Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  It would be absurd to claim that the eras of Billy Wright and Bobby Moore were ‘better’ or more important than the era of David Beckham and Wayne Rooney. The eras were separated by decades of rapid social change so they were just different from each other. There are any number of ways in which this can be illustrated. One might be a comparison of the ‘autobiographies’ of famous sportsmen. The World’s My Football Pitch by Billy Wright, published by Stanley Paul in November 1953, is unlikely ever to join the ranks of the literary classics. Possibly November 1953 was an unfortunate month to choose to launch a book ‘written’ by the captain of the England football team, as his side were notoriously beaten at Wembley 6–3 by the superb Hungary team on the last Wednesday afternoon of the month. The defeat, England’s first by a foreign team on home soil, provoked a national trauma that was not healed until Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup in July 1966. A work of no distinguishable literary merit written at a time of sporting humiliation is perhaps best consigned to oblivion, but what makes the book so interesting more than sixty years after its publication is the manner in which it is written and in particular its genuine reverence for the hierarchy of the Football Association.

  On the first page Wright tells the story of the ‘splendid banquet’ given in his honour by the FA at the end of the 1951–2 season to mark Wright’s breaking of Bob Crompton’s record of forty-one England caps which had come to an end when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo.

  The banquet was conducted in that kind manner which has become their trademark… Mr Amos Brook Hirst, the FA Chairman… shook hands, congratulated me, and then revealed a grand human touch by announcing that Mr Arthur Drewry, for so long chairman of England selectors, had been invited to make the presentation…

  Mr Drewry rose and handed out a pat on the back which made me blush. I looked beyond the handsome figure of Mr Drewry to the many tables packed tight with friends and acquaintances...

  We should perhaps at this point withdraw into the antechamber at Lancaster Gate, where BBC radio reporters used to lurk in the days when the wooden balls were slipped into the velvet bag and given a good shake before the draw for the next round of the FA Cup. We could then leave Billy and his all-male dinner-jacketed acquaintances to their misty-eyed reminiscences of an international career which had begun in a war-weary country six years earlier.

  Sporting biographies, and that pernicious innovation the sporting autobiography, which the subject has neither written nor, in some cases, even read, tend to follow slavish lines of fashion. Currently, the books that sell the best are those which reveal to a gawping public the tensions of the dressing room. It appears that cricket fans who used to flock to the ground to admire the virtuosity of Kevin Pietersen at the crease want to read about their hero’s apparent contempt for his team-mates and management staff rather than his duels with the best bowlers of his time. Similarly, fans who have admired Roy Keane as a footballer are fascinated by his loathing of the man who had been his manager during his successful years at Manchester United.

  Books that contain such controversial opinions and lurid revelations are seized upon eagerly by newspapers for serialisation in an attempt to boost circulation. Editors of radio and television programmes can’t get enough of them because they are quite sure that this is what their listeners and viewers want and that their programme’s ratings will benefit accordingly. It is all a long way from Billy Wright’s reverent gratitude for the beneficence bestowed in kindly paternal benevolence by the Football Association in May 1952.

  Wright discovered that he had been appointed captain of England for the match against Northern Ireland in October 1948 while sitting on the bus that took him from the Wolves training ground to his digs in Tettenhall. On the seat next to him was a large ham he was taking home for his landlady, Mrs Colley. In rationed Britain, this present from the grateful people of Denmark, against whose national side Wright had recently appeared in an international match played in Copenhagen, was of considerable value. Alan Bennett’s film A Private Function, set at the time of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip in November 1947, makes clear the lengths to which British people might go in search of a loin of pork or a shoulder of ham.

