Читать книгу The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain - Peter Chapman - Страница 9

For a small village, Great Marfold had a good team and could call on players from a much wider area. The uncle married to my dad’s oldest sister, Laura, played centre-forward. She went to watch when they’d advanced to the late stages of one of the Bedfordshire cups. It was a Saturday afternoon game, quite sunny, at the Victoria Works ground in Bedford. Their keeper, Bill Farrell, was twenty-one and due for a trial at Luton Town the following Monday.

In the style of the day, their opponents had a hard centre-forward, a curly-haired fellow called Red Venner. ‘Dirtiest man ever walked on a football field,’ said my aunt. ‘I heard him shout out during the game, “Get that big bugger!”, pointing at Bill.’ When a cross came over, Farrell took it arms outstretched, body taut. Venner came in, studs raised, and caught him hard in the chest and stomach. ‘Well, you said you’d get him,’ my aunt shouted at him, as they carried the keeper off. My uncle took over in goal.

In the dressing room they gave Farrell a cup of hot sweet tea. When they took him to hospital and he was waiting to be seen, he kept doubling over to ease the pain. The proper sister wasn’t on that evening. Something had perforated in his stomach and he died next afternoon. ‘The day his banns were called,’ said my aunt. ‘And he’d have got in the Luton team easily.’ Venner’s son was apprenticed to my uncle as a toolmaker. He said his father had hung up his boots, would never play again, and didn’t sleep for a month after the incident.

Bert Williams had been injured before. It may have had something to do with the way he played, taut and, like a compressed spring, waiting to bounce. But there were always good stand-ins available. We had the greatest goalkeepers in the world and any one of them could be drafted in to do a perfectly adequate job by our standards. By anyone else’s, it would be superb.

Bernard Streten, Luton’s veteran keeper and favourite of my Bedfordshire uncles, had deputised for Williams once in 1949. He came in, did all that was required in a match in which he had very little to do, and never played for England again. His only international cap was a reward for long-standing service to the cause, bestowed by the selectors in the spirit of ‘they also serve who stand and wait’.

The same sentiment guided them as they brought in Gil Merrick of Birmingham City now late in 1951. Williams wasn’t expected to be gone long. Though two years younger, Merrick was already thirty. He’d been overlooked as a contender in the Swift succession. At that time Birmingham had been promoted from the Second Division to the First, thanks to his conceding only twenty goals in forty matches. But next season his team’s form was so bad that two of their players started arguing on the field on a visit to Highbury, and almost came to blows. Team captain Merrick ran upfield and told them to ‘turn it in’. A selector was in the stands and concluded that a keeper had no business out there getting involved. An army man in the war, Merrick soldiered on as his team was dispatched back to the lower division. Eventually he was deemed worthy of reward and proved a decent stop-gap for Williams.

For the spring-to-autumn months up to Merrick’s selection, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had tried to lift the nation’s spirits with a celebration of its new British way. The Festival of Britain was held down by the Thames on bombed wasteground by Waterloo Bridge. There was a steam train, and big iron wheels standing there for people to look at. My parents said there would be a firework display and some kind of dome. They took me along and told me it was good. The festival made no impression on me, other than the strangeness of its slogan: ‘Tonic for the Nation’.

A tonic was something my grandparents had when they were ill. They’d get it from Dr Dadachanji’s surgery at the end of Colebrooke Row, opposite the gardens, the last house before Goswell Road. His waiting room in the front parlour was cold and dim, with a few wooden chairs, and his surgery was at the back. Dr Dadachanji was small and quiet and, to me, mysterious. He probably was to everybody. I’d gone to see him when my nose bled badly and people didn’t know what to tell me but to put my head back. The blood ran down my throat and came back later in livery globs. Dr Dadachanji sent me to the children’s hospital in Hackney Road, where they plugged my nose with cotton wool soaked in snake venom. Mysteriously, it worked.

Millions were spent on the festival and millions came. It was pronounced a great success. An uplifted people should have gone to the polls in the general election the month after the festival closed and swept Attlee back into power. He was running against Winston Churchill, who had lost in the 1945 election because he was considered yesterday’s man. Many people, however, had picked up the idea that the nation was a bit poorly. A large part of the electorate did certainly vote Labour, even though many of them were in places much too far from London to have gone to the festival. They were in the big industrial constituencies, with enormous Labour majorities, but they only counted for one seat. Many in the lesser populated areas – strangely, a lot of them nearer London, so they may have visited the festival – voted Conservative. Labour got more votes, the Conservatives more constituencies, and Churchill returned to office.

