I doubt, though, that anyone could have portrayed our difficulties more vividly than did George Cohen many years later. He recalled, ‘The Uruguayans were as stubborn and difficult as Alf imagined and predicted they would be. We couldn’t get round them or through them. Connelly found himself running into blind alleys, as did Wilson and I when we tried to steal a little ground on the overlap. Bobby Charlton was unable to get within firing range, Roger Hunt threw himself against a brick wall. In the end we were relying on Jimmy Greaves to thread his way through some blue-shirted resistance, but it didn’t happen.
‘The South American coach Ondino Viera made no pretence to any ambition beyond survival. He had a sweeper, the captain Horacio Troche, behind a back four and everyone else, including their most creative players Rocha and Cortés, in withdrawn positions. Body-checks and high tackles were commonplace and, ironically enough, Nobby received one of the worst. But he scarcely blinked and carried on. We ran relentlessly but only into an ever-deepening deadlock.’
Though Alf had banned us from reading the papers, not everybody followed his instructions and the following day no one had any doubt that we had to win back the belief of the people, and, perhaps, a little of our own. If Alf had read the newspaper criticism, and I suspected he had because like most football people he found it difficult to resist the temptation in the wake of any performance, good or bad, he firmly rejected the idea that we were suddenly in crisis.
He said that most certainly we could have played better but then it was also true we could have played much worse. He said he was happy with the defensive performance, it had been solid and watchful and never looked in danger of allowing a sneak goal that might well have been both psychologically and tactically disastrous. As for the attack, well, it wasn’t the best day but he added, ‘You will rarely find opponents more capable and dedicated to making your lives difficult.’
Some newspapers agitated for us all to be returned promptly to the training field to work on new tactics. Didn’t we know the nation expected much better than our first offering? It just wasn’t good enough.
Fortunately for us there was no more chance of Alf enrolling in the Robbie Burns Society than of following the dictates of Fleet Street. He deemed that what we needed most was not a return to the treadmill but a brief break from football. It was just as well, though, that one of the newspapers had not witnessed the degree of relaxation achieved by some of the lads at a reception for the team staged by Hendon town council.
Nobby reported later that a few of the players, having become bored by the ceremonials, and partaken eagerly of the wine that accompanied the buffet, sent some of the local dignitaries home with prawn cocktail and potato salad that had been slipped into their suit pockets. Such laddish behaviour, had it found its way on to the news pages, might not have hugely enhanced our image as we prepared for the next match against Mexico.
However, those pranks apart, Alf could say that the day had gone exactly as he had hoped. While West Germany were overwhelming Switzerland 5-0, Brazil surviving the brutal tackles of Bulgaria to win with goals by Pelé and Garrincha, and the USSR pointing North Korea back to their mysterious homeland, or so it seemed, we were briefly returning to the world beyond the touchline. Alf was certainly in one of his mellower moods and had arrived at the civic reception with no hint of the pressure that had gathered around him so sharply from the moment the first boos had rippled down the Wembley terraces.
We went to the reception after a visit to Pinewood Studios arranged through a contact of Alan Bass. Alf, the movie buff, was particularly pleased to meet such eminent film actors as Sean Connery, Yul Brynner, George Segal and Robert Morley. He would later confirm that the Scottish brogue had never sounded so pleasant to him as when Connery made a short speech in which he said that our match against Uruguay had done nothing to deflect him from his belief that England would win the cup.
It just happened that Connery was taking a break from playing James Bond in You Only Live Twice. In the morning on the training field, and with a much sterner face, Alf would make clear his opinion that we had used up one of those lives.
John Connelly, of course, had some reason to spend the rest of his life envying our generous allocation.
11. The Sweetest Goal
IT WAS ONCE said I was a scorer of great goals rather than a great goalscorer and to dispute this might suggest a degree of immodesty, something I would wish to avoid at this more reflective stage of my life. However, it also happens that as I look back I see an element of truth in the fine point of a clever and, let’s face it, not exactly ungenerous assessment.
No one, anyway, had to tell me that I wasn’t Jimmy Greaves or Gerd Müller. No, I didn’t inhabit football exclusively to score goals in the way of those natural-born predators. I always knew that to score was the point of it all, the ultimate objective, and everything I did along with my team-mates was in the hope of achieving that.
But I didn’t change colours like a chameleon when there came a sniff of a goal, didn’t believe that only in the act of putting the ball in the net was I truly defining myself as a footballer.
Some might see evidence of that in the fact that I obviously relished so much swinging long and arching passes across the field and there were certainly times when it was suggested to me that a shorter, more direct ball might have carried more telling effect.
The charge sometimes aired, and never more so than when Jimmy Murphy was setting me his relentless drills, was that I was a little in love with the ornamental for its own sake; even, I blush to mention, that it was not unknown for me to step back, a little like an artist contemplating the effect of his latest brush stroke.
Whatever the truth of that, as a professional I could never ignore the reality that scoring a goal had to be more than some occasional extension of my role as a midfield playmaker and sometime left-winger – and the fact that I had scored more for England than anyone, until I was surpassed recently by my Manchester United and England successor Wayne Rooney, will always be a source of great pride and satisfaction.
