Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  There would have been no problem had the match been postponed, as they all believed it would be. Unexpectedly, however, it started on time but even so there would have been no problem if West Ham had won or just drawn and taken Blackpool down to London for a replay. The problem was the 4–0 defeat by a Second Division team on a frozen pitch. On learning of the players’ breaking of their curfew via an outraged West Ham supporter who had seen the four players in 007 and who – having witnessed the disaster at Bloomfield Road – was still steaming on Monday morning, manager Ron Greenwood felt deeply hurt at being let down by the four. Their punishment could not be announced immediately because, by pure coincidence, this was the week that Moore featured on This is Your Life. Moore’s response to his eventual suspension by the club was that the incident had been blown up out of all proportion: ‘I know that when you are England captain, people are always looking for little chinks in your armour, little slip-ups that they can cash in on, so I tried not to give them the chance.’

  The relationship between Greenwood and Moore, which had been in decline since the contractual standoff in 1966, now fractured. The manager was angry; the captain retreated into his shell to such a degree that he barely contributed anything at team meetings. His silence undermined Greenwood’s authority and so it continued. His captaincy style had always been quiet, the players aware of who was captain because of Moore’s aura and his remarkable sense of anticipation which enabled him, even when he had lost much of the small amount of speed he had once had, still to be in the right place at the right time to break up an attack and start one of his own. For England this lack of flamboyance did not matter because the national side had Alan Ball and others who could shout. One of the many qualities of the 1966 side was that there were almost eleven captains, such was the maturity of that team. Moore was the symbol of the side and the right man to be hoisted on to the shoulders of his team-mates but it was, as Ramsey always wanted, a team effort.

  For West Ham it was different. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were a poor side and they looked to their captain, the captain of England, to provide visible leadership. This Moore failed to do, whether deliberately or not. He appeared an isolated figure. The word frequently used about him was that he was ‘aloof’ but, of course, that was intrinsic to Moore’s character. The calm reassurance that he conveyed when he was at his best as a player was in part the result of that aloofness. Greenwood wanted to sack Moore in 1970, just after he had finished runner-up in the poll for the European Footballer of the Year. The worsening relationship was caused by more than the fracas after Blackpool. There was a slackness and lack of discipline throughout the playing squad which made West Ham an almost dysfunctional club. When Greaves moved from White Hart Lane to Upton Park even he was shocked by the lack of discipline and the amount of drinking that went on. It was tragic for the supremely gifted Greaves that he should have ended up there because he was well on the way to full-blown alcoholism. When Greenwood said Moore could go and play for Clough at Derby and then reneged on the agreement, it upset Moore but it wasn’t entirely unexpected, such was the lack of trust between the two men.

  Off the field, Moore decided that as his playing career wound down and he was no longer the captain of England, which had an intrinsic commercial value, he would seek to secure his financial future by investing in various businesses. His mock-Tudor residence in Chigwell which had cost him £11,500 was sold for £41,000. He commissioned an architect to build a new house which cost £80,000 to design and build and was called Morlands. When he spotted a charming manor house between Chigwell and Abridge in the Essex countryside he decided it would be the perfect setting for a country club. Woolston Hall would comprise a restaurant, discotheque, cocktail and lounge bars, a sauna, a golf driving range, a swimming pool and tennis courts. The operation was a fiasco. Debts mounted as the project suffered from a lack of fiscal management and it soared wildly over budget. For some reason Moore attracted the worst of luck and the worst of company. There were arson attempts, reports of gunshots in the vicinity and theft on a grand scale as he tried to bring his vision to life by demanding the best fixtures and fittings. Woolston Hall opened in August 1972 but was sold early in 1974 during the three-day week with trading losses of £242,000 and a total debt of more than £530,000. Moore was not the only investor but in the end he was left with all the bills. Moore was an honourable man but he was never the businessman he thought he could be. He never recovered his financial equilibrium.