I’d never realised he’d been away. With his solemn presence in the wings – his pronouncements on the ‘noble cause’ of the Korean War, and the like – he’d been awaiting his call, available when the country took stock of the seriousness of the situation. Enough people felt it was not the time for ‘tonics’ but for harder stuff to raise the spirit. A few more finest hours, that’s what was needed. Churchill came back with memories stirred of resolute wartime leadership and the glories of unflappable defence. Gil Merrick made his international debut three weeks later.

The selectors found the man they’d been looking for. They could have invented him. Merrick was from Birmingham City, the club of Harry Hibbs himself. Where Harry had been safe rather than spectacular, and Williams had modified the goalkeeping standard to spectacular but safe, so under Merrick it took a step back into history; he was referred to as ‘never unnecessarily spectacular’.

Merrick was in the image of Birmingham itself, capital of the English Midlands, the industrial heartland. It was just up the road from Coventry. Birmingham people didn’t say much, not that we’d have understood them when they did, but were quietly engaged in the job of rebuilding. They made hammers and drills, anchors and chains, gear boxes and other bits for cars, which was all pretty dull, really, but they ‘got on with it’. Gil Merrick played with the sleeves of his jersey neatly rolled to the elbow.

He was the model of post-war man. With a dark, neatly trimmed moustache, he looked like one of my scoutmasters and anyone’s gym teacher; apart from the rolled sleeves, it was his only hint of affectation. The programme my dad brought back from Wembley when he saw him in the Belgium game the following year said; ‘One of the few goalkeepers in the football league with a moustache.’ In the 1930s my mum used to write away to film stars in Hollywood and they’d send back autographs. To a generation brought up on Clark Gable, moustaches had an element of dash and made men ‘handsome’. Unfortunately, Hitler and, with his periodic returns to the country to save us, Sir Oswald Mosley had intervened and done nothing for them as far as I was concerned. But that wasn’t Gil Merrick’s fault.

Merrick was a PT expert and fitness fanatic. You could imagine him in white singlet and long trousers, crease finely pressed, standing calmly at ease as he awaited the order to vault the wooden horse or cartwheel across the rough coconut matting (if it chafed the skin, you just took no notice). When I later saw photos of him, his face was entirely placid. As far as 1 knew, he never smiled or looked as if he was about to. His hair, dark and receding at the temples, was brilliantined back and flat. As a goalkeeper, he was unflappable. He said it himself, he was ‘born to the defensive position’.

His debut was in his home city, at Villa Park, and a comfortable 2–0 win against Northern Ireland. It was an uncomplicated game in the manner of the home international championship, where football was played in the right way. Nippy wingers jinked down their right and left touchlines and inside-forwards were artful schemers. Respectively, they were marked by the full-backs – unsung, decent men with neatly greased and parted hair – and the half-backs who matched their opponents by being muscular and wily. In the vanguard of each attack was the centre-forward, a physical, thrusting player, much of whose game was reduced to single combat with a strong and unyielding centre-half. The goalkeeper stood detached and beyond, awaiting the outcome of the set-piece battles in front of him. This was how things were and were meant to be.

My dad, instinctively a Williams man, was a rapid convert. The Belgium game ended as a comfortable 5–0 win but the Belgians had put a few good shots in on goal. The day was November damp, the ball becoming heavier with each revolution across the Wembley surface and with each yard travelled through the afternoon murk. But every Belgian effort Merrick handled with absolute ease. He caught the ball ‘like he didn’t have a care, just picked it out of the air,’ my father said. ‘That wasn’t easy with those leather balls, they’d weigh pounds on a day like that.’ Actually, in the second half a white ball was used. It looked like the new plastic continental type that didn’t absorb water. Merrick later wrote that he didn’t like them because they swung around unpredictably, though this one proved to be the only one he came across that didn’t. Maybe it was a normal leather one which somebody had slapped a bit of white paint over.