Now I can only hope for him, as he contemplates the possibility of his last World Cup finals in Russia in 2018, that he knows the kind of moment that came to me on the night of 16 July 1966.
I hope that he gets to enjoy the charge to the spirit that accompanied the goal I scored against Mexico after two hours and six minutes of the hardest toil and growing frustration in our first two games of the 1966 tournament.
The impact it had on my confidence, my understanding that we might just win the World Cup, has never dwindled down the years. I can re-conjure it as easily as I might this morning’s stroll among the autumn leaves.
Some judged it to be the best of my career. I’m not so sure about that but I do know it was one that I, and also it seemed the team and the football nation, greeted not so much as a triumph as a deliverance.
Suddenly, everything we had worked for, and dreamed about, seemed possible. It was, surely, a moment to build upon and have it nourish all of our hopes.
Certainly, it left me in maybe the most blissful state of mind I had ever enjoyed out on any field and the fact that I was experiencing it in a place which I had loved so much since I first discovered it as a schoolboy international, and been so entranced by the old towers and, most magically, a playing surface that I thought might have been transplanted from some football heaven, just made it all the more perfect and exhilarating.
On the old film of the game there is some rather strange evidence confirming my exalted mood.
It shows that when the referee blew for half-time, with the stadium still buzzing in the wake of England’s breakthrough, one of the twenty-two players returned to the dressing room so quickly he might have been attempting to qualify for the Olympic 100m final. Yes, it was me.
Why? It was because when my shot whipped past the Mexican goalkeeper Ignacio Calderón, releasing tension that had started to grip us five nights earlier in the first half against Uruguay, I suddenly felt
that I could run for ever. Nor had I ever felt better, more confident in my skills and my pace and my sense of direction.
The game seemed easy again. When the break was signalled, I suppose now, I just wanted to confirm to myself that I was indeed, at the age of twenty-eight, in the best possible condition. Inevitably some of my team-mates speculated that I was in great need of the bathroom. What wasn’t in question, however, was the general and joyful assumption that we were, finally, on our way.
In terms of ability, and football sophistication, the Mexicans plainly lived on a different and a less stylish street than the Uruguayans but in one respect they might have been wearing the light blue of the South Americans rather than their own plum-coloured shirts. They wore the same legend across their hearts, the one that said, ‘No Pasarán – They shall not pass’.
That we did breach their defence – and in the thrilling process believed that truly we had set ourselves up to play with much more poise – was something for which I received lasting praise.
However, whenever I see a flash of the old film showing my leap of celebration or hear some reference to the goal that ignited our campaign, I think immediately of Roger Hunt, my companion on that first trip to London to meet the man who promised that we would indeed win the World Cup.
Roger was in so many ways the epitome of Alf’s ideal of the selfless team-mate, the man whose commitment to the hard, and often less glamorous and noticed work, was ultimately the difference between winning and losing.
If the theory ever had to be embodied in a single, important strike, the one against Mexico would surely serve well enough. There is no hardship, certainly, in recalling again every detail of it.
The goal was set in motion by Martin Peters, who was replacing Alan Ball after the Uruguayan impasse (the other change was also a case of tactical like for like with an orthodox winger, Terry Paine, replacing the ill-fated John Connelly).
Playing with great confidence, Martin broke up a rare attack from the Mexicans – who had started in almost identical fashion to the Uruguayans when Isidoro Diaz booted the ball into our half while the rest of his team-mates retreated into defensive positions – and played the ball to Roger, who immediately passed it on to me.
He had found me in a nice little pocket of space just inside my own half. It was a situation in which to apply another tenet of Murphy’s law, in this case the one that insisted that when you found yourself briefly unattended by defenders with a mission to close you down, the best approach was to use up that space as quickly as possible.
‘If you find yourself in some space,’ Jimmy often told me during our Sunday morning sessions, ‘make sure you cover the first ten or twenty yards as quickly as you can.’ He pointed out that this served two purposes. It discouraged front players from attempting to track you and at the same time created a degree of doubt and confusion in the minds of the defenders.
On this occasion Roger was the perfect ally. As I moved into the Mexican half I saw that he was darting one way and another to make a series of distractions, and the more he did it the closer I found myself to Calderón’s goal.
Roger’s diversionary tactics had prevented the Mexicans sending in a single challenger to my possession of the ball. Had they done so, I would likely have laid it off, probably to Peters, and then gone again. Instead I found myself in the kind of firing range that was never yielded by the Uruguayans.
I hit it sweetly enough from around twenty-five yards and again Murphy’s law was applied: hit the target and hit it hard.
At the distance of fifty years it would be easy to skip on to the next challenge facing us, the final group game against France, but that would be another disservice to a Roger Hunt so widely, and undeservedly, cast as a mere workhorse. It was Roger who most effectively got on with the job of seeing off the Mexicans and confirming our progress into the quarter-finals.
