TERRY: I didn’t see the score. I only saw ‘England F’.
BOB: Pardon?
TERRY: ‘England F’. I saw the first word and the first letter of the second word – F. England F. See?
BOB: Oh, my God. Well that’s it, isn’t it? It’s obvious. England flop.
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? ‘No Hiding Place’
(Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais; BBC TV, 1973)
THE EVENTS of 1966 and 1968 always seemed bound by some mythical, mystical thread, especially to those like me for whom the events happened in our formative years of football fandom. England’s first World Cup and European Cup successes; the tears of Bobby Charlton; Sir Alf and Sir Matt; the myths, facts and images converged to create what we believed to be the truth of the sport: that England and Manchester United ruled the waves. Had any vestige of the invincibility of those teams survived within our maturing consciousness, the 1973-74 season destroyed it for good.
In terms of personnel, both teams were unrecognisable from their glory days. On the opening day of the season at Arsenal, goalkeeper Alex Stepney was the only survivor of United’s victory over Benfica. When England played their first game of the campaign, Martin Peters was the one World Cup winner on the field. Several months later, United had been relegated and England were at home watching the World Cup. As shocking as both events were, the warning signs had been there since the start of the decade.
Harold Wilson, Britain’s Prime Minister since 1964, had always been quick to associate himself with his nation’s football team. His second general election victory had come in England’s annus mirabilis of 1966 and Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins would come to speak of Wilson’s ‘theory of almost mystical symbiosis between the fortunes of the Labour Party and the England football eleven’. Perhaps Wilson should have remembered that when the polling booths closed across Britain on 18 June 1970. Sat in his constituency headquarters in the Liverpool suburb of Huyton and buoyed by opinion polls that had given him a cushion over Conservative leader Edward Heath, Wilson felt as confident as, well, a football manager holding a two-goal lead with 20 minutes remaining in a quarter-final.
Within a few hours, the Conservative Party had emerged as a clear winner, going on to achieve a 31-seat majority. The Tories had promised ‘A Better Tomorrow’ in their election manifesto, but Wilson was believed by some to have been a hapless victim of a national depression that had suddenly made its people feel more inclined to look for a change of government; a mood that had settled following events in the Mexican city of Leon four days earlier. Alf Ramsey had appeared comfortably on course to repeat his victory of four years earlier against West Germany. Yet, from a position of apparent impregnability, both Ramsey and Wilson had lost. Perhaps there really was something in that theory.*
After the loss of his team’s world title, Ramsey began planning a European Championship campaign, just as the nation, under Heath, prepared for its entry into the European Economic Community on the first day of 1973. Ramsey, unlike Heath, would never make it through to his completion date – dumped out in the quarter-finals after winning an easy qualification section against Greece, Malta and Switzerland.
England began their group with a 1-0 win in Malta that was notable mostly for the debuts of Derby County’s Roy McFarland, Tottenham Hotspur centre-forward Martin Chivers and Everton duo Colin Harvey and Joe Royle, along with the absence of Bobby Moore, out of favour at West Ham after a late-night visit to a Blackpool nightclub on the eve of an FA Cup defeat at Blackpool.† But, despite those enforced changes, Ramsey was a long way from being ready to tear down the foundations of World Cup success. The likes of Moore, Gordon Banks, Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters, Alan Ball and Norman Hunter from the 1966 squad still had important roles to play. ‘It was very homely,’ said McFarland. ‘Alf had a love for those older players because of what they had done for him. Maybe in the long term he did hang on a little bit too long to some.’332
‘It seemed like the 1966 team was a family,’ said Arsenal centre-forward John Radford, who earned a pair of caps without breaking in on a regular basis. ‘I remember watching one game on film and someone like Bobby Moore actually fell asleep. Alf had to go up and shake him and say, “Would you mind?” It was, “Right. Sorry, Alf,” and we’d carry on.’333
A 3-0 home win against Greece saw Arsenal’s Peter Storey awarded the first of his 19 caps, an amount that supporters of men such as Rodney Marsh and Peter Osgood saw as a blight. Storey appeared in most England games over a two-year period, either at right-back or in the midfield enforcer role he was now known for at Highbury. ‘He didn’t like doing it,’ said team-mate Bob McNab. ‘He would be swearing under his breath and snarling. He hated it that much it made it worse for the poor bastard he was marking.’334 His club captain, Frank McLintock, called him ‘a head case, a loony – but you wanted him in your side’.335 As did Ramsey, evidently seeing him as a natural successor to Nobby Stiles.
A three-man attack of Chivers, Hurst and Francis Lee all found the net against Greece, and Chivers scored two more when Malta were beaten 5-0 at Wembley. Another double by the Spurs man was the highlight of the 3-1 win over Scotland with which England wrapped up an unbeaten campaign in the Home International Championship. The victory meant that England were undefeated in seven games since the World Cup, although The Times’s Geoffrey Green said their final week of matches ‘wore the label of all work and precious little play’. Green did enthuse, though, about the contribution of Chivers, arguing that he offered England ‘the kind of ramrod they need to finish much of their elaborate approach play’.
