1966

by Bobby Charlton

  Now, seventeen years later, we were treading together another field for England. It was, we agreed, a remarkable turn in our family’s involvement in football and a source of immense pride to, more than anyone, our mother. Yet if Jack and I could also feel extraordinary exhilaration at the unique distinction of two brothers playing together in the national team, the fact was that our relationship had indeed been beset by certain complications.

  To be honest, they have taken most of our adult lives to resolve since Jack, in my view, unfairly took our mother’s side in what amounted to her refusal to accept my wife Norma – and in a way that I believe would have brought hurt to any son, however loving. All I can say now, truly, is that in all the pain that came with the kind of dislocation which I know from time to time afflicts so many families, I never lost sight of my debt to a mother who, I know, cared passionately about her sons.

  Though it is a myth, helped along by newspaper stories and photographs that accompanied my emergence as a schoolboy candidate for stardom with Manchester United, that my mother gave me my first lessons in football, I have never forgotten her passionate interest in and support for my early steps into the game. Nor would I ever begin to discount the way she brought four sons up through the war years on my father Robert’s modest wage from the pit.

  Her passion for football was always mirrored in her pride over the fame of her cousin Jackie and the fact that her four brothers, Jack, George, Jimmy and Stan, all made good and long careers as professionals.

  She urged her sons, and the fact was I needed a lot less bidding than Jack, to sit at their uncles’ knees and learn about a life that represented to her a sure-fire escape from the hardships and dangers of a working life spent underground. And then there was the delight with which she greeted the news that Jack and I would be playing together for England. She left no one in doubt it was the great fulfilment of her best hopes.

  No, I never questioned any of this even when I felt myself obliged to defend the feelings and status of a wife whom I loved dearly and who would always do so much to enhance my life.

  My mother encouraged me to spend some of my school holiday time with her brother Stan, who was playing at Chesterfield. On visits home to the North East, Stan and his brothers would take me down to the beach and encourage me to show off my skills. My mother would watch over us, so often clucking with pride. And when I came back from Chesterfield she wanted to know every detail of the footballer’s life. For her it was more than a way of earning a living. It was an escape to an existence so charmed it could barely be imagined by so many lads obliged to ride a colliery lift each working day.

  It became clearer to me as the years passed that none of the strife that had come with my attempts to have Norma seamlessly absorbed into the life of the Charlton clan could ever ultimately break the ties of blood and experience that bound me to Jack.

  We went to different schools, and went different ways – my obsession with football was initially so much greater than Jack’s, no doubt because my talent for it was more obvious in our boyhood – but in a way that only compounded my respect for the fact that in the end he made so much of himself in the game.

  My delight at his selection by Alf was underpinned by the fact that I had regularly driven across the Pennines to watch him playing for the fast-emerging Leeds United. I knew he had had some problems with Don Revie but then I could also see how he had come to convince his manager that he had a vital part to play in the development of one of England’s great club sides.

  I loved the way he was involved in the game. His passion to succeed was reflected in every move he made. I also noted how he had refined his game, how his timing – and his impact in both penalty areas – had made him such a powerful influence on a team which was setting an extremely hard pace at the top of English football. So I would drive home thinking, ‘Well, Our Kid is really making something of himself in the game.’

  Revie had at first seen a stormy, not always disciplined figure, someone of strong opinions – and emotions – who would often express his frustrations in the most forceful way. My former United team-mate Johnny Giles, who became so integral to the success of Leeds, once said of Jack, ‘He made a fantastic contribution to the development of the team and he deserved all the success that came to him, but if I’m honest I have to say he wasn’t always the team-mate who made you feel most comfortable.

  ‘He never spared his criticism if he thought you had done something wrong and in the dressing room we said of him, “The thing about Jack is that if he isn’t always right he is never wrong.” ’

  It was a remark that certainly triggered the memory of some of the more tempestuous moments of our youth, as did Johnny’s recall of the time Jack became so disenchanted with the flow of cards on the Leeds team bus that he picked up the pack and threw it out of the window.

  We were brothers who, according to many of the people we grew up with, often suggested that football was the one bond left unbroken by our often sharply different natures. Even the game we loved, me quite exclusively and Jack sharing his affection for it with a lifelong passion for fishing and hunting, could provoke flashpoints.

  One of the more explosive came after I’d watched him play for his youth team on the Ashington Colliery Welfare Ground. I had been very impressed with his performance, his strength in the tackle and his effectiveness in the air, where he generated so much power with the thrust of his long neck, but his effort was flawed by a careless mistake which cost a goal.

  I pointed out how a ‘stupid’ mistake had marred an otherwise terrific performance. His response was to hit me on the head which such force it would always serve as a warning against saying to Jack something he might deem the wrong comment at the wrong time.

  It was also true that he was not often too thrilled when told that he had to look after his kid brother during time he had allocated to hunting or fishing. Reluctantly he would allow me to tag along in his wake as he pursued the rabbits and waited for the fish to bite.

