Читать книгу Sir Alf - Leo McKinstry - Страница 10

Within months of transferring from Southampton to Spurs in the summer of 1949, Alf had justified the move by regaining his place in the England team after he had lost it to his Saints full-back rival Bill Ellerington. Languishing in the Saints reserves, his cause would have been hopeless. But his superb form for Tottenham soon attracted the England selectors, and he was picked for the match against Italy at White Hart Lane. England managed to win 2–0, but the result was harsh on the Italians, who had dominated much of the game and had only been prevented from scoring through a memorable display of goalkeeping by Bert Williams. Alf himself had a difficult match, not just in coping with the Italian winger Carapellese, but also in working with right-half Billy Wright. The Daily Sketch commented: ‘Wright could not be satisfied with his performance. There were times in the game when he went too far upfield, leaving Alf Ramsey exposed to the thrusting counter-attacks of the quick and clever Italian forwards.’ But, as always, Alf was learning, and the key lesson he took from the game was the importance of positional play. ‘That November afternoon I realized more than ever before that it is sometimes more important to watch the man rather than the ball, to watch where the man you are marking runs when he has parted with the ball,’ he wrote.

Alf had performed creditably enough, however, and soon became a fixture in the England team, winning 31 caps in succession. One of his fellow players in that Italian game was the revered Preston winger Sir Tom Finney, who was immediately impressed by Alf:

I felt he was a really outstanding full-back, with a good idea of how the game should be played. He was very good at using the ball; unlike some others, he never seemed just to punt it up the field and hope that it got to one of his own side. He always felt that the game should be played on the floor. But he was not particularly fast, and I don’t think he liked playing against people who were clever on the ball and quick.

Like most of the Tottenham players, Sir Tom never found it easy to mix with Alf;

To be honest, he was a bit of a loner. He was not easy-going. He did not suffer fools gladly. He was a theorist who had his own ideas on how the game should be played, but he kept those ideas to himself. He had a very quiet personality, never swore much. I always got on all right with him but I never found that he was a fella who wanted to talk a lot. I would not say that he had many great friends in the England set-up. Unlike some less experienced players who have just broken through into the international team, Alf never felt the need to link up with anyone.

According to Sir Tom, though Alf was generally ‘very serious’ he could display an odd, dry sense of humour. On one occasion, when Spurs had drawn with Preston at Deepdale in the FA Cup, Sir Tom popped his head round the corner of the Spurs dressing-room to say hello to Alf, who was, after all, an England colleague. In his account in his autobiography, Finney wrote:

Alf, who was standing close to the door, seemed quite animated.

‘Not much point you lot coming all the way to London for the reply,’ he barked. ‘There will be nothing for you at Spurs.’

I was taken aback, not so much by what had been said but more by who had said it. I looked Alf in the eyes for a moment but it was impossible to tell whether he was being aggressive, jocular or simply mischievous. He was dead right though – four days later we lost by a single goal at White Hart Lane.

It was always an absurdity that Sir Tom Finney, one of the finest footballers in history, should have to run a business as a plumber in Preston because his earnings from the game throughout the forties and fifties were so meagre. When he and Alf played against Italy in 1949, the maximum wage stood at just £12 a week, while England players received a match fee of just £30, plus £ 1-a-day expenses if the team were playing abroad. It was a semi-feudal system, one where players were tied to their clubs even against their will, since the clubs held their registration and no move was possible without the directors’ permission.

Yet this oppressive relationship was only a reflection of the deeper malaise in football at the time. England was the nation that gave football to the world in the 19th century, but it had failed to progress much since then. Complacently living in the past, the game’s administrators and journalists still told themselves that English football was the finest in the world. The evidence for this global supremacy, it was claimed, lay in the fact that England had never been beaten by a foreign side at home. It was not strictly true even in 1949, when the Republic of Ireland won 2–0 at Goodison Park, but, despite all the years of bitter enmity across the Irish Sea and Ireland having competed in two World Cups as a sovereign state, Eire was transformed into a home nation for the purposes of maintaining the undefeated record. Alf’s trip with Southampton to Brazil in 1948 had shown him the rapid developments that were happening elsewhere in the world, especially in terms of tactics and equipment. But England clung to the reassuring, outdated certainties of W–M formations and ankle-wrapping boots. Training was hopelessly unsuited to a modern, fast-moving game. Indeed, many coaches still clung to the grotesque notion that professionals should be deprived of the ball during the week, so that they would be more hungry for it on Saturday. In place of perfecting their ball skills, they had to carry out endless laps of the track. ‘The dislike of the ball was pretty universal in training. I thought it was crazy,’ says Sir Tom Finney. The physical treatment of players was equally primitive. It was usually carried out by a former club stalwart who knew nothing of dealing with injuries.