In any event, Merrick’s handling was impeccable. Someone in the newspapers called him ‘the Clutch’ and the terraces picked up on it. From Bert Williams, ‘the Cat’, with its overtones of continental panache, England goalkeeping passed into the clutch of Merrick. It spoke again of the industrial Midlands, with its car factories and things. Very solid, reliable and British.

Just as well, because his first game in London, two weeks after his debut, brought home the nature of the outside threat. My father went again. In our role as founders of football, ‘everyone wanted to beat us’, he said. The latest to try were the Austrians, who came armed with the concept of ‘tactics’. These weren’t entirely new. Austria’s pre-war ‘Wunderteam’ had employed ‘tactics’ when they beat England 2–1 in Vienna. This was in 1936 shortly before Hitler had annexed Austria. The war had come and we’d largely forgotten about ‘tactics’, trusting the world might have the sense to do the same.

The Austrians were held in such high regard they were invited to play at Wembley. By contrast, France had never been afforded this full international honour, inferior footballers and poor ally in war that they were. Austria had flourished as a playing nation till overrun by the Nazis. Though on the wrong side in the war, this could largely be attributed in people’s minds to German belligerence. Austrians had about them underdog qualities. They might even rate as plucky. They still had the unwelcome occupying force of the Russians on their soil and it was touch and go in these grave times whether they’d leave. We instinctively liked the Austrians. They showed their gratitude by turning up at the headquarters of world football with a devious plan to overthrow us.

Against all natural law, they played with an attacking centre-half: Ernst Ocwirk, ernst in German meaning ‘serious’. He performed in a manner that made the conventions of the centre-half position a joke. He took the field with a number 5 on his back, as he should, but then showed this was a deliberate attempt to deceive. Instead of holding back to await the thrusts of the England centre-forward, he advanced to occupy something more like his own team’s central attacking position. Had he any decency, he’d have worn number 9 on his back. Then, just when the English team had noted where he was, he’d be gone, and back in his own team’s defence. Up and down the field in flowing fashion he and the Austrians played. The terraces, according to Fleet Street, nicknamed him ‘Clockwork’ Ocwirk. The Austrians ran into open spaces where they weren’t expected to run. They passed the ball to each other there and held it, while thinking next what to do. They kept it from the England players for lengthy periods of the game.

England couldn’t get a handle on them. The Austrians wouldn’t attack in conventional, civilised combat form. Nor would they stand up to be attacked. Characters you’d least expect would pop up and attack you. As suddenly they’d be gone. From the dark heart of the European continent, they were like those gorillas in the Malayan and Kenyan jungle. They, too, got together to concoct plans and tactics. They also probably sat in the dressing room swearing oaths. But everyone agreed they were damned tricky. (A few years later when one of my comics started giving away small photos of foreign players, Ocwirk’s was the first I collected.) With a minimum of effort they scored two goals. England did most of the running, often fruitlessly chasing the ball. But we had more muscle. Through physical endeavour, England scrambled a draw.

The menace of tactics was obvious but it was difficult to know what to do about it. In the absence of clear thinking, it was decided to ignore it. Resolve and character would have to do. An empire had been built on them. Britain lost ‘every battle but the last’. There were no defeats, merely setbacks ‘on the road to eventual victory’. Actually, it was Karl Marx who said something like that, the fellow who had claimed that by bringing the railways to India, Britain had only laid down the iron path of Indian revolution. Off the rails though he was, he’d done his best work in Bloomsbury, in the British Museum, a few streets from where my nan had been born off Theobald’s Road. Lenin had lived in Finsbury for a while, just north past the end of Exmouth Market. He’d have walked along it, as my grandad and great-grandma served up carved roasts to the poor and workers of the area, and around the streets of Clerkenwell en route to his own eventual victory. Marx and he would have picked up some of the grit and mood in the air.

It wasn’t that foreigners like them, or any other, were not clever people. Tactics, whatever you felt about the morality of them, showed they could be. But could their keepers calmly catch a ball? Would they take a cross, with the pressure really on? They were form rather than content, capable of something thrillingly dangerous or elaborate but impossible to sustain. Foreigners couldn’t ‘hold the line’; they couldn’t see things through.

