My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  Chapter Nine

  Watching the Cup Final on Television

  UNBELIEVABLY, ALMOST UNFORGIVABLY, I’D never watched the 1959 FA Cup Final.

  I’d seen the goals countless times, especially the first: my father shrugging off the Luton Town full-back and cutting a perfect ball into the path of Roy Dwight. But I hadn’t seen the whole thing – we didn’t have a tape. Sometime in the 1970s my dad had tried to get one, writing to Bob Wilson who was then presenting the BBC’s FOOTBALL FOCUS. He’d sent us some highlights – twenty minutes’ worth – which apparently was all they had.

  The suspicion remained that there must be something more substantial in the archives, and when my father became seriously ill I’d thought about going back to ask again. But apart from one brief exchange in the hospital when he was first admitted – ‘I think I’m finished, don’t tell Mum’ – we’d never acknowledged that he was dying, and to flash his life before him on videotape seemed somehow an affront to his stoicism.

  So it was only afterwards that I called the BBC. I knew people who knew people and I wasn’t expecting it to be much of a problem. But word came back that Bob Wilson had been right the first time – all they had in the library was a highlights edit and shots of the homecoming parade through the streets of Nottingham. When I’d gone searching for my father’s appearance on the very first Quiz Ball – broadcast live from St Joseph’s Hall, Highgate in 1966 – I had been prepared for failure from the start. A football-themed quiz show that might never get off the ground was hardly likely to head the BBC’s archive priorities. But the 1959 FA Cup Final? How could they not have the 1959 FA Cup Final? My father’s finest hour wasn’t a wedding speech captured on Super 8 and liable to be lost in a house move, it was the broadcast record of the nation’s greatest sporting institution.

  ‘Yeah I know, I’m sorry, but we just don’t have it. I was really surprised myself.’ The Match of the Day librarian couldn’t have been more sympathetic, but the ’59 Cup Final seemed to have joined Dixon of Dock Green and early episodes of Dad’s Army among the ranks of the BBC’s disappeared.

  And that’s where I would have left it had it not been for Dave Pacey, the man who scored Luton’s only goal in the final. I’d called him up to talk about his memories of the goal and the game, when he let slip that he had the whole thing on tape – he’d got it from the BBC eighteen years earlier. This raised twin prospects: either the match was still crouching in the dark somewhere deep inside the BBC, invisible to the filing system because of a computer glitch, some cataloguing mistake; or – much worse than never having been kept at the time – it had been wiped only in the past couple of decades.

  I went back to my man at the BBC, who agreed to look again. He called me a couple of weeks later with some news: he’d located three uncatalogued rolls of film in the system which might be the Final. He wouldn’t know for certain until he’d ordered them up from the vaults and threaded them onto a machine. The VHS arrived a month later.

  There’s no preamble to the game, just a black-and-white clock. Film was too expensive to waste on preserving ‘Abide With Me’ and the teams walking out of the tunnel. The tape starts with a shot of the centre circle; the referee is checking his watch and three Luton players are standing round the ball waiting to kick off, each figure inside his own sooty aura of film grain. The camera pulls back slightly and there’s my father at the bottom of the screen with his back to me, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and rubbing his hands in anticipation.

  Kenneth Wolstenholme, the voice of all our football yesterdays whether we ever heard him commentate live or not, tells us that this is the seventy-eighth FA Cup Final, the thirty-first at Wembley. The game starts. He indicates the flow of play simply, naming the players as they assume and release possession: ‘Whitefoot, Gray, Imlach . . .’ The story of the match tells itself.

  ‘Whitefoot, Gray, Imlach’ is the prelude to Forest’s opening goal after nine and a half minutes. It’s a five-man move, with my father the only player to touch the ball more than once between the Forest half of the pitch and the back of the Luton net. A long kick by the Luton goalkeeper is headed infield from the left-back position by Joe McDonald. At seven o’clock on the centre circle Jeff Whitefoot pivots through the ball on the bounce, sending a casual-looking half-volley towards the left-wing. It’s actually a perfectly weighted pass but the Forest inside-left Billy Gray can’t resist the urge to tamper with it, jumping to add a little momentum with his head. The ball, which was on its way to my father’s feet, is now heading outside him towards the line.