The paralysis within English football was perhaps most graphically highlighted in the antique way the FA and the Football League were run. Both were managed more like a somnolent Oxford college than a professional sports body. The Football Association, which was composed largely of representatives from the counties and old universities, had a certain contempt for men who earned their living from the game. Snobbery, poor record keeping and amateurism were rife throughout the organization. When Stanley Rous first became secretary in 1934, there were complaints about his inappropriate dress for matches. ‘I would remind you,’ said one old councillor, ‘that your predecessor would go to matches in a top hat and frock coat.’ This kind of nonsense was still carrying on after the war, with FA members more worried about protocol than performance. The Football League was just as bad. The Yorkshireman Alan Hardaker, who was later to be compared to a cross between Caligula and Jimmy Cagney because of his autocratic methods, arrived at the League’s headquarters in Preston in 1951, as deputy to the secretary Frederick Howarth. Hardaker was shocked at what he found. Housed in an old vicarage, the League kept no proper records and stored files in the attics. Like some Victorian colonialist, Howarth relied on telegrams rather than the telephone. His loathing for the press equalled that for modern technology. ‘Howarth was against change of any sort, particularly if it meant more work for him,’ wrote Hardaker. As a result, ‘The League was like a machine that had been lying in a corner for three quarters of a century.’

The antiquated approach extended to the selection of the national team. What should have been the job of the England manager was instead in the hands of a group of opinionated, often elderly, figures who had absolutely no experience of international football. The eight FA selectors were inordinately proud of their role and enjoyed their trips abroad, but they disastrously lacked judgement or any long-term vision. Riddled with prejudices, often displaying blatant bias towards players from their own clubs, they showed no consistency, no understanding of the needs of modern football. ‘There was always this chopping and changing. Someone would have a tremendous game for England and then be dropped, for no reason,’ says Sir Tom Finney. At their meetings, the selectors would go through each position in turn, seeking nominations and then holding a vote to decide the choice if there were a dispute. On occasions, they could be breathtakingly ignorant. In his first games for England, Bobby Moore was frequently mistaken by one selector for the Wolves midfielder Ron Flowers, purely because they both had blond hair. Similarly, John Connelly, the Burnley winger, recalled talking to a selector during the 1962 World Cup in Chile: ‘All the time it was Alan this, Alan that. He thought I was our reserve goalkeeper, Alan Hodgkinson.’

The man trying to grapple with this system was Walter Winterbottom, who had been appointed England manager and FA Director of Coaching in 1946. The very fact that these two enormous jobs were combined in one individual only demonstrates the indifference that the FA showed towards the management of the national team. In the face of his burden, Winterbottom fought hard to bring some rationality to the chaos. Before the war, he had been an undistinguished player with Manchester United before a back injury ended his career. Having paid his way through Carnegie College of Physical Education, he served as a PT instructor in the Air Ministry during the war, rising to the rank of wing-commander. His military credentials, earnest, academic manner and plummy voice appealed to the socially conscious chiefs of the FA. But Winterbottom was no cypher. As passionate and obsessive about football as Alf Ramsey, he had analysed the game in depth and, through his position as Director of Coaching, he aimed to start a technical revolution in English football by raising skills and tactical awareness. Many of the future generations of top managers were inspired by Winterbottom’s coaching. ‘Walter was a leader, a messiah, he set everyone’s eyes alight,’ said Ron Greenwood. Sir Bobby Robson was moved to call him ‘a prophet. He was my motivator in terms of my staying in football.’ Alf himself wrote of one of Winterbottom’s team talks during his first England tour in 1948: ‘His tactical knowledge of Continental teams, and his outlook on the Italian methods and temperament left a lasting impression on me.’