Churchill saw through the Labour Party as soon as he was back in Downing Street. Our position slipping, they’d tried to stop anything that might be construed as our retreat from greatness by quietly taking us down the nuclear path. Churchill didn’t mind, he just wished he’d been told. He soon visited the USA to push his arguments for the alliance of English-speaking peoples, our special relationship. It was the alternative to dealing with the chaotic Europeans. The USA had always liked the cut of the old boy’s jib more than that Attlee fellow, with his pink ideas. In return for aid, Churchill said they could use our military bases for the two countries’ ‘common defence’. That’d hold the line.

On the customary end-of-season tour, in May 1952, England went to Italy. In the goalmouths of Florence stadium where my father had played before him, Merrick did his bit maintaining the score at 1–1. They travelled on to meet the Austrians again, in occupied Vienna. The game was played at the Prater Stadium in the Russian zone, but British troops packed the crowd. The forward line was led by Nat Lofthouse of Bolton Wanderers, a centre-forward in the old physical mould. Ocwirk’s mechanism failed to tick for the occasion, while Lofthouse so intimidated the Austrian keeper, Walter Zeman, that he scored two of England’s goals in a 3–2 victory.

Unintimidatable, Merrick had his best England game. He made the winning goal, rising to pluck a swirling corner kick from the angle of bar and post and clearing, via Tom Finney, to Lofthouse on the chase. Zeman came at him boots first – as Merrick noted, this was ‘the wrong way of going down at a man’s feet’. We went down with head and hands, bravely, either to smother the shot or pluck the ball from the rampaging opponent’s toe. Zeman’s feet laid out Lofthouse, but not before he slipped in the winner. The troops carried him off on their shoulders at the end, Lofthouse the ‘Lion of Vienna’. Merrick, however, quietly claimed a greater prize than a mere title. England field players kept their shirts from each game, but the keeper was never able to have his jersey. He had to hand it back to an FA checker perched over the kit basket; something about them being more difficult to obtain, thought Merrick. The feel of this one was like wearing ‘a special and expensive suit for the first time’. The mood in the dressing room was so jubilant that he asked if he could keep it and the ecstatic Winterbottom was happy to comply. ‘Do you wonder,’ said Merrick, still moved by the memory years later, ‘I treasure that jersey more than anything in football?’

For reasons I could never grasp, my parents were moved to take holidays on the continent – about once every four years, with a week at a holiday camp between times, while they saved the money. This was my mum’s doing. My dad – country boy, big family – would as happily have stayed at home. Before the war she’d taken a couple of day-trips to Ostend from Margate and a boat trip down the Seine for her fourteenth birthday. At work, Waterlows had organised a football tour to a small town near Ypres and she went as a spectator. That was Easter 1939; a member of the ship’s staff counting them off at the Ostend quayside said: ‘There’s more than ever now. Everyone thinks there’ll be a war.’ Then the civilian traffic stopped and my dad went in khaki. He wrote romantic letters back with sketches of happy soldiers jumping off landing craft on to beaches. The censor would let those through. My mum felt she’d missed out on the fun and dragged him back as soon as he was home. Much of Italy was destroyed. They hitched army trucks to get from Florence to Siena, wangled special visas to get to Trieste. This was thought very strange round our street.

When I went abroad at the age of three, the Channel was very rough. It always was. My parents said they’d been on one crossing when even the crew was sick. We stayed with my father’s friends in Siena in a small street behind the cathedral. It all seemed extremely poor. Aunts, nieces and grandmas competed to scrub my face at night and parade me back in front of the applauding family. It was very embarrassing. Trains were always late. There was a huge mob on Florence station, which my dad said would all leap through the open windows when the train came in to grab a seat. So, clever move, we stood on the platform behind a priest, our seating arrangements thus assured. When the train came in, he threw his suitcase through the window like the rest of them and, habit ascending, dived dramatically after it.

If it hadn’t been for the last game on the next summer tour – this time stretching itself to the newer frontiers of South America – England would have stayed unbeaten. Uruguay, the World Cup holders, won 2–1 in Montevideo. It was a pity but much too far away to matter. Of more immediate importance was the fact that the spring and summer of 1953 proved that reward came to those who stayed the course. Stanley Matthews received his winner’s medal at Wembley, with his last chance to appear in an FA Cup Final. His runs down the Blackpool right were defined as the thrilling difference in a 4–3 victory against Bolton Wanderers. That much of the score resulted from errors which would have disqualified either goalkeeper from appearing in the South East Counties League, was a detail laid aside in celebration of a long and distinguished career. A month later, Gordon Richards, unable to win a Derby in three brilliant decades in the saddle, did so at his final attempt. ‘It felt like it all came right,’ said my dad. There was a sense of justice and harmony to the world. Master the fundamentals and eventually the glorious moments would follow.