It was an appropriate way for Chivers to end a season in which he had changed perception of him as fragile and injury-prone; someone unable to pack the punch his physique promised. He had come a long way from the man once dropped by Bill Nicholson for a game against West Ham and told to study the way Hurst played. He was now into a three-season stretch in which he was undoubtedly the most feared No.9 in the country, the sight of him collecting the ball, charging into the penalty area and finding the net becoming a staple of the weekly highlights. His 34 first-team goals in 1970-71 included both in Tottenham’s 2-0 win against Third Division Aston Villa in the League Cup Final; and in the following two seasons he would find the net 44 and 33 times respectively in all Spurs games. It was a scoring rate of which Jimmy Greaves, the man he effectively succeeded at White Hart Lane, would have been proud.
Chivers had arrived in north London during 1967-68, signed from Southampton for £125,000 a few weeks after scoring a hat-trick for the Football League against the Irish League.‡ He scored on his Spurs debut, but in September 1968 tore up his knee and was sidelined for almost a year. When he returned in the 1969-70 season, he managed only 11 goals in 31 League games. ‘I used to think he was a bit of a joke,’ an unnamed international defender was quoted as saying midway through Chivers’s breakthrough season. ‘He had all the muscle and skill, yet he never looked as though he wanted to put it to use.’336
During 1971-72, Chivers scored in England’s victories in Switzerland and Greece and bagged eight in Tottenham’s successful UEFA Cup campaign, including both in the 2-1 first-leg win against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the final.§ It was his new-found appetite for the robust that had made the difference. ‘We were always trying to get Martin to use his physique properly,’ said his former Southampton manager Ted Bates. ‘In those days a big, strong centre-half could swallow him.’337 The television analysts’ approval was provided by Jimmy Hill, who said, ‘Chivers has everything a footballer needs – the physique of a giant, the control of a juggler, speed to burn, he can head and shoot and has a football brain to boot.’338
Chivers felt blessed to have joined a club that gave his talent the opportunity to flourish, especially as he could have ended up across north London in a more functional Arsenal unit. ‘We were a good side,’ he recalled. ‘We won the League Cup and were at the start of a sequence of four finals in four years. I could never imagine playing the Arsenal way. It was very successful for them, but they did build on a strong defence, whereas we tended to play more attacking football.’339
England’s European Championship quarter-final was a two-legged affair that would send the winners into the final four in Belgium. It saw them renew rivalry with West Germany, who had followed their third place in Mexico by constructing a team that drew upon the Total Football principles of Holland and its European Cup holders, Ajax Amsterdam. It was poignant that the West Germans always seemed to be standing in the way on England’s most significant recent occasions: 1966, 1970, 1972. Memories, first-hand experience and bestowed tales of more serious conflict were still too fresh for the public to treat these games in isolation from global history. Happily, the weight of such things did not seem likely to result in the same negative on-field approach that one witnessed in contests between, for example, India and Pakistan on the cricket field, where 13 consecutive Test matches between 1952 and 1978 were drawn. ‘We have come here to play football, not just to defend,’ German manager Helmut Schoen promised.
Ramsey might have been better served by adopting more of a bunker mentality. Uncharacteristically, he opted to field an attacking line-up that eschewed a defensive midfielder, even though his squad included both Storey and Alan Mullery, whose tale was one of the most romantic of the season. Loaned to Fulham after losing his place in the first team, the Spurs skipper was recalled before the UEFA Cup semi-final against AC Milan and proceeded to score important goals in the semi-final and final before lifting the trophy. Behind the midfield trio, Ramsey’s selection of the left-footed Hunter in the absence of McFarland forced Moore to play on the right of the centre-back pairing. He was so unused to playing there that newspapers had predicted that Liverpool’s Larry Lloyd would partner the England captain. Neither full-back, Paul Madeley or Emlyn Hughes, played there regularly for their clubs, although Madeley famously had no set position in the Leeds team and was understudy for everyone except the goalkeeper. In summary, Ramsey selected a back four in which only one man was playing in his week-in, week-out position and offered them no midfield protection. This was his line-up: Banks – Madeley, Moore, Hunter, Hughes – Bell, Ball, Peters – Lee, Chivers, Hurst.