But, as well as the vicissitudes of the selection process, Winterbottom was faced with two other major problems. The first was the reluctance of some major stars to accept any degree of instruction, especially from someone who had never played international football. With a narrowness typical of the period, certain players believed that fitness and ability were all that mattered, with coaching regarded as alien and demeaning. In an interview with the BBC, the centre-forward Tommy Lawton recalled an early pre-match session with Winterbottom:

He said to us, ‘The first thing we’ll do, chaps, is that we’ll meet in half an hour. I’ve arranged a blackboard and we will discuss tactics.’

I looked at him and said, ‘We’ll discuss WHAT?’

‘Well, how we’re going to play it and do it.’

So I said, ‘Are you telling me that you’ve got a blackboard downstairs, and, God forbid, you’re going to tell Stan Matthews how to play at outside right and me, you’re going to tell me, how to score goals? You’ve got another think coming.’

For all its arrogance, Lawton’s contempt illustrated the deeper, long-term problem with Winterbottom: his failure to command automatic respect from players. Winterbottom was too remote, too theoretical to motivate his teams. His lack of top-class experience told against him. Once, on a coaching course, he asked a group of professionals:

‘Can you give me a reason why British players lack environmental awareness?’

‘Because we didn’t get enough meat during the war,’ came the cynical reply.

Unlike Alf, he did not have that natural, intangible aura which incites devotion. ‘Walter was a likeable fellow,’ says Roger Hunt, one of the 1966 winners, ‘but he didn’t instill the same degree of discipline as Alf did later. Somehow, he came across more like an old-fashioned amateur.’ Alan Peacock, the Middlesbrough and Leeds striker, is even more scathing:

Alf was very different to Walter Winterbottom. I was not impressed with Walter at all. He was like a schoolmaster. That’s how he came across. It was so much better under Alf; he knew how to set teams up. But Walter was more like a cricket coach from the Gentlemen. He had little understanding of the way professionals operate. Walter was too scared to upset anyone. Some players need a kick up the arse, others can be talked to.

Bobby Charlton, who played for four years under Winterbottom, felt that

there was no sense of belonging in the team. Walter had this impeccable accent, whereas football’s a poor man’s game, players expect to be sworn at, a bit of industrial language. Through no fault of his own, Walter used to make it seem an academic language. He used to go through things in discussion that I felt were obvious to people who were supposed to be good players. It was theory all the time.

Jimmy Greaves, who like Charlton began his England career in the late fifties, has this analysis of the difference between Winterbottom and Ramsey:

Walter was a joy, although I never understood a word he said. I used to think, what on earth is he talking about, but I loved him all the same. I had the same respect for Alf, but the fun did go out of it. The thing about Walter was he could smile quite easily in defeat. If I wanted a manager who’d make friends, it would be Walter. If I wanted a winning team, I’d take Alf. He brought atmosphere and spirit. This was something Walter failed to do. Too often during Walter’s era, teams were like strangers, on and off the pitch.

The consequences of Winterbottom’s inadequate leadership, inconsistent selection policies and poor administration were made clear in the most dramatic fashion in 1950, when England entered the World Cup for the first time. Until then, the FA had refused to enter the competition, deeming it too inferior for England. Indeed, between 1927 and 1946, the British associations were not even members of FIFA, having withdrawn after a series of disputes over issues such as separate membership for the Irish Free State. In a signal of FIFA’s welcome for Britain’s return from isolation, it was generously decided that the 1949–50 Home International series could be used as a qualifier for the tournament in Brazil, with the top two teams going forward to the finals. England topped the table easily, having beaten all three of the other nations. But the Scottish FA had previously announced that they would not be going to Brazil unless they won the Home International championship. Travelling as runners-up would not be good enough. Despite pleading from England and FIFA, Scotland stuck with this self-denying, pig-headed decision, and remained at home. It was a move that only fuelled Alf’s growing dislike of what he came to call ‘the strange little men’ north of the border.