No one did either like we did. In June, who else could have staged a coronation in all that rain? Look at Queen Salote of Tonga, the only royal guest to ride with her carriage hood down, soaking Haile Selassie in the process. God bless her, people thought, for being such a good sort and showing why the empire was necessary in the first place. My fourteen-year-old Uncle Keith and I squelched around to the special school in Colebrooke Row, near the Manchester Union of Oddfellows, for our red jelly and pink blancmange. They were served in the hall, not the playground where the kids’ party was meant to be. It didn’t detract from the day. The national spirit had been buoyed that morning by the news we had conquered Everest. At least, that was as I understood it.

There was some confusion over the men who had reached the summit. Neither was British. As a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary was almost, but not quite. Our butter came from New Zealand and had a picture of a kiwi stamped on the wrapping. New Zealanders were called ‘kiwis’. The fellow who went to the top with him clearly wasn’t British. He was Sherpa Tensing. ‘Sherpa’ was the name of the group, like a tribe, he belonged to; his name was Tensing Norgay. The BBC and everyone called him ‘Sherpa Tensing’. They could, by the same token, have referred to his partner at the summit as ‘Kiwi Edmund’.

The Sherpas were loyal and trusty, a bit like the Gurkhas who fought with the British army. My dad had a kukhri, one of the Gurkhas’ curved knives, in a leather sheath on a shelf in the sitting room. This one was blunt but a frightening-looking thing. You were glad these people were on your side. The Gurkhas were from a similar part of the world, but the Sherpas lived at the foot of Everest itself and were mountain guides. Amazingly, they were guides who hadn’t been to the top of the mountain themselves. Their god had forbidden them to do so, we learned. Only on our authority, it followed, had they been happy to ignore his ruling. It was a mark of how loyal and trusty they were. They’d just been waiting for us to come along and lead them to the conquering heights.

There lay the answer to my early confusion. Two non-British types had reached the summit but the conquest was ours. It was a British expedition. A little down the mountain was its British leader, John Hunt, who had selected the two to go to the top. He could have chosen himself but it was to others we allowed such honours. We took quiet satisfaction from knowing that without us it wouldn’t have been possible. As on Everest, we led by rock-like example, uninterested in public glory. Britain’s role was naturally that of the man at the back.

There was no one more natural in the role than Gil Merrick. He had been born to the position upon which everything depended. He was the sort of person who exemplified our response to a threatening world. He faced it as we would, quietly and calmly, and if not to win every title on offer abroad, then at least to stay unbeaten at home.

The first challenge of the autumn was to be the game staged for the FA’s ninetieth anniversary. The team sent along in October by Fifa as the ‘Rest of the World’ wasn’t exactly that. The Latin Americans found it too difficult to travel half the globe in boats and planes for this one game alone. But with a collection of mainly Austrians and Yugoslavs, plus a Swede, German, Italian and a Hungarian-born Spaniard to make up the number, it would represent a good test of our renewed confidence in our game and the forces of the universe.

An Austrian, Willy Meisl, a journalist whose brother Hugo had been the goalkeeper of the 1930s’ ‘Wunderteam’, was given the honour of writing an introductory note in the Wembley programme. True to the character of such people, he abused it. It had long been recognised in other countries, he said, that ‘there was little hope of defeating a British national team by orthodox tactics on its home ground’. The Rest of the World would employ Austria’s methods of an attacking centre-half and ‘charmingly precise, short-passing game’.

This was boastful of him, as well as mischievous to suggest that the ‘orthodox’ way was itself a form of ‘tactics’. Right-minded people knew it was the right way to play. He showed further bad grace in suggesting that although England might be getting used to such ‘tricks’ as tactics (he used quote marks to suggest he didn’t really think they were tricks), its teams were ‘so stereotyped’ that they were ‘still prone to be baffled when unusual methods are introduced’. In response, they could only play a hard physical game and get ‘stuck in’. It was ‘why the true craft of soccer has experienced a decline in the game’s homeland’ he claimed, concluding that the Rest of the World would prove superior on the day. But England’s fighting power might achieve a 2–2 or 3–3 draw.