  His first touch is the one that makes everything which follows possible. It’s a neat flick executed on the turn, using the weight of the incoming pass to redirect the ball – and himself – past his marker, Brendan McNally. Wrong-footed and realising he’s beaten, McNally reaches out to grab his opponent’s shirt, but my father shakes him off, and within two or three strides he’s got yards on the Luton right-back. The speed of the man is breathtaking. As he cuts in and heads for the box, the director panics and cuts too: tight on him haring towards the dead-ball line for no more than a second, then back again to the wide shot.

  Steady in the control room now, don’t lose your composure and ruin the only moving pictures of my father’s finest moments.

  As he enters the lower left-hand corner of the penalty area there’s a flick of the head to see what his options are. ‘Wilson’s in the middle . . .’ suggests Kenneth Wolstenholme. But my father has seen beyond him. Five defenders including McNally have tracked back into the area. Without breaking stride, he cuts them all out of the action with a tighter than right-angled ball back towards the edge of the box. As it clears the penalty spot Roy Dwight arrives to strike it first time.

  The ball hits the net and the goal slips untouched into the past. Unmediated, self-contained, perfect. It nestles into the memory, bedding in for posterity.

  Every goal we see on television now is remembered for us – immediately, serially, externally – before we get the chance to remember it for ourselves. Before we can register the experience of the singular unrepeatable moment, it’s already been repeated six times from four angles, so that what actually gets remembered is a seventh-generation copy – a fatally corrupted file, contaminated by analysis and diluted with all kinds of information that wasn’t in the original.

  Instinctively, my right hand pats the sofa beside me for the remote control, then I check myself and let the handshakes happen and the game restart in its own time. There’s no replay.

  Five minutes later my father swaps roles with his inside-forward, feeding Billy Gray out on the flank with a right-footed pass. Gray dummies inside, steps back and lofts an open invitation to the far post, where Tommy Wilson rises unchallenged to put a no-nonsense working man’s forehead to the ball. It all has the smoothness of inevitability. The Forest players are relaxed, they’ve been here before. Billy Walker brought them to Wembley during the week to walk on the pitch and practise climbing the steps to the Royal Box to get their medals.

  Up in the stand the wives sit together, sharing the worry. For once, their picture will be in the papers too – hatted and handbagged and captioned without first names of their own. It’s Mrs Roy Dwight whose worst fears will materialise today.

  They’ve already suffered a sort of trial by social ordeal. Their husbands left Nottingham early and enjoyed a relaxing week in Hendon: they went to Lord’s to watch the cricket; they played, rather than trained, on a local park near the hotel, putting down tracksuit tops for goals like schoolboys. A few of the committee men joined in and the players took great pleasure in putting them on their backsides. Billy Walker took the odd corner.

  The wives had to face the Savoy on their own. Plates of asparagus were set in front of them like straightened question marks to which they had no answer. The cutlery was a silver-plated trap set to go off if they dismantled it out of sequence. Waiters hell-bent on humiliating them sprinkled cheese on their soup.

&n
bsp; But after the game’s first quarter of an hour, even the most nervous among them has allowed herself the luxury of exhaling and starting to enjoy the spectacle. From her seat my mother can make out the polka dots on the Queen’s hat, below and to the left in the Royal Box. Further below, the Forest men are already two goals up and treating Luton the way they had the committee members on the park at Hendon.

  One committee man has made his own small contribution to their mood. Half an hour before kick-off Frank Chambers appeared in the dressing room. By this stage the players were each in their individual bubbles of concentration, performing the solo routines that would help them come together and perform as a team. Billy Gray was having a cold shower, Joe McDonald was smoking in the toilet, Bob McKinlay was waiting, making sure that everybody else had started to change before he began himself. My father had already cracked his pre-match egg into a glass of sherry and downed it in one, for stamina.