  This meant that football, our lifelong inheritance from our mother’s line, would always form the strongest aspect of our relationship. For me it was my life, for Jack it was an important part of it and, ultimately, the means by which he escaped his horror at the prospect of a lifetime of work in the pits. He briefly experienced the ordeal, then signed for Leeds United in what he considered the most liberating act of his life.

  The pit was my father’s life and sometimes I would meet him at the pithead at the end of his shift. We would walk home, talk about his day and my hopes for the future. But if my father was largely unmoved by the appeal of football, and often became embarrassed when people he didn’t know so well wanted to talk about the progress of his sons in the game, it was not as though he didn’t leave us a legacy of his own.

  Though he would sometimes comment about our play, offer a criticism or perhaps a little praise, it was clear to us that it was all coming second-hand. What he did give us, though, was something utterly authentic and Jack and I would always agree that it was indeed a valuable gift.

  It was to do with how a man should tackle life and all its difficulties. He had to do it as uncomplainingly as possible, he had to meet his responsibilities to his family and he had to get on with any work that was available.

  In his life this meant going to the colliery each working day, and I don’t think either Jack or I ever lost sight of this. We always had a strong sense of it when he came home at night, sometimes with fresh scars from the colliery, sometimes with a few lumps of coal he had collected while walking his little horse along the shore.

  If Jack took more of his nature from our mother than our father, if he was much bolder and less self-conscious about what people might think of him if he behaved in a certain way, and said precisely what was on his mind, in the end he was faithful enough to the idea that sooner or later it was essential to make the best of your situation. Jack did face difficulties at Leeds but when he appeared for England duty he had resolved them quite
brilliantly.

  On my trips to Elland Road I had been increasingly impressed by the development and the authority of his game, and another admirer of his achievement in turning all his prospects around was Ian St John, the fine, brilliantly combative centre-forward of Liverpool and Scotland.

  St John had the chance to observe Jack extremely closely on his debut for England. Afterwards, he reflected, ‘When I first saw Jack in the Leeds team I wasn’t overly impressed. I thought he could be rash in a way that put his fellow defenders in difficulty. But that day at Wembley when he first appeared for England I was quite amazed at the extent to which he had transformed his game.

  ‘He had reinvented himself. He was now playing to his strengths, in the air and in the tackle and in his ability to read the game. He deserves real credit for turning around his career, a career that was going nowhere. But I do think Don Revie was vital as well. I spoke to Don many times and he said that when he first became manager at Leeds, Jack was a big dogmatic bugger who didn’t care to listen to anyone’s opinion but his own. But eventually the penny dropped and he became a real player.’

  When Jack and Nobby were picked for England the prevailing critical response was that it was an act of desperation. They were, the theory went, rough-hewn players who wouldn’t have heard the call to England duty from any other manager but Alf. I was inclined to agree with the latter point but only in a way that acknowledged the insight that went into the selections. Alf had the vision to see the best qualities of both players and as we moved closer to the World Cup there was a growing consensus, both inside and outside the camp, that the team had been quite immeasurably strengthened.

  One of the principal beneficiaries, my brother would say – and I couldn’t argue – was me. Jack declared that a huge factor, an absolute key to success, was the introduction of Nobby. He said, ‘Nobby could win the ball and allow my brother Bobby not to have the responsibility of having to pick up and mark and hold up the people in the back four. Nobby gave the ball to Bobby and let him play.’

  George Cohen echoed that point. ‘It’s not recognised that Nobby was a very good distributor of the ball, but he fed Bobby Charlton time and again. Bobby could see Nobby go into a tackle, was confident he’d come out with the ball, and moved into space knowing that Nobby would find him. That was a very good partnership. It became the axis of our midfield, it made everything we did more coherent.’

  For Jack there was an equally warm welcome from his new team-mates. Gordon Banks was particularly appreciative of his physical authority, saying, ‘Jack was strong and commanding in the middle. We used to get on at each other during matches but this was purely to keep each other on the alert. The sometimes rude and brutal things we yelled in the heat of battle were always quickly forgotten once the final whistle was blown.’

  Ray Wilson, with whom I had made such a strong bond, spoke of an instinctive understanding with my brother. He said, ‘Me and Big Jack were mouthy players and it’s very important that people talk. We never used to break, we tried to keep the back four solid, we never tackled until they got round the penalty area and the other lads put them under pressure, so they couldn’t squeeze the ball through.’

  What we were seeing then in the team, and from the distance of today the picture is no less vivid, was a pattern that unfolded with increasing clarity from that April day at Wembley to a biting cold night in Madrid near the end of 1965. It was no less than the smelting of the finest, most efficient defence in the history of English football.

  Detaching the defeat by Austria at Wembley in October – one over which Alf would be so quickly vindicated in his claim that it was a passing aberration – the statistics alone tell a story of extraordinary, fast-gathering meanness.

  In six games, finishing with the match at the Bernabéu which would always be remembered for almost entirely different reasons (Alan Ball being not the least of them), we conceded just three goals. We shut out the talented Hungarians, who were led by the world-class Ferenc Bene at Wembley, we yielded one to the Yugoslavs in the always fierce battleground of Belgrade, and left West Germany and Spain scoreless in Nuremburg and Madrid. Sweden were beaten 2-1 in Gothenburg.