  Moore had shown an interest in money since those steely negotiations with West Ham in 1961 over the extra £2 a week to take his wages up to £30. The failure of Woolston Hall meant that Moore finished his football career worrying about how to make ends meet and pay the bills. Although the marriage to Tina was by now starting to show cracks he apologised to his wife for being unable to buy her the champagne dinners he thought she deserved. He had one last chance at financial restitution when he was approached by Mark McCormack who offered to do for him what he had done for Arnold Palmer, whom he had turned into Arnold Palmer Inc. McCormack’s agency fee was 20 per cent rather than the 10 per cent that Moore had been used to giving to Jack Turner who had done so well to get him that column in Tit-Bits. Moore’s mind was made up when he realised McCormack wanted 20 per cent of everything, including his football salary. Moore turned down the American and with him went any chance that he could enjoy a life after football commensurate with his achievements in it.

  All he could do was to play on for as long as he could. He eventually moved to Fulham on a free transfer in 1974, joining up with Alan Mullery, and together they helped to take the Second Division club to the FA Cup final where they met, inevitably, a resurgent West Ham United. It was to be his last appearance at Wembley but it was not to be a successful one as his old club won 2–0. He went off to America to play in the NASL for San Antonio in Texas but he returned for a final season with Fulham in 1976–7 when he was joined by Rodney Marsh and George Best, possibly the two most ill-disciplined players in English football. In front of The Big Match Sunday-afternoon television audience, Marsh and Best tackled each other, causing guffaws in the commentary box and putting smiles on the faces of many, but for the man who had captained England it must have seemed like exhibition football or a charity match; in either case it was a long way from Wembley 1966 and Guadalajara 1970. It didn’t help Fulham much either as they went from ninth in Moore’s first season to twelfth in his next and seventeenth in his last. He was thirty-seven but he still refused to hang up his boots, travelling to Denmark to play for Herning Fremad, a club in their Third Division. The engagement lasted for just nine games. He expected an offer from a Football League club to become their manager but all that materialised was one from non-league Oxford City and then a brief, unsuccessful stay at Southend United in 1984.

  His assistant during his time with Oxford in the Isthmian League was Harry Redknapp, who went on to far better things, but then Redknapp had what it took to be a manager and Moore, for all his ability as a player, did not. Moore was like Bobby Charlton and Gordon Banks who had similarly disastrous times in charge of Preston North End and Telford United respectively, yet, ironically, it was they who were the indisputably three world-class figures in the side of 1966. Jack Charlton, who did not possess anything like the talent of his younger brother, knew exactly what it took to be a manager. It is possible that the offers did not materialise because it became known in the boardrooms of Football League clubs that Moore simply lacked the ruthlessness necessary to be a successful manager.

  The 1980s were not a particularly happy decade for Moore. He left Tina, who had been so conspicuously by his side during the triumphs of the late 1960s, because he had fallen in love with Stephanie, the woman who was to become his second wife. The newspapers treated him kindly. They owed him that much and Moore must have been grateful given his horror of exposing in public personal matters which he was desperate to keep private. He had a good time in Hungary on location in John Husto
n’s Escape to Victory, which was the director’s equivalent of playing out the dregs of a fine career with a Danish Third Division side. The footballers – Moore, Pelé, Summerbee, Ardiles, John Wark and most of the then Ipswich Town team – gave better performances than the actors. Michael Caine must have been grateful to have been given a double as good as Kevin Beattie.

  Michael Caine and Bobby Moore pose before the charity premiere of Escape to Victory, September 1981 (Ray Moreton / Getty Images).

  Other gainful employment included stints as a pundit at matches broadcast by Capital Gold and as a journalist for the Sunday Sport. He never complained about this apparent fall from grace but it must have been depressing for all those fans who admired him so greatly to discover that he was working in a newspaper office above a dildo factory. Predictably, he told few people about his final illness, which he bore with all the fortitude and dignity he had displayed on the field in his years of glory. He remained heroic to the last.