  This close to the game a suit, unless it belonged to the manager, was an unwelcome sight. Thirty seconds of awkward bonhomie and a couple of well-meaning platitudes to endure before getting back to the business at hand. But Frank Chambers had a ritual of his own to perform. He went round the players handing each one a gift – a pair of see-through frilly knickers for their other halves, specially made at his lingerie factory in Forest colours, a lace rosette on one side.

  ‘He produces these things just as we’re getting ready,’ says Chic Thomson. ‘It was madness, but it just broke all the tension anybody might have felt. I’ve never seen players so relaxed and I’ve played in some big games. Y’know, pointing in the crowd saying, “Look, there’s so-and-so.” And the way we started was absolutely wonderful, the football was tremendous. If Roy Dwight had stayed on the field we’d have made five or six, without any doubt.’

  On the tape, as on the field, the collision looks nothing special. It’s almost a minute later that my father kicks the ball out of play to allow Tommy Graham on with the magic sponge. He waggles Dwight’s right ankle and flexes the knee. He doesn’t know the leg’s broken. Neither does Dwight. While the camera checks on the injured Luton man he gets up to stamp his weight on it, and has collapsed again by the time we cut back.

  ‘No substitutes, of course, allowed – this is a competitive match,’ Wolstenholme reminds us.

  Subs are for friendlies. None is allowed in the league or the cup and won’t be for another half-dozen years. Remarkably, Forest have fielded the same eleven players from the 3rd Round to the Final. By the time the St John ambulancemen have performed their pallbearers’ walk with the stretcher, it’s looking as though they’ll have to play the last sixty minutes with ten.

  The unluckiest man in the stadium isn’t Roy Dwight, though. It’s Geoff Thomas. Dwight has a fractured shinbone, but he also has a goal and he’s going to get a winner’s medal. Thomas, a one-club player with fifteen years’ service at Forest, has been twelfth man for every round of the Cup. Now that injury has finally struck, all he’s called on to do is ride shotgun in the ambulance.

  At Wembley Hospital half a dozen or so male patients are gathered in their dressing gowns on a semicircle of chairs around the television set in Barham Ward. Suddenly, as though John Wayne had climbed off his horse and into the room from the afternoon feature film, the Cup Final turns from small-screen black and white to life-sized and somewhat surreal colour, as they’re asked to make way for the scorer of Forest’s first goal. Roy Dwight, minus his boots but otherwise still in his full kit, is lifted into a bed with a cage to keep the blankets off his right leg, and settles in to watch the second half.

  ‘It was sad when he went off because we were playing well’ – this is Johnny Quigley – ‘but second half your old man played out of his brains. It was hard playing with ten men at Wembley because it takes all the stamina out of you. You thought you were getting sucked under the ground. But your old man was going like a bomb, he had a tremendous game that day, tremendous. He was the best man on the park.’

  ‘Stewart played everywhere’ – Chic Thomson now – ‘Billy Gray sort of came back and played behind the other three, but Stewart was playing left-half, left-wing, centre-forward, outside-right. In fact, Bobby Mac says to me, “He’s going to keel over.” He never stopped, just tremendous.’

  I’ve been primed with these rave reviews of my dad’s performance long before sitting down with the tape. It’s hard not to feel a little like a critic measuring a film against impossibly rapturous advance word of mouth. But then I’m armed with all sorts of information that makes this a different match to watch now than it was to watch then, let alone to play in.

  I get special satisfaction when he steals the ball from Luton’s Billy Bingham – the same Billy Bingham who will sack him as first-team coach at Everton twenty-seven years later. A sort of pre-emptive revenge, but only for me. There’s a twinge of sympathy for a diving header that goes just wide from Bingham’s teammate Allan Brown – together he and my father will lead Blackpool to within a point of promotion, before they both get the push.

  Luton pull a goal back. In the stand my mother has nowhere to hide, except behind her hands. Along the row, Pat Thomson looks down at hers and realises they’ve destroyed her hat. Her husband throws himself at a swinging boot to smother an equaliser and needs treatment. Geoff Thomas is on his way back from the hospital, he’ll miss everything except the presentation.