Despite never having competed before, England were one of the favourites for the World Cup, largely because of the lustre of their name. But it was obvious, almost as soon as the party had gathered, that the preparations were inadequate. Instead of heading to South America a few weeks early to acclimatize, the England team held some practice sessions on the ground of Dulwich Hamlet FC at Dog Kennel Hill. ‘I would have preferred to have gone to Brazil, got accustomed to the conditions and, of course, had a series of trial matches under the conditions we should have had to face,’ said Alf, adding ruefully that the FA’s finances did not stretch to this. In fact, England flew out barely a week before their first game. The Lockheed Constellation took off from Heathrow early on 19 June at the start of a journey lasting 31 hours, with stops on the way at Paris, Lisbon, Dakar and Recife, before landing in Rio on the 21st. ‘The whole thing was a farce really, a shambles. We had a week’s training in Dulwich, then the journey to Brazil seemed to take for ever. By the time we stepped off the plane, everyone was knackered,’ recalls Alf’s Spurs team-mate Eddie Baily, who was making his first England trip. Baily was also disturbed by the absence of any proper medical support. ‘Can you believe it? All that way across the world and no bleedin’ doctor.’ Exhausted, the players made their way to the Luxor Hotel by the Copacabana beach, where they were shocked by the conditions they found, as Winterbottom later recalled:

Probably it was my fault because we should have gone into things more thoroughly but the Luxor was hopeless for our needs. As soon as we arrived, I knew there would be problems. When I inspected the kitchens, I was almost sick; the smell went up into the bedrooms, the food was swimming in oil and it was practically impossible to arrange suitable meals. Nearly all the players went down with tummy upsets at one time or another.

As Stanley Mortensen, one of the team’s wits, put it, ‘Even the dustbins have ulcers.’

The players encountered further difficulties as they practised in the South American heat, as Alf, who prided himself on his fitness, wrote:

During our training spells two things quickly impressed themselves upon me. The first was that during practice matches, I found it very hard to breathe. Secondly, at the conclusion of even an easy kick-around, I felt infinitely more tired than after a hectic League match at home.

But for all their problems, England did not seem to face a difficult passage to the next round, having been drawn against Chile, the USA and Spain. And progress seemed assured when England defeated Chile 2–0 in their opening game. Next came the apparent formality of beating the unknowns of the United States, a country that had no more interest in soccer than England had in baseball. For this game, the team had to fly 300 miles inland from Rio to Belo Horizonte, a modern city whose layout impressed Alf from the air: ‘such a beautifully planned city with “baby skyscrapers”, much loftier than any buildings we have in this country.’ Alf was not so enamoured by the coach-ride from the airport to the team’s base at the British-owned Morro Velho gold mine 16 miles from Belo Horizonte. According to Alf, this involved ‘the nightmare experience of being driven around the 167 hairpin bends on a road which seemed to cling to the side of the mountain’. Nor was the accommodation, a series of chalets on a miners’ camp, a great improvement on the Luxor Hotel. ‘They stuck us in wooden huts. It was really primitive. We couldn’t sleep at night,’ recalled the goalkeeper Bert Williams. Even so, on the eve of the match, the players were in high spirits, enjoying a sing-along led, inevitably, by Eddie Baily, whom Alf often compared to the cockney comic Max Miller. No one doubted what the outcome would be the following day. One old miner at the camp asked Alf, ‘Tell me, how many do you think you’ll win by?’ Back home, the Daily Express argued that the American team was so hopeless that England should give them a three-goal start. Double figures were possible, thought John Thompson of the Daily Mirror. Arthur Drewry, the Grimsby fishmonger who added to his duties as President of the Football League by serving as the chief selector for the England XI in the World Cup, was so confident that he decided the US game should be treated as little more than a practice match before the real contest against Spain. With barely a word of explanation, he overruled Winterbottom, who had wanted Stanley Matthews picked.

But the mood of optimism was dampened when the players reached the Belo Horizonte stadium, where they found a narrow pitch with coarse grass and a sprinkling of stones; ‘I’d known better playing as a kid on the marshes,’ says Eddie Baily. The dressing-rooms, which had only just been completed and reeked of building materials, were so dingy that Winterbottom took the players off to change at a local athletic club, ten minutes’ bus ride away. On their return, the England team were greeted by a large hostile crowd of 20,000 gathered behind the 12-foot high concrete wall that surrounded the pitch. The atmosphere was intimidating, claustrophic. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever played in a prison,’ said Bert Williams to Alf.