  In retrospect, it is possible to see that Moore’s performance in the defeat to Brazil was the pinnacle of his career. It confirmed for the world the English belief that Bobby Moore was the greatest defender in world football. At the end of that game, Moore and Pelé exchanged shirts, their faces wreathed in smiles of warmth and friendship. The image of the bare-chested Moore and Pelé, their faces full of admiration for each other’s ability and the manner in which they played the game, is one that elevates the very nature of sport and the sporting contest.

  In one of the last scenes of Oliver Stone’s biographical film Nixon (1995), the president wanders through the White House with Henry Kissinger. It is the night before Nixon is due to resign the office of president and the two men stop in front of the official portrait of Nixon’s nemesis, John F. Kennedy, the painted face downcast and thoughtful. Nixon turns to Kissinger and says simply, ‘When they look at him, they see who they want to be. When they look at me, they see who they are.’ When we look at Bobby Moore on the shoulders of his team-mates in 1966, or in this unforced natural pose with Pelé, we see football as we want to see it, as Bobby More at his best portrayed it – committed, sporting, skilful and moving.

  Moore, like Jack Kennedy, died young. He died before the negative aspects of twenty-four-hour rolling news channels made their intrusive presence felt. Moore came from an age when we knew little of the true nature of our sporting heroes, and his biographer Matt Dickinson believes that that is how Moore wanted it. It may well be that we do, too, that we prefer to revel in the golden myth of England’s greatest captain – in the idyll that was 1966 – rather than engage with the more complicated truth. The image we hold of Bobby Moore up to and including the World Cup finals in Mexico in 1970 may not be the whole man but it is the best part of Man.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE AGE OF GARY LINEKER

  Gary Lineker celebrates after scoring for England against West Germany during the World Cup semi-final in Turin, 4 July 1990 (Chris Smith / Popperfoto / Getty Images).

  Gary Lineker’s life before he was elevated by his goals and the fame that accompanied them was not unlike that of Bobby Moore or, for that matter, that of thousands of boys growing up obsessed with sport in the 1960s and 1970s. Lineker was born in Leicester and displayed his uncanny ability to score goals from an early age. His parents, Barry and Margaret, had so much faith in his potential that they undertook a troublesome inconvenient move of house to make sure their free-scoring son attended a football-playing school. When Gary was ten the family moved out of the city and bought a house at Kirby Muxloe, a village to the west of Leicester.

  Between the time that I took the Eleven Plus and getting the result, we moved house. In the county there was only one grammar school that I could go to and it was a school that played rugby not football so I was sent off to live with my grandparents in the city for about six months whilst my parents looked for another house to move back into the city to enable me to go to a football school because the same thing had happened to my dad. He had passed the Eleven Plus and went to a rugby-playing school and regretted it for the rest of his life. He said, ‘I’m not letting that happen to you.’ I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised I passed the Eleven Plus so there was no huge celebration or anything like that.

  It is probably no coincidence that two of the four England captains whose lives form the centrepiece of this book passed the Eleven Plus, but Lineker understandably believes that academic attainment is no way to judge the intelligence of a footballer:

  Footballers are a cross section of working-class society and generally they come out of tough areas, so I wouldn’t have expected many of them to have passed the Eleven Plus. There would be the odd one but not many of them. Frank Lampard went to a private school and he’s got A levels and I’ve certainly played with players who had university degrees. Some footballers are bright. To get to the top of the game you have to have a degree of intelligence even if it’s just a sense of spatial awareness. Things that go through a footballer’s brain when he’s playing are phenomenal when you think about it.