  ‘No doubt there are going to be quite a few critics eating their words at twenty minutes to five . . .’ says Kenneth Wolstenholme. This is the first Cup Final for a decade without a team from the game’s northern heartland. Plenty of columnists have written it off in advance.

  The film reel changes. Chic Thomson jumps back in time during the overlap, lining up to take a goal kick twice.

  ‘Imlach, right back with his own defence . . .’

  My father’s putting in a tackle by the corner flag. Billy Gray’s ahead of him, socks rolled down, suffering cramp. The pitch looks perfect, but players from both sides have already told me how much of it is sand. Now he’s in the centre circle, picking up the ball just inside his own half. He’s at the edge of the Luton box before he has to check stride; he hasn’t beaten anybody, he’s just outrun them. There’s no Forest player to cross to.

  ‘Well, he’s got to do this on his own . . . goal kick to Luton Town with eleven minutes to play . . .’

  As the goalkeeper runs to retrieve the ball, the Luton left-back is doubled over from the chase, his hands on his thighs as he tries to recover his breath. My father walks past him, jaw flexing.

  Of course, he’s not winning the game single-handedly – I’m watching it single-mindedly, choosing moments. If I were Bob McKinlay’s son – or Jack Burkitt’s or Johnny Quigley’s or Chic Thomson’s – I could choose others. But he’s giving everything. And as the pitch and the pressure start to tell on the players of both teams, he seems, as he did in those charity games I remember as a child, to be playing at a different speed from everybody else.

  ‘Morton a little slow and it’s Imlach . . .’

  In the ninetieth minute he steals the ball off the toe of the Luton centre-forward at the halfway line, and he’s close enough to shoot before anyone closes him down. After ninety-two he wins the ball on the right from a goal kick, runs it out of play, and wins it back again from the Luton throw-in.

  ‘Up to three minutes of injury time now . . . this must be heartbreaking for Luton Town supporters. And for Nottingham Forest supporters enough to bring on a heart attack . . .’

  He’s still running after the final whistle. As a gaggle of Forest players fall into each other’s arms in the centre circle, he’s just visible racing through the bottom corner of the shot on his way back towards his own goal and – I imagine – his best friend, Bob McKinlay.

  In the main stand a dozen or so well-dressed women are in tears. At Wembley Hospital the staff are still waiting to treat Roy Dwight. Only once he’s seen Jack Burkitt lift the cup and accept two medals from the Queen will h
e allow them to wheel him away for X-rays. He’s thinking about the midweek walk-through, grateful to Billy Walker for giving him a mental template of the view from the Royal Box, which he can match up with the scenes on television. But before they can collect their medals, the players have to pick up their teeth.

  ‘A lot of us had teeth missing,’ says Chic Thomson, ‘four or five of us, including your dad. And we were deciding what to do with ’em because somebody had said, “You can’t meet the Queen without your teeth.” And of course we didn’t play in them, we usually left them in the dressing room. Somebody said, “We’ll put them in Charlie’s cap.” I said, “No, what happens if someone belts one in and they’re all mashed up, it’ll be worse.”

  ‘So in the end Tommy Graham had a big red handkerchief, like the kind of thing you’d put on the end of a pole if you were leaving home, and we put our teeth in there. Nobody noticed it, but at the end of the game Tommy had the hanky out and he was saying, “Come on, get your teeth,” and I’m saying, “Well, they’re not mine, y’know.” It was great.’

  Chic got his. My father’s stayed in the red handkerchief, forgotten in the excitement. The Queen would just have to deal with it. You can see the gap in his smile as the players fight their way off the field through the ranks of the Royal Marine Band, marching out of the tunnel in the opposite direction for the post-match ceremonials. His jaw is still flexing, as though the mechanism takes a few minutes to wind down once he’s stopped running, and his arm keeps shooting up into the air to acknowledge someone he sees, or thinks he sees, in the stand.

  When the Forest players get to the foot of the steps something strange happens. It’s as though they have a collective flashback to years of pre-season punishment running up and down the stands; they all break into a sort of decorous jog and mount the steps to the Royal Box like dressage horses. There’s half a suspicion that they’ll launch into a sequence of star jumps in front of a baffled monarch when they reach the top.