Still, they were only playing the USA. And within minutes of the kick-off, England – wearing blue shirts to avoid a clash with the white of the Americans – were already on the attack, scything through the inexperienced American defence. It seemed only a matter of time before there would be a goal from England’s front line, which included such legends as Tom Finney, Stan Mortensen of Blackpool and Wilf Mannion of Middlesbrough. But, after half an hour of missed opportunities, the scores remained level. Then, in the 37th minute, came the truly unexpected. A long, speculative shot was hit towards England’s penalty box. There seemed little danger, for Bert Williams had it covered. But just as he was moving for it, the American centre-forward Joe Gaetjens – who later died in a prison in Haiti after taking part in the attempted coup against the corrupt regime of Papa Doc Duvalier – burst forward instinctively. As he dived, the ball appeared to hit the back of his head, took a wicked deflection and flew past Williams into the net. The English thought it was a freakish goal; the Americans praised Gaetjens’ heroism.

England went into half-time still 1–0 down. Winterbottom reassured them that the goals were bound to come, but as one of the forwards, Roy Bentley, commented, ‘It had begun to feel as though we could play for a week and not score.’ It was the same sorry story in the second half. England squandered a wealth of easy chances, frequently hitting the woodwork or blasting over the bar. ‘I was sitting alongside Stan Matthews, and he kept saying, “Bless my soul, bless my soul,” remembers Eddie Baily. England captain Billy Wright later recalled how frustrated Alf became: ‘Even Alf Ramsey, who used to be expressionless throughout a game, threw up his arms and looked to the sky when a perfect free-kick was somehow saved by their unorthodox keeper.’ The England players even felt the referee was conspiring against them, especially when, in the dying minutes, another of Ramsey’s free-kicks was met firmly by Stan Mortensen’s header and appeared to cross the line, only for the referee to disallow the goal. There was to be no reprieve. After 90 minutes, England had lost by that single Gaetjens’ strike. ‘I have never felt worse on a football pitch than at that final whistle,’ said Billy Wright. The crowd erupted in disbelief and ecstasy, setting fire to newspapers on the terraces and letting off a barrage of fireworks into the blue sky. When the result was flashed to newsrooms in England across the wires from Reuters, there was incredulity. It was widely thought that a typing error had been made, with the real score being England 10, USA 1.

But the players were all too aware of the catastrophe. ‘The dressing-room was like a morgue. It felt like a disgrace to lose to a team of no-hopers. I think it was the darkest moment of my career,’ says Sir Tom Finney. In attempts to lessen the shame, a number of legends grew up. One was that England had been desperately unlucky, since nothing more than fate had prevented a deserved victory. ‘I think a fair result would have been 12–1,’ says Bert Williams. Alf Ramsey himself summed up this attitude: ‘So far as we were concerned there was a gremlin upon that football and it was not our day, the United States running out winners by that “streaky” goal.’ Another complaint was that the USA had fielded a team of ineligible players from overseas; the florid, faintly ridiculous Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express wrote that the American eleven ‘seemed to have come straight from Ellis Island because there was not an American-born player in the side’. This is nonsense. Eight of them were born in the US, while the other three, whose number included the former Wrexham midfielder Eddie McIlvanney, were cleared by FIFA under the residency rule. It was, in any case, a pitiful charge. Why should England have had anything to fear from a group of journeymen, no matter where they came from?

From an American viewpoint, however, England were far less dominant than was later suggested. An interesting article in the magazine Soccer America highlighted how poorly England played – and not just the forwards. The US full-back Harry Keough, for instance, felt that ‘England took us too lightly and tried to come in too close early in the game before shooting’. Keough went on, in reference to Bert Williams’ argument that England should have won 12–1: ‘He isn’t telling it all. He had to tip over one from our left-winger, Ed Souza, with 15 minutes to go. And with three minutes left our right-winger Frank Wallace took off on a breakaway and only had Williams to beat, which he did, but Alf Ramsey followed the play and saved it.’ But Ramsey, claimed Keough, ‘had otherwise a bad day, with Ed Souza beating him frequently’. And even the Daily Mail admitted that Souza ‘played a victory march against Wright and Ramsey’. In Talking Football, Ramsey described Ed Souza, with a hint of mournful euphemism, as ‘a truly great player who possessed a pair of educated feet in addition to a pair of broad shoulders which he used fairly and often.’

To this day, England’s defeat by the USA remains the greatest upset in the nation’s sporting history. It haunted the players for years, a stain on their reputations. The supposed champions of the world had been turned into an international laughing stock. ‘I hate thinking about it even now,’ Bert Williams said recently. For Alf Ramsey, the defeat rankled deeply. One journalist, who mentioned the match years later, recorded that ‘his face creased and he looked like a man who had been jabbed in an unhealed wound’. Educated in the days when there was still an Empire, Alf was a ferocious English patriot, one who always described his nationality on official forms as ‘English’ rather than ‘British’. His almost visceral attachment to his country was one of the cornerstones of his existence. And when the chance came more than a decade later, he was determined to avenge this humiliation.