  Gary went to the City of Leicester Boys’ Grammar School, where they played football. At weekends he was involved both in games for his school and club games for Aylestone Park. Prolific from an early age, he scored 200 goals in one season for his school team. Plenty of clubs scouted him but Gary’s grandfather Harold knew Ray Shaw, who was the chief scout at Filbert Street, and Gary duly signed schoolboy forms there. Gary had the same placid temperament as his grandfather who had also been a promising schoolboy player but there was no money in football in those days and he had gone into the family business, G. A. Lineker & Son, a fruit and vegetable stall in the covered market in Leicester town centre. He was followed by his own son, Barry, Gary’s father. The life of a market-stall holder clearly held no attraction for Gary: ‘My dad sold the stall in the market for a few quid when he retired ten years ago. That was bloody hard work. It probably gave me the drive to succeed in football. Getting up at four in the morning and work all day till late in the evening like my dad did? No thanks.’

  Barry Lineker had supported Leicester City all his life so Gary and his brother Wayne were given season tickets from the age of eight. There were thirteen apprentices taken on to Leicester City’s books along with Gary Lineker, but he was the only one who made a successful transition to the life of a professional footballer. It helped that he continued to live at home as he didn’t suffer the social upheaval that frequently derails young boys who have to leave home and live in a strange city once they have signed associate forms.

  Lineker left school with four O levels, a number which he could have doubled had he bothered to apply himself, for his teachers quickly realised that he was a bright lad. His aptitude for languages became very clear when he was transferred to Barcelona in 1986 and then, in 1992 at the end of his career, to Nagoya Grampus Eight in Japan. His headmaster issued the traditional warning that he couldn’t expect to make a living playing football, but he was never going to choose any career other than a sporting one. He was a fine free-scoring batsman as well and, if he did not make the grade at Filbert Street, he thought he would have a good chance of doing so at Grace Road because he also captained Leicestershire Schoolboys at cricket. In being talented at both sports he was by no means unique. Football was not a year-round sport before television told youngsters it was and all boys who loved sport played cricket in the summer. As late as the 1980s there were still footballing county cricketers like Phil Neale of Worcestershire who played for Scunthorpe United alongside Ian Botham. Leicestershire’s Chris Balderstone, Worcestershire’s Ted Hemsley and Warwickshire’s Jim Cumbes had only just retired from professional football at the end of the previous decade.

  When Gary Lineker emerged as a clean-cut English hero in the early 1980s, a new, television-age version of the sepia newspaper displaying the photographs of Billy Wright and the colour magazine promoting Bobby Moore, his arrival was welcomed with relieved gratitude by a nation that had had very lit
tle to celebrate since Martin Peters had scored the goal that had put England 2–0 up in the 1970 quarter-final that afternoon in León. The 1960s had seen some unpalatable moments. The League Cup final between Arsenal and Leeds United in 1968 had been a showpiece occasion at Wembley that displayed all the worst traits in English football. It ended in a miserable 1–0 win for Leeds courtesy of a goal by the left-back Terry Cooper, but with the acquisition of that first trophy Revie’s Leeds were on their way. It would be grossly unfair to blame the rise of negative football on Revie’s team. What we all knew was that in players like Bremner, Giles, Gray, Lorimer and Clarke, Leeds had footballers of undoubted talent. It was frustrating that they seemed to prefer to kick opponents instead of outplaying them, which they could do when they set their minds to it.

  The 1960s had been a decade that had started with the delights of Tottenham Hotspur’s Double-winning side and ended with Manchester United’s European Cup-winning side boasting the talents of Best, Law and Charlton. Unlike today’s utterly predictable Premier League in which Leicester City’s unexpected success in 2015–16 was greeted with understandable hosannas by supporters all over the country, there were at least half a dozen teams every season who could have won the league. It was the time of Shankly’s first great Liverpool side of Callaghan, Hunt and St John and of the Everton trio of midfield match-winners in the shape of Kendall, Ball and Harvey. Manchester City had their own holy trinity of Lee, Bell and Summerbee and Arsenal were building a side on its way to the Double of 1970–71 including Radford, Kennedy and George. Hugh McIlvanney later wrote: ‘Much of what passed for glamour and creativity in the 60s was sham but the decade was a genuinely distinguished period for football in England with Moore, George Best and Bobby Charlton at the apex of a broadly based pyramid of exceptional talent.’