It also helped that at half-time Alf was in his best business mode. He said that the goal was delightful but it still counted up to just one. The Mexicans, now obliged to attack, were not without threat. Their striker Enrique Borja was clever and persistent and plainly capable of exploiting the additional support from his team-mates that the new situation so urgently demanded. He had given Mexico the lead in their opening game against France, one of thirty-two goals for the national team, a record which would stand until 1997. There was also some creativity, and plenty of energy, from Diaz and Aaron Padilla.
So, of course, Alf was right to wage another battle in his war against complacency, and in this case the threat of downright euphoria. As always, no one listened more attentively than Roger. Without his ceaseless application, his insatiable willingness to run in pursuit of any possibility, we would not have drawn any benefit from the move which brought the decisive second goal with fourteen minutes to go.
Again Martin Peters was involved. We traded passes out on the left before I played the ball into Jimmy Greaves, whose shot could only be pushed away by Calderón. Hunt was there to deliver the killing stroke. No Pasarán? Roger might have quoted General Franco, who said after taking Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, ‘Hemos pasado – We have passed.’
It would prove, though – despite the fact that we fancied ourselves against the French team which did not seem anything like the force which had given Alf such a sobering first experience of international management in 1963 – something less than a trouble-free rite of passage.
Inevitably, Alf carefully measured his praise after the victory which made for much more agreeable reading in the morning papers that found their way into our hotel more easily than after the Uruguayan roadblock.
Yes, he said, we had played better than we had against Uruguay: there was more rhythm, more certainty and patience in the build-up.
Again, with our second clean sheet, we had been watchful and composed in defence and our goals had come with some fluency. But, then, we also had to remember that we had not disposed of one of the heavyweight contenders.
If we had not beaten Mexico we would surely have been, despite our home advantage, relegated from the group of favourites in which Brazil, their frailties yet to be exposed, still figured prominently alongside such as Argentina, Portugal, Hungary, USSR, West Germany and an Italy still three days away from being destroyed by the shock troops of North Korea.
Instead Alf could proceed against France in the knowledge that another of his players, barring injury, had guaranteed himself a place in the rest of the campaign. It was Martin Peters. There had been that great surprise when he was left out of the Uruguay game. He had been superb in the climax of our preparations against Poland in Chorzów and now after his performance against Mexico, in which he played a part in both goals and was never less than a source of sharp action and consistently applied intelligence, it was unthinkable that he would not line up against the French.
It meant, we can see it so clearly in retrospect, that Alf now had much less than a handful of decisions concerning the players who might make the difference between winning and losing it all.
The questions he was asking himself most intensely can be itemised easily enough. They involved four players: Alan Ball, Geoff Hurst, Roger Hunt, and, given his long-won reputation, most agonisingly, Jimmy Greaves. At this point, before Jimmy picked up an injury against France which would endanger his place in the likely quarter-final, Alf’s biggest issue concerned Ball.
Could he continue to leave out such a tirelessly committed, and now smouldering figure? Alan’s room-mate Nobby reported that he was taking his exclusion extremely hard and Alf’s fear might have been that the young player’s hurt and frustration could turn into outright disaffection. As it developed, that never became a factor and perhaps in this Alf’s instincts were working more acutely than those who worried that the setback of being left out against Mexico might destroy in Alan one of the most remarkable forces of motivation any of us had ever seen.
Still, Nobby’s concern was understandable enough. Many years later he recalled, ‘Bal
ly was shocked when he was left out for the Mexican game and there were occasions when it was clear to me how much he was hurting. Once he came up to our loft of a bedroom at the hotel after collecting some winnings from a local bookmaker’s office and threw a few fivers on the floor. Then he did a dance of mock celebration and shouted some insults in the direction of Alf, a man I knew he respected, perhaps even loved, and that, with the look on his face, told me that really he was breaking inside. Fortunately, though, it turned out that he had a lot more resilience, and self-confidence, than anyone could then have imagined.’
Whatever his private evaluation of Bally’s situation, and measurement of the effect his continued exclusion might have, Alf decided to roll the dice, one last time in the tournament it would prove, in the direction of an old-style winger. On this occasion it was the fine Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan who got the nod, but with only the same result as those of John Connelly and Terry Paine. All three wingers were fine, talented professionals but what they couldn’t do was indefinitely hold up Alf’s growing conviction that in 4-3-3, the magic formula unveiled in Madrid, lay his best chance of delivering the World Cup.
No doubt the most complicated question of all was to do with Jimmy Greaves. He made that statement of great confidence after victory in Poland, when he said that as far as he was concerned there was no doubt that he would share with Roger Hunt duties up front, but the course of the first two matches had not strengthened his case. Hunt, as usual, had run quite relentlessly and against Mexico he had been, as I said, increasingly relevant to all that we attempted.
By comparison, Jimmy was a much more peripheral figure and, most crucially, he had failed to score. For Jimmy and his elite breed that was the equivalent of being denied oxygen. He kept his place against France but his pensive expression suggested that at least a little of his natural swagger had gone missing.
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