Broken and bewildered, England played their last group game against Spain, needing a win to gain a play-off place. Brought into the side alongside Stan Matthews, Eddie Baily did his best to raise morale:

Walter said to me before the kick-off, ‘Just settle in and give Stan the ball.’

‘Is he going to give it back?’ I said.

There was nothing funny about the result. England were beaten 1–0 and crashed out of the World Cup. Again, there were complaints about the refereeing and the conditions. ‘I have never played in a game so hot. The temperature must have been 105 degrees. At half-time, we went down into the dressing-room and had to put on oxygen masks,’ says Eddie Baily. ‘The referee allowed an unbelievable amount of obstruction and shirt-pulling. I remember Alf, who had this thing about fair play, being furious.’ Alf even claimed that the Spaniards must have thought they were playing basketball, such was their propensity to use their hands. With the kind of patronizing insularity that was to become his hallmark, Alf said in 1952 of the referee’s interpretation of the rules, ‘It is going to take a considerable time for the whole world to see football as we do.’

In truth, it was going to take England a long time to catch up with the rest of the world. Convinced that their team had been the victims of nothing more than bad luck, the self-satisfied football establishment learnt little from the Brazilian fiasco. The illusion was maintained that England were still the best in the world. There were to be no changes in policy or structure or playing style. The attitude was captured by the statement of Bob Jackson, manager of Portsmouth, the club which won successive championship titles in the late forties: ‘What suits Continentals and South Americans doesn’t necessarily suit us. We have a way of playing that has stood the test of time. Given more favourable conditions and a fair crack of the whip, we can beat anybody.’

England may have been failing, but for Alf personally the years immediately after the American debacle were the best of his international playing career. Now in his thirties, he was at the peak of his confidence, his understanding of the game enhanced by experience. It is a tribute to his effectiveness that in an era of fluctuating selection policy, Alf was not to lose his place for three seasons. His own captain, Billy Wright, was glowing in his praise of his right-back. He once described Alf as ‘the coolest player I have ever seen in an international match’ and ‘one of the greatest of modern defenders. He brought with him into the game tremendous thought and initiative.’ Playing in front of Ramsey, said Wright, ‘I have come to appreciate the tremendous accuracy of his passes. He strokes the ball along the grass with radar-like accuracy.’ He went on to refer to Alf’s unique understanding of the game:

I could sit for hours and talk football with Alf Ramsey. He has the priceless ability of being able to put over new ideas in a splendid fashion, encourages his colleagues to reveal their own theories and in every way is a remarkable character whose contribution to the game has definitely helped to improve the standard of defensive play.

As an example of Alf’s thinking, Wright cited his tactics playing for Spurs against the Newcastle and Scottish winger Bobby Mitchell, one of those quick players who always worried him. Before the match, Alf examined the pitch at White Hart Lane, looking closely at the two ends where he would operate. He said little, but proceeded to have one of the best League games of his life, continually forcing Mitchell into the dampest areas. ‘Even the world’s greatest ball-players cannot play in mud,’ said Alf afterwards.

Ramsey had become such a central figure in the English team that when Wright was dropped in the autumn of 1950 because of poor form, Alf was chosen as the England captain for the Home International against Wales, a game which England won easily 4–2. Alf, in the words of Tom Finney, was ‘an ideal captain, very methodical. He studied the game a lot and knew so much about it.’ With Wright still absent, Alf retained the captaincy for the next match, against Yugoslavia. England’s vulnerability was becoming more apparent than ever, as Ramsey’s team were held to a 2–2 draw, the first time that a continental side had achieved a draw on English soil. Making his debut in that game was the brave-hearted Bolton centre-forward and former coalminer Nat Lofthouse. ‘From the start, Alf did all he could to make me, the only new international in the side, feel at home,’ said Lofthouse. ‘His great knowledge of soccer and his ability to discuss the game in an interesting way, made a profound impression on me.’ Talking of his wider qualities, Lofthouse called Alf ‘the greatest driver of an accurate ball I have ever seen. When he makes up his mind to send a clearance to you, the ball invariably finds its target. The tremendous accuracy and faith that Alf has in himself also gives confidence to others.’