Shoddy though his intentions were, his forecast proved almost correct. The Rest of the World were 4–3 up with one minute to play when England fortunately won a penalty. Some said the referee’s decision was dubious. But Mr B. W. Griffiths was a transparently neutral Welshman who had served in the RAF during the war. He’d been a sergeant-instructor and was now a schoolteacher, a stickler for doing it by the book. In 1950 he’d been among the first British referees to officiate at a World Cup and seen at close hand the tricks foreign defenders got up to. They needed watching. Besides, there was an order to be upheld here. England and Tottenham full-back Alf Ramsey, a man with a stomach for the occasion, strode up to take the penalty kick and drove the equaliser home from the spot.

The crowd had been in such a state of cliff-hanging excitement that they’d probably forgotten the advertisements in the programme for Wembley’s forthcoming attractions. England’s next opponents at the ground in one month’s time were to be the Olympic gold medallists, Hungary. They figured modestly on the page of events on offer. At the top was an ice hockey match between Wembley Lions and Harringay Racers in the Empire Pool (seat prices from half a crown to twelve and sixpence); next, tournaments of amateur boxing and ‘indoor lawn tennis’. The Hungary game – for 25th November, kick-off 2.15 p.m. – was then mentioned, but in far less space than the ad for the imminent start of the year’s pantomime season. Understandable, really, since as a spectacle it would surely not rate with ‘Humpty Dumpty on Ice’.

On the day itself, the programme notes did anticipate a significant contest. At the Helsinki Olympics the year before, the Hungarians had beaten Yugoslavia 1–0 in the final. They were, of course, among the communist countries making a mockery of what should have been the thoroughly amateur Olympics. Their players claimed to have jobs outside football. Hungary’s captain, Ferenc Puskas, was an army officer, the ‘galloping major’. He would be marked in one of the day’s crucial battles by England’s captain and ‘human dynamo’ Billy Wright. Centre-forward Nandor Hidegkuti and goalkeeper Gyula Grosics were ‘clerical workers’. Centre-half Jozsef Bozsik was to set a Wembley record as ‘the first Member of Parliament ever to play in an International match upon the famous pitch’. He was member for one of the Budapest constituencies, whatever that meant in a totalitarian state. No one was fooled. They were full-time footballers.

Their beautiful football in Helsinki, said the programme, had made them famous the world over. They were unbeaten in the past two seasons. One note, which had a 1066-and-all-that ring to it, went so far as to say that this was the day ‘England faces perhaps the greatest challenge yet to her island supremacy’. To meet it, Gil Merrick was cast in a classical role; he was Horatius facing the Etruscan hordes across the Tiber: ‘It may well be his duty this afternoon to show that unspectacular anticipation is the best weapon of all to hold a heavily attacked bridge.’

But this was to get things out of proportion. Others had been and gone before this lot, the cherry-shirted Hungarians, all continental short shorts and short passing game. The privilege of writing in the programme on how the match might go was not given this time to any cheeky foreigner but to the football correspondent of the London Evening Standard, Harold Palmer. In a half-century or so, he noted, fourteen foreign international sides had been seen off. Hungary had been among them, losing 6–2 at Highbury in 1936. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been a clever team, Palmer conceded with magnanimity, and they had even been superior in midfield. They’d just lacked that component of seeing things through. Having got so far, they ‘let themselves down by their weakness in front of goal’.

Theirs was a style fairly common to central Europeans. Like their neighbours, Austria, they moved away from their adversaries to find open space and retain possession: ‘they reason that while they hold the ball the opposition can do nothing.’ But they couldn’t run away for ever. Today they would also find conditions not to their liking. Heavy fog had threatened to have the game postponed and the novel concession was being made, in their honour, of using a white ball for the whole game. But they were not accustomed to playing on ‘heavy grounds like ours in mid-season’ and the hard tackling of a team of ‘superior stamina’. They were, in short, about to discover it was a man’s game. There was not so much wrong with our football, the Standard man concluded, as the ‘jaundiced Jeremiahs’ made out. This set of opponents would no doubt come with their schemes and plans. We had no need, however, to worry unduly about tactics. Honesty would triumph above deviousness: ‘The English game is all right.’