  This was exactly the statement of tough frugality Alf had hoped for when he called up Nobby and Jack. There was still plenty of time to fashion his optimum strike force, but first he had to close the gates. Now, with each new performance, you could hear them tightening.

  For me, fortified by the presence of Nobby and Jack, and with Alf making it increasingly clear that any worries about my defensive frailties in midfield had been removed at the stroke of writing down Nobby’s name on the team-sheet, it felt as though I was taking some first, sure steps into a promised land.

  The critical pressure was for a spectacular performance but what was being produced, the players had now come to believe, was a convincing blueprint for success in the great tournament. The pleasure, and gratitude, which came to me with the reinforcement of Nobby was heightened by my long and admiring analysis of quite what he brought to the game.

  I’d never, and never would, have a relationship with any player on the field quite like the one I shared with Nobby. When Jack quailed at the idea that he had upset the little man in the heat of the action, it reminded me of an early assessment I had made on the nature of Nobby’s fearlessness. My conclusion was that there was only one man on earth who had the power to inspire in him a little dread.

  It was his father, Charlie, and I discovered this at half-time one night at Old Trafford when Nobby had briefly lost his head and earned a booking. As we walked up the tunnel and turned towards the dressing room we passed the point where fans could get closest to the players. It was then I heard Charlie bellowing Nobby’s name. When he heard the cry ‘Norbert’ my friend walked towards his father with the bearing of a contrite and fearful schoolboy summoned by a ferocious master.

  He knew precisely what to expect. It was a lecture on the behaviour required when you represented a great football club like Manchester United. It was not enough to play strongly, to battle for every ball; you also had to be in command of everything you did and all of your emotions. Nobby couldn’t always meet such a demand but the certainty was that no one had a more developed idea of what he had to do to help his team in all circumstances.

  He was certainly not lacking in attacking skill and intuition but his early conclusion was that his surest asset was an ability to win the ball and put it at the service of a more creative player. From this, I benefited so hugely I have to say it was one of the cornerstones of my greatest success with my club and my country.

  The result was that when you received the ball from Nobby you were bound to say, ‘Hell, the little fellah had to spit blood to win this ball, I just can’t waste it.’

  I never forgot that one of my foremost responsibilities for both United and England was to make myself free to receive the ball from Nobby. His job was to defend, which he did like a tiger and with brilliant perception of how the game was flowing, and maintain a steady supply of possession.

  Neither Jack nor Nobby meekly accepted any restriction on their right to shape a game, Jack with his dominant presence in either penalty area, Nobby with his zealous prowling of the ground in front of defence.

  Nobby, the combative altar boy, and Jack, who was never happier than when he had a shotgun or a fishing rod in his hands, were not everybody’s idea of a holy alliance. But for both Alf and me there was never a question mark against their status. Right from the start, we agreed, they were an unqualified blessing.

  7. Olé, Olé, Olé

  MADRID ON 8 December 1965 was so cold it made walking down the wide and elegant Gran Via an unaccustomed ordeal. Eight years before I had strolled along there in the spring sunshine before later watching in awe the unfolding majesty of Alfredo Di Stéfano at the Bernabéu.

  It was the most riveting individual performance I had ever seen and on that soft, sweet-scented night, when my eyes followed every stride of the great man,
I felt as though I was being taken to the very boundaries of what was possible from one player on a football field.

  Now there was ice in the wind coming down from the Sierra and that seemed like the most appropriate accompaniment for the chill of apprehension that came with the fact that at a crucial point in the shaping of England’s team we were facing one of Europe’s better sides in their own fabled fortress. We had made some good, if occasionally erratic, progress through the year but here we were under a critical examination, one that could well tell us whether we were a team which at last could begin to contemplate with some confidence the climax of a long and testing journey.

  Bringing a fine edge to the challenge was that we had been spending our training hours in Madrid working on the detail of a new strategy which Alf believed could well be crucial to all our hopes of moving on to a higher and more secure competitive level. He had never been so fastidious in the outlining of his game plan – and making clear the expectations he was placing on the shoulders of every player stepping out into the Bernabéu.

  England had never won anywhere in Spain, so it was not so easy to imagine that in a few hours our campaign to win the World Cup would be touched in the great stadium by what felt like several degrees of white heat.

  In 1957 I was a travelling reserve for Manchester United’s European Cup semi-final against Real Madrid, a mere spectator. This new experience, by the most extreme comparison, made me feel I was suddenly at the heart of something huge and thrilling.

  After we had beaten Spain 2-0, and Alan Ball, playing his fourth international at the age of twenty, had produced one of the most phenomenally committed performances I’d ever seen at any level of the game, Alf left the dressing room much more quickly than usual.

  There was none of the normal brusque, one-on-one debriefing as he mingled with his troops. He didn’t linger to point out individual mistakes or to take a player through the pivotal points of his performance and, occasionally, perhaps offer a light pat of congratulation for something particularly well done, or, maybe more frequently, a frown of censure. He certainly didn’t pepper us with his sometimes biting one-liners, as he had George Cohen in our final training session before this match in Madrid.