I expected, would play no part in his master plan.

  Here, despite his well-earned reputation as a full-back of great craft and creative instinct, was the unveiling of our manager’s first principle: before anything else, a winning team must be able to defend.

  Here too was the first solid and, as it would turn out, immutable raft of the Ramsey calculations: Banks, Cohen, Wilson, J. Charlton, Moore and Stiles. There were other questions to be resolved, finely balanced choices to be made, but none of them would concern defensive deployment. That matter, most certainly, had been resolved

  A vital, and he would say fundamental, stage of his work was, barring accident, complete. He believed that after two years of trial and error and an increasingly encouraging trend of performance he had gained the first strong foothold on success: he had a set of defenders he would continue to hone to his needs but now he could proceed with this crucial task in an atmosphere of mutual trust.

  In the time between a 1-1 draw against Holland in Amsterdam and the Scotland game four months later, Alf had settled on his new defensive order. He had done it against the knowledge that the completed unit needed time to knit together. In the attacking aspects of midfield and at the front, he decided, there were still opportunities for considerable experimentation. But at the back certainties had to be imposed without any further delay.

  Banks, inevitably, was returned to goal in place of Tony Waiters of Blackpool, and Bobby Moore also automatically reappeared as captain and central defender along with Ray Wilson at left-back. This meant that George Cohen was the only de
fensive survivor of the Dutch game. For Bobby Thompson, the strong Wolves full-back, and such notable performers as Alan Mullery, Maurice Norman and Ron Flowers, it was the discouraging hint they were no longer prime contenders.

  There would, still, be time for a few missteps. The following autumn we lost 3-2 to Austria, which was only England’s third defeat on home soil, and a rare mistake by Nobby contributed to one of the Austrian goals.

  After the game Alf was besieged by reporters wanting to know quite what had happened to the World Cup strategy. However, they were infuriated by his refusal to concede that the result constituted anything approaching a crisis less than a year before the opening of the World Cup.

  ‘I’m disappointed by the result,’ he said, ‘but I’m not very disappointed. Overall, I’m happy with our progress. We have a lot of good things in place.’

  One of them, much to my encouragement, was that he was particularly happy with my performance as an attacking midfielder. Such assurances, coming from Alf, always carried a considerable measure of extra weight. However well you liked to think you had played, and however much encouragement you received from your team-mates and the media, it was always his approval which you valued most highly.

  Looking back, it is hard not to see that a touch of hysteria had become part of the intense monitoring of our campaign. Jimmy Hill, who had become the doyen of TV football criticism, went as far as declaring, ‘We will not win anything with this lot.’

  Against this sceptical background, Alf could hardly have been blamed for retreating into an ivory tower. Had he cared to, he could have pointed out that before the mishap against Austria we had gone ten games without defeat since losing to an extremely impressive Argentina by one goal in Rio the summer before last.

  As it was, he would soon enough have plenty of reasons to feel vindicated in his confidence before the opening of the World Cup in eight months. And also, perhaps, in his decision to ‘invite outside’ one of his most persistent critics, Eric Cooper, who had a big readership for his billing as the Daily Express’s Voice of the North. He had written a scathing piece under the headline ‘It’s Hokey Cokey, Alf’ after the draw in Amsterdam which presaged the arrival of Jack and Nobby.