Elsewhere, the programme noted the Hungarians’ tactics would differ from the Austrians, but not greatly. Rather than an attacking centre-half they came with a retreating centre-forward, Hidegkuti, the Budapest clerical worker, filed away mischievously in the wrong shirt. It had number 9 on its back, but he ‘usually lays well behind his inside-forwards’. From here he was apt to feed them with through passes, or run through himself on to passes they supplied him. It wasn’t, therefore, that England didn’t know about this. As Palmer had recommended, they chose not to worry unduly about it. In the event, the words of Meisl came back to haunt: faced with unusual methods, England teams were ‘prone to be baffled’.

The England defence retained control of their faculties for all of fifty seconds. In as many years, no foreign team had been able to storm the citadel. A sign that things might be otherwise came with the Hungarians’ first attack. Advancing from behind his midfield line, Hidegkuti collected the ball and hit a hard shot from the penalty area’s edge into the top right corner of Merrick’s net. A ‘stunned hush from the packed Wembley terraces’ greeted it, said a Hungarian report. It took their players several seconds to dance at the sight of the ‘white English ball in the net’. Geoffrey Greene, The Times reporter, also had his eyes on it: ‘it was meant to be a dove of peace. Instead it was the angel of doom’.

Within fifteen minutes the same player had scored twice more, one of them charitably disallowed by the referee. The appearance of a retreat that the deep-lying centre-forward gave, suddenly revealed itself as attack. Not only had the match programme given warning, history had seen it all before. In the last such challenge to England’s ‘island supremacy’, the nifty Normans had pretended to run away, then turned with the home team caught unprepared. First Hastings then, 900 less a few years on, Hidegkuti worked the same trick. The victim was a Harold, now as then. Harry Johnston, the Blackpool centre-half, couldn’t fathom whether to follow Hidegkuti and be caught out of position, or leave him to cause havoc at will. Mind befuddled, he looked through the mist for help, calling out across the pitch to his captain, Billy Wright: ‘What do I do, Billy?’ Wright’s reply was succinct and honest: ‘I don’t know, Harry!’

The score was 4–1 by half-time. In the second half England dug into their reserves of resilience and scored twice. So did Hungary. A combination of their easing up – a lack of ‘superior stamina’, possibly – and a first-rate performance by Merrick, kept the score to 6–3.

At five o’clock, a little over an hour after the end of the game, my dad walked the couple of minutes to Gloucester Road tube from the Natural History Museum, where building works were going on around a new air-conditioning system to fan the dinosaur bones and drawers of dead beetles. The papers were on the streets, the placards and men at the newsstands screaming the match outcome. He had to walk up and down the pavement by Baileys Hotel with the Evening News for a while to take it all in. ‘We thought foreign teams were nothing,’ he said. ‘The big games, the ones you were frightened about, were with the Scots.’ He’d had the chance to see the match but hadn’t taken up the offer for the sake of a lost afternoon at work. He was glad he had. He didn’t want to face the journey home: ‘If I felt like this, I wondered how bad it was for those who were in the stadium?’

As for all internationals, his youngest brother, Bim, was there. In his early twenties he had no worries about missing a half-day’s pay and no regrets that he had. It was an incredible occasion, breathtaking – actually, the very opposite of that. It made you realise how long you’d been holding your breath and didn’t have to any more. You’d felt it coming for so long, that the waiting was the problem. The tension was off. The hordes had finally stormed down from the hills. ‘To those who had seen the shadows of recent years creeping closer and closer, there was perhaps no real surprise,’ said Green of The Times. England must ‘awake to a new future’.

For the Wembley crowd the true shock had been Hidegkuti’s goal in the opening minute. It was one of four in the afternoon hit with such power as to make the dusky continental ‘weak in front of goal’ ghost look more pallid than old Harry Johnston. The second following within a few minutes of Hidegkuti’s initial strike made the spectators realise this was to be no flash in the pan. By the third, they were fully disposed to savour what was served before them.