  I made myself comfortable and feeling rather drowsy settled down to a smooth uneventful journey. ‘Congratulations,’ said a cheery voice from somewhere behind my left shoulder. ‘It’s a great honour to be chosen to captain England.’ I turned to see the clippie, Miss Helen Mearden, thrusting a copy of the Wolverhampton Express & Star at me. ‘Look in the Stop Press,’ she added quickly, obviously noting my look of blank disbelief. But she was right. The Stop Press informed me in an impersonal inky manner:

  England team to meet Ireland in Belfast: Swift (Manchester City); Scott (Arsenal) Howe (Derby); Wright (Wolves) capt. Franklin (Stoke) Cockburn (Manchester Utd); Matthews (Blackpool) Mortensen (Blackpool) Milburn (Newcastle United) Pearson (Manchester Utd) Finney (Preston).

  My hands were shaking quite literally with excitement as I re-read the paragraph time and time again. They were still shaking when we reached Tettenhall and, after a desperate scramble back into the bus to snatch up the forgotten ham, I ran every yard of the way home. ‘What’s all the excitement and hurry about?’ asked Mrs Colley. ‘Have you come into a fortune?’ ‘Better than that,’ I replied, ‘I’m captain of England.’

  Allowing some licence for the somewhat breathless prose of the ghost writer, the picture painted is nevertheless that of an overgrown child almost speechless with excitement. It chimed with the readers because that childlike enthusiasm combined with a deep-seated patriotism is presumably how they too saw the captaincy of the England football team in 1948. Such emotion leaves other nations mystified.

  In 2008, Fabio Capello arrived as manager of the England football team puzzling over the English obsession with their football captain and left after making a stand on retaining John Terry as his captain when his employers removed the armband from the Chelsea defender. At his first press conference, Capello was asked repeatedly which player he had in mind to lead England out at the start of his first match in charge. He dismissed the enquiry as an irrelevance to his wider task, which was to ensure that England qualified for the 2010 World Cup and then to make sure they were competitive when they got to South Africa. The assembled journalists, however, were not to be so casually dismissed. More questions on the topic followed: ‘Can you give us a hint, Fabio?’ ‘Can you tell us his initials, Fabio?’ It was partly mischievous, of course, but the mischief disguised a more profound anxiety. The journalists knew that Capello’s decision really mattered to their readers because for them the England football captain is anointed, not merely appointed.

  Gary Lineker, despite having been an England captain, understood Capello’s befuddlement after his own experience of playing in Spain:

  In England we probably overvalue the importance of the England football captaincy. In Barcelona, the players vote for who they want to be the captain. They vote for three or even four choices so if the captain who is the first choice is injured or dropped he remains as the squad captain but the guy the players voted as No. 2 will assume the armband and so it goes on. I’d never seen that till I went to Barcelona but when I saw that I started to think, ‘Why should the manager pick the captain anyway?’ The captain is the representative of the players and therefore should be chosen by the players. Eight times out of ten the manager would probably pick the same person. I thought that was a much better idea.

  That was not dissimilar to Capello’s stated position on arrival in 2008 because the Italian understood from his own experience of captaincy that it was given to the player on the side with the most caps. It was a reward for seniority, a label only, of no real consequence. By the time he resigned in 2012, ironically over the issue of captaincy, Capello understood very well that the captaincy of the England football team was like the captaincy of no other country.

  Where does this idiosyncratic feature of English sport
originate? The captain of the England cricket team, whether the Test or the one-day captain, wields considerably more influence on the field of play because the game is longer and more fluid than football and the options available – and therefore the decisions that he must make – are so much more numerous. He might lead the team on to the field after discussions with the coach about who would be the best bowlers to exploit the prevailing conditions, but once the opposition’s innings has started, the pitch – which appeared to be green when he won the toss and put the other side in to bat – might have turned out to be as flat as a pancake. Even more worrying, Anderson and Broad are both pitching the ball in their own half of the pitch and are being cut and pulled at will by Warner and Finch. All the carefully conceived plans to keep the Australians under control at the start of their innings have gone out of the window by the end of the sixth over. It is entirely up to the captain how to get England out of the mess they now find themselves in.