After a solid game against Yugoslavia, Alf had a far more painful ordeal: his first major after-dinner speech. To the end of his life, Alf found such appearances difficult. An awkward, stilted speaker, he was unable to enliven his performances with either humorous anecdotes or powerful delivery. ‘I don’t think he took kindly to public speaking. He was not very good at it; he was very clipped,’ says the journalist Ken Jones. Alf confessed that, at that 1950 banquet, ‘I was extremely nervous. I would rather take a penalty at Wembley than again go through such an experience.’ He managed to get through it, however, with ‘a few words of thanks’. Fortunately for Alf, he would give up this ambassadorial role, when Billy Wright returned to the captaincy in early 1951, having recovered his form.

Ramsey showed no signs of any decline in his. He had become so cool that even with England he would retain the Spurs approach, often trapping clearances deep in his own half, inviting a challenge from his opponent before pushing the ball to a colleague. One of his increasingly important gifts was his deadliness at set pieces, as Nat Lofthouse recalled in 1954:

Another of Ramsey’s intelligent moves, developed because of his beautifully controlled kicking, has brought many goals from free kicks. Ramsey and I have practised this move for hours before international matches. He possesses an uncanny knack of being able to place a football almost on a pinhead. Such accuracy is, of course, the outcome of years of hard work, a factor people are inclined to forget when they see the master soccer-man in action. It is, however, only when you have been out on the pitch with Alf Ramsey that you appreciate his greatness.

In 1953, Billy Wright wrote of Alf’s quest for perfection:

For hours Alf Ramsey and Nat Lofthouse practised this move. I have rarely known Ramsey to be completely satisfied with his efforts and although early on he was placing the ball on Lofthouse’s napper eight times out of ten, Alf, we all knew, would never be content until he could do it ten times out of ten.

Alf’s manager, Walter Winterbottom, in a BBC interview in 1970, emphasized his importance as an England player, praising him for being ‘so consistent’. Winterbottom went on:

We always felt confident in him. He was a thinking full-back, one who believed in precision passing. He was good with his drives; he could hit the ball very true. He was also precise in those long, floating lobs, about forty yards up the field. He could put an absolutely precise centre which would allow someone like Nat Lofthouse – who was a bit like Geoff Hurst – to run in at an angle and meet the ball at the right moment to outwit the keeper. Alf was already then forming opinions around this idea of concentrated defensive work, of never losing the ball when you had possession and of this all-round playing and hard working of the team. The things coming through now I could see when he was playing.

A profile in the Daily Mirror in February 1951 called Alf ‘the soccer intellectual’. It stated that

to Ramsey, football appears as a succession of chess problems, an exercise of the intellect. For all that, he can produce a lustiness and strength in the tackle when needed. He passes the ball with supreme accuracy and precise pace. He spends as much time in practice as any inside-forward might. These are the qualities of Ramsey’s game reflected in himself. He dresses quietly, immaculately. In conversation, he is reflective. He said one very significant thing to me: ‘I don’t care too much to be told that I have had a wonderful game. I prefer it when someone points out a fault. Then I can do something about it.’

Alf was particularly impressive in the match against Argentina, when England looked incapable of breaking down the South Americans until his calm assurance pulled them through to win 2–1. Bernard Joy of The Star described Alf’s performance as

the finest full-back display I have seen in many years. Ramsey played as though there were no Argentinos within miles. He refused to be stampeded into helter-skelter methods and particularly in the second half sent forward a stream of precision passes. Ramsey it was who realized that the only way to draw the Argentine defence from goalmouth was to start short passing bouts in midfield. And his brainy free kick with the ball to the far post instead of into the centre of the crowded penalty area won the match.

Alf’s authority was even more crucial in the match against Austria in November 1951, when England’s unbeaten record against continental sides came under its most severe threat yet. Led by their brilliant attacking centre-half Ernst Ocwirk, Austria were one of the most powerful teams in Europe at the time, and with only 25 minutes to go, as they led 1–0, they seemed to be on the verge of a famous victory. But then Eddie Baily won the ball, weaved his way through the Austrian defence and was about to shoot when he was brought down. The referee instantly gave a penalty.