That goal came after a sharply hit diagonal pass from the wing found Puskas on the gallop a few yards out from the right edge of Merrick’s area. Severely left-footed, Puskas easily controlled the ball but, skidding to a halt, found himself with his back half turned towards the goal. He may have appeared off-balance to those near him. He rocked back on his right foot, as if he might even fall and let the ball go beyond reach in front of him. Billy Wright, driven to new heights of dynamism at having been caught out by Puskas’s move into a dangerous position, ran and threw himself at the ball in a sliding tackle. He aimed to sweep it out of play for a corner kick and on the damp turf his momentum carried him into the crouched row of photographers across the touchline. The problem was he didn’t have the ball with him.

Puskas was the ‘tubby brains’ of the Hungarian attack. In addition to his plastered-down, centre-parted hair, he was short and of square frame. In technically polite terms he had a low centre of gravity. He hadn’t been unbalanced at all, and placed the studs of his left boot on the ball to drag it back swiftly out of Wright’s path. In a continuation of the same movement, he pirouetted on his right foot, drew his leg back and hit an unstoppable shot. Merrick, knees buckling, hardly had time to lift his hand.

Billy Wright witnessed this as he detached himself from the sprawl of grey-coated cameramen and dislodged trilby hats. Stanley Matthews was off in the fog on the right-wing but four decades later could still clearly see Puskas’s goal in his mind’s eye. The Hungarian report observed how the crowd ‘applauded for a very long time’. What they’d seen had been so simple that anyone in British football would have been proud to have done it. The footwork was perfectly no-nonsense, and effective enough to dump the England captain on his backside. It was rounded off with an example of shooting to equal anything England’s own forwards could have provided. It was brilliant, might even have been very British, yet was a million miles beyond us.

Puskas’s ‘drag-back’ captured the imagination sufficiently to be given the name. In scarcely a second, it fused elements of the game – deftness and directness, skill and shooting power, the scurrilous tactical stuff of foreigners and the straightforward decency of home – thought unfusable. It was a moment of football creation and for England the moment of much wider defeat. We had to acknowledge we were beaten. What the crowd witnessed wasn’t some overseas reverse, explained by the quirky things that went on abroad and distant enough to be forgotten. It had happened here, on our turf and before our own eyes.

Allowing for a few thousand neutrals at the game, a bare minimum of Magyar émigrés and a scattering of communist diplomats, some, say, 95,000 people went back to the workplaces, pubs and working-men’s clubs of an England approaching full employment and spoke about it. According to the old marketing principle that everyone knew 250 people – or, even if the number were pared to a conservative 100 – it meant that somewhere between nearly a quarter and over half of the population of England heard of the moment from someone they knew who had been there. This was in addition to what they discovered through the papers and radio. TV had missed the moment; only the second half was broadcast, because the FA didn’t want people staying away from several afternoon replays between lower division and non-league clubs in the second round of the Cup. But all channels of communication reflected on this matter of wide national concern. Scots, Welsh and Irish joined in, in appreciation as much as glee.

Puskas’s achievement was of mythical proportions. My dad talked about it with his brother and many other people. When he told me about it, I understood it to have been performed by someone from somewhere called ‘Hungry’. This put it in the same funny-country category as ‘Turkey’ and ‘Grease’, though it turned out to be not some old gag but a stroke of magic. Puskas, I gathered, rolled the ball beneath his foot backwards and forwards several times. This had cast a kind of spell on the England defence, as if they were under the influence of an old Indian snake-charmer like Dr Dadachanji. They had swayed back and forth with it, till Puskas’s final dispatch of the ball snapped them out of their trance. I practised rolling an old tennis ball under my foot in the backyard and tried it on the other kids in the infants’ playground. Far from mesmerised, they shouted at me to get on with it. It occurred to me this might not be my skill; also, that foreigners could do very impressive things.

The Hungary defeat was not Merrick’s fault. He’d had to be necessarily spectacular to stop any number of Hungarian attacks. My encyclopaedia showed one, the England keeper springing left with rolled sleeves and black wool-gloved hand to push the ball around the post. A strand of dark brilliantined hair out of place confirmed the pressure he was under. Puskas said that if Merrick hadn’t played so well the score would have been 12.

By the time a quarter of that figure had been reached, the outcome was certain. We had been out-performed and the most implacable last line we could muster was unable to stop the foreign tide. As Puskas’s shot flashed by, Merrick’s raised hand clutched only a gloveful of November gloom. Half turning his head to watch the ball on its way into the net, his eyes were unmoved as ever, staring at the end of empire.