  The history of the England cricket team captains in the twentieth century is a useful comparative tool as we seek to examine the social or cultural origins of the mystique of the England football captain. Until the abolition of amateur status by MCC in November 1962 (not insignificantly, a date situated between the end of English football’s maximum wage in 1961 and the landmark decision in the George Eastham High Court case which was finally decided in July 1963) all England cricket captains (apart from the anomaly of Len Hutton) were amateurs and almost invariably they had some if only minimal contact with one of the two ancient universities. Even after the abolition, the captaincy was held by the former amateurs M. C. Cowdrey (Tonbridge and Brasenose College, Oxford), then E. R. Dexter (Radley and Jesus College, Cambridge), followed by M. J. K. Smith (Stamford School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford) before Ray Illingworth (Pudsey and Yorkshire) was reluctantly given the job and complicated matters by proving to be an outstanding captain and winning the Ashes in Australia in 1971.

  It is arguable that the qualities inculcated in the public schools in the Victorian era and in the ancient universities between 1850 and 1950 are fundamental to the English conception of sporting captaincy. Academic excellence was of little importance. If you could make a stab at translating Julius Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars from Latin to English that pretty much fitted you to run some part of the British Empire or change the bowling and set a new field at Lord’s. Being ‘clubbable’ was clearly important and the ability to shout ‘follow me, lads’ was as vital at the Sydney Cricket Ground as it was in the trenches on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The slaughter of ‘the flower of a nation’ during the Great War, with death making no distinction between officers and other ranks, calls to mind some aspect of captaincy. Whether you spoke fluent Latin and Greek or you could scarcely articulate an English sentence, what was required from an officer in the heat of battle was a quality of character and integrity sufficient to inspire others in what might well be a doomed cause.

  The ideals of muscular Christianity developed in the High Victorian Age rather weirdly persist in the realm of contemporary English sport and particularly sporting captaincy, as they do not appear to survive in other areas of national life. Victorians placed considerable emphasis on integrity, courage and honour because those qualities built character. Sport was encouraged precisely because the playing of football, cricket and rugby pre-eminently led directly to the display of those virtues. Of course, a gentleman like the good Dr W. G. Grace was the most blatant cheat, but the money-making activities of this ‘shamateur’ and his determination to win by any means never affected the public perception of his heroic status. Is the difference in response to Grace then and John Terry now simply one of class snobbery?

  Even in the meritocratic twenty-first century it is interesting that England cricket captains such as Andrew Strauss (Radley College) and Alastair Cook (Bedford School) retain something of the social class of the old Oxbridge-dominated days. The captain of the England football team, however, requires qualities different from his cricketing counterpart. It is perhaps easier to define what an England football captain should not be than to define precisely the attributes he must possess. David Bernstein was the FA chairman when John Terry was dismissed as England’s captain and in a revealing interview he gave at the time to Matt Dickinson of The Times he made plain the qualities he thought the captain of the England football team should display.

  There’s something particular about an England football captain and actually I believe rather different to the way captains are perceived on the continent. And when you look at the statue outside Wembley of Bobby Moore, you can hardly say more than that because the history of Bobby and Billy Wright and so on is the stature that one is looking for from England captains. This particular accusation [of racially abusing the Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand] – which of course is totally unproven, I must keep saying that – the FA board, 14 people who had a uniformed view on this, felt that going into a European Championship with all the connotations that are involved and a long period to go between now and the championships, that it was an overhanging issue that was not appropriate and not in the best interests of England for that to be allowed to continue.