The eyes of the huge Wembley crowd instantly turned to Alf, whose unflappable temperament had made him the chief penalty taker for Spurs and England. As he walked up to the spot, Eddie Baily said to him, ‘I’ve done all the fuckin’ hard work for you, Alf, now make sure you score.’ A silence descended around the stadium, everyone knowing that England’s long cherished record depended on the ‘The General’. Preparing to take the kick, Alf exuded his usual steadiness, behaving as casually ‘as if he were taking a stroll along Bournemouth Front,’ said Billy Wright. But Alf was always good at covering up his feelings. Inwardly, recorded Alf, ‘my heart was beating madly and the goal appeared to have shrunk to about half its normal size’. The tension grew while Alf placed the ball slowly and deliberately on the spot. As in everything else in football, he was a master of detail when it came to penalties. ‘In the course of practice I have noticed that if you kick a football with the lace facing the sky it invariably rises high and, after making some experiments, I discovered that the best way to place the ball for a spot kick is to make the lace face the keeper.’ Finally satisfied with his placement, he took a few steps back and then, on the referee’s signal, moved towards the ball. Just as his right foot was about to make contact, he saw the Austrian keeper move slightly to his right. ‘At once, like a boxer going in for the kill, I side-footed the ball into the other side of the net.’ A vast, echoing roar went round the terraces as the ball sped across the lush Wembley turf into the corner.

Three minutes later England took the lead, again thanks to Alf. All the hours of practice with Nat Lofthouse paid off, as one of his perfectly flighted free-kicks sailed over the Austria defence and straight onto the head of Nat Lofthouse, who knocked it down into the net. But Austria refused to give up and late in the game scored the equalizer through a penalty. To England’s relief, the score-line finished 2–2. The unbeaten home record against Europe remained intact. With little sense of perspective, the Daily Mail praised England for ‘a glorious fighting display that completely rehabilitated the reputation of English international football, threadbare since our World Cup defeat’. This may have been an exaggeration, but Alf certainly deserved the plaudits. He was, according to the Mail, England’s ‘ice-cool hero’. Alf himself described the game as ‘my greatest international’.

One England player making his debut in that historic game was the young Arsenal winger Arthur Milton, who also played cricket for Gloucestershire and England; indeed, he was to be the last ever double international. Today, Milton has interesting memories of playing alongside Alf:

Alf was very quiet in the dressing-room, very quiet. But I was the new boy, so he came and had a chat, telling me to go out and play my game and enjoy it. I found him reassuring, comforting. Walter Winterbottom, the manager, was not all that forthcoming. Billy Wright was the captain, but I found Alf the most reassuring of those three. I could see that he was very in control of himself. He did not make a fuss. To be honest, I got lost a bit in the game, not having had much experience, but I got no ball from Billy Wright. I always felt that Bill Nicholson was a much better wing-half than Billy Wright. Now Alf, he was a real class act. He stood out. Not perhaps such a good defender as a distributor of the ball. He was good in defence but nothing exceptional. But his use of the ball was always fantastic. Lovely mover he was.

Throughout 1952, Alf remained a fixture in the England team, playing in all seven internationals, including the famous 3–2 win against Austria in Vienna, when Nat Lofthouse ran half the length of the field to score the winner. In the crowd at the Prater stadium, there was a large contingent of British soldiers, members of the multi-national Forces of Occupation, and at the final whistle they poured onto the field in celebration. A surprised Alf was hoisted on the shoulders of one khaki-clad Tommy, who told him, ‘We ain’t half pleased mate. The local lads have been telling us for months what they were going to do to you. Well, you well and truly done ’em, mate.’ For all his obvious class, Alf allowed occasional errors to creep into his play. Against Portugal at Goodison in 1951, for instance, he mis-hit a backpass which allowed the Portugese to equalize 2–2, though England eventually ran out winners 5–2. Even worse was his howler against Northern Ireland in Belfast in November 1952. The Celtic forward Charlie Tully, one of the quick mercurial wingers who always troubled Alf, took an inswinging corner. On the near post Alf seemed to have it covered and was preparing to head the ball away, when suddenly he swerved outside its path. The ball sailed into the net, ‘as if pulled by some magnetic force’, to use the phrase of England goalkeeper Gil Merrick. Afterwards, with typical conviction and no word of apology, Alf told Merrick, ‘I let it go because I thought it was going to hit the side netting.’