  It is not surprising that John Terry was defended by Capello as well as Chelsea supporters. He was, for a long time, the best central defender in the country, unstinting in his effort, thoughtful in his positioning and over the course of his career he won more than a dozen trophies. He was, however, a constantly controversial figure and his misbehaviour provoked widespread condemnation long before the Anton Ferdinand incident which lost him the England captaincy. Previous to that he had been one of the Chelsea players who had abused American tourists after 9/11, he had urinated on the floor of a nightclub and had to deny allegations that he had taken an undercover journalist on a tour of the Chelsea training ground in return for cash. There were also the widely reported infidelities, including an affair with the former girlfriend of his team-mate Wayne Bridge. It could be argued that it was less surprising that he lost the captaincy than that he had hung on to it for so long. As a central defender and as an inspiring captain he had many virtues. As a role model for the rest of society, especially as far as impressionable youngsters were concerned, he had none apart from those playing qualities already mentioned.

  One reason why it was not appropriate for Terry to continue in the role clearly was to do with the impending court case arising from the Anton Ferdinand incident, which would not be heard until after the 2012 European Championships had concluded. A second was the seriousness of the charge, but much more interesting is Bernstein’s instinctive evoking of the image of Terry’s two main predecessors, Bobby Moore and Billy Wright, two men cursed by a fondness for more alcohol than was good for them or indeed for the image of the England football captain. Happily for his clean-cut image, Wright’s alcoholism did not take hold of him until after he had finished playing; while Moore never allowed the effects of heavy drinking to impair the majesty of his performances on the field. He was fortunate nonetheless that his alcoholic excesses did not become known to the general public during his playing career. Nowadays, players are at the mercy of anyone with a mobile phone and a thirst for malice and personal publicity.

  Both Wright and Moore played in a post-war era in which the captaincy of England automatically conferred on the holder of the office the odour of instant sanctity. To an extent it still does so – just as long as the captain is not the subject of negative comment for actions committed either on or off the field of play. It is arguably only England that demands such a high price of its football captains. Matt Dickinson makes the point that

  You can have a lengthy ethical debate as to whether what Ryan Giggs was alleged to have done is worse than what John Terry was alleged to have done. But when Diego Maradona is appointed the captain of Argentina nobody sits there for a second worrying about his history of drug addiction. When he deliberately punches the ball past Shilton with his fist none of the papers
headline an article that criticises him for not representing the kind of Argentina we want people to see.

  The two ‘untouchables’, Wright and Moore, both captained their country for ninety matches and made over 100 appearances in an England shirt, but the reason their stars shone so brightly for so long was because in the 1950s and 1960s supporters of the England football team had no appetite for the demystification of their heroes in any walk of life they admired. There were plenty of seemingly untainted heroes around in those early post-war days: Hutton and Compton, Matthews and Finney, Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Montgomery, John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing – the news of whose successful conquest of Mount Everest reached Britain on 2 June 1953, the day of the coronation of the radiant young Queen Elizabeth II. A month previously, Stanley Matthews had finally won his FA Cup winner’s medal to national rejoicing; Gordon Richards – knighted in the Queen’s Honours List – finally won his first Derby at the end of his career four days after the coronation; and at the end of August, Denis Compton swept a four down to the gas holders at The Oval to regain the Ashes for England. At the dawn of the New Elizabethan Age, Great Britain appeared to have a surfeit of heroes in many fields of sporting endeavour. Even though the Hungarians scored thirteen times in two matches against the England football team, in the national consciousness the 7–1 defeat in Budapest in May 1954 was quickly obliterated by the triumph of Dr Roger Bannister who ran the first sub-four-minute mile that same month.

  How heroic can a hero be if his behaviour away from his principal field of activity does not arouse the same universal acclaim that it attracts on the field? Compton held what people now would certainly regard as unappealingly supportive opinions about the South African government during the period of apartheid; Montgomery’s egotistical behaviour provoked one of Churchill’s great bons mots – ‘In war unbeatable: in peace unbearable’. Recent research suggests Montgomery was a sufferer from Asperger’s syndrome. Churchill himself, with his gargantuan appetite for alcohol, would not have escaped condemnation in our more censorious age. A BBC television programme about the 1945 general election, transmitted in May 2015, included at least one contributor who passionately argued that Churchill had been drunk during the great wartime speeches that had united a nation engaged in a life or death struggle against fascism.