To say that England were caught unawares would be an understatement. Borussia Moenchengladbach midfielder Günter Netzer was 27 years old and had made his international debut in 1965. Yet his absence from two subsequent World Cups meant that few expected him to turn in one of the finest individual performances in the history of the stadium. ‘We hadn’t been told a thing about him,’ Moore lamented, while Ramsey admitted being ‘surprised at the way the Germans came at us’. Netzer strolled around Wembley as though he owned the place, his long blond hair adding to his regal air, orchestrating the fluent movements of colleagues whose versatility and speed of thought embarrassed the home team. England’s efforts looked outmoded and pedestrian. ‘Netzer had the game of his life,’ said Chivers. ‘But he was never the same again as he was on that night. They took us to the cleaners.’340
If the Germans played with arrogance it was justified by their superiority. And they considered it further payback for the attitude England had displayed towards them in Mexico two years earlier. ‘Just after England scored their second goal they started rolling the ball around as though it was all over,’ Gerd Müller recalled of the World Cup game. ‘This made me mad and I think all our team hitched up their shorts and got on with the game.’341 There was no chance of the German team allowing this game to slip away from them. A 3-1 victory was fully merited, Lee’s equaliser merely a temporary distraction.
In fairness to Ramsey, plenty of observers had been calling for more adventurous team selection. ‘It is the mood as much as the mechanics which must be more adventurous this time,’ writer Pat Collins had urged. ‘The accent must be on scorers more than stoppers.’342 The timing for such a development could have been better, however. It would now take a miracle in Berlin two weeks later to keep England in the tie, but Ramsey was disinclined to try for one. He opted for damage limitation, naming Hunter and Storey in a four-man midfield. It was what John Anthony, writing in Football Monthly Digest, called ‘the selection above all else that persuaded most of us that Ramsey was not the manager we once believed him to be’.343
Picking the mercurial Marsh instead of Hurst – his England career now over – was fooling no one. England’s line-up, and subsequent tactics, suggested that a 0-0 draw was the extent of their ambition. And that is what they got. ‘Embarrassing, third rate,’ was the resulting description of the England team by Goal editor Alan Hughes, while Green described them in The Times as ‘like a train stuck to the same straight lines’. Schoen, revelling in the Schadenfreude of it all, said, ‘I don’t think you have moved forward. In Germany we have been trying to restore the balance between attack and defence and I think we are succeeding. We now put more emphasis on technique, but I don’t think this is so in England.’
The Home Internationals failed to bring much relief. True, Marsh scored his first England goal in a 3-0 win in Cardiff, before Scotland were beaten at Hampden Park, but it was what happened at Wembley in between that defined England’s tournament.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland had been raging since 1969, when increasing violence between the Protestant and Catholic communities – torn over whether the province should remain within the United Kingdom or be part of a united Ireland – led to the deployment of British troops. Nationalists, loyalists and British forces formed three points of an intricate, tragic triangle that saw more than 3,500 people killed over almost four decades of conflict. The year 1972 would come to be recognised as the worst of all, with 497 people dead, more than half of them non-combatants. In January, the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre saw 13 unarmed civilians shot dead by troops in Derry during a banned civil-rights march, with a 14th dying later. Reprisals would include the nationalist IRA’s bombing of the Aldershot army barracks, killing seven, and a ‘Bloody Friday’ in Belfast in July, when more than 20 bombs were detonated in little more than an hour, killing nine and wounding approximately 130.
In March, home rule had been introduced, Westminster taking over Northern Irish affairs after the suspension of the Stormont parliament. And on the sporting front, the year’s Five Nations Championship in rugby union had been left uncompleted when Scotland and Wales refused, on safety grounds, to fulfil their fixtures against Ireland in Dublin. In February, Northern Ireland were forced to stage a European Championship qualifier against Spain at Boothferry Park, where their player-manager, Terry Neill, fulfilled that same dual role for Hull City. It was Neill who prodded home the only goal after 34 minutes when the Irish visited Wembley in May, giving his country its second victory over England and the first since 1957.
‘I happened to be leaning against the post,’ recalled Neill, who believed that the opportunity to give their countrymen a brief respite from the atrocities of life fired his team’s resolve to hang on to the lead. ‘The Troubles were at their worst and at Wembley that night we all felt that it might have given the little province of Northern Ireland a bit of a lift,’ he said. ‘Our centre-half, Allan Hunter, epitomised the spirit. Alf Ramsey threw on Martin Chivers with about 20 minutes to go. Big Chiv had pace and skill and we are on our knees because we have grafted like mad. Chiv trots on and says to me, “Your boys are playing terrific tonight,” Allan Hunter is a couple of yards away and says, “Kick the bastard.” Chiv spent the last 20 minutes out on the right wing somewhere. It certainly was a sweet moment.’344
Appreciation of what the result meant in the streets, pubs and workplaces of Belfast was all well and good as far as English fans and media were concerned. What was of greater import to them was exactly where the events of these spring weeks had left their team in football’s pecking order. Not since Hungary waltzed around them in 1953 had the national team appeared so irrelevant and out of touch, so removed from what was happening in the chemistry labs of the sport’s development. According to Italy manager Ferruccio Valcareggi, ‘England’s great weakness is their lack of flexibility. They are extremely limited in some of the skills of the game.’ While most people in English football liked to refer to Madeley as a ‘Rolls-Royce’, he called the Leeds man ‘a robot’.345
English clubs might have won the UEFA Cup for the fourth consecutive season, but the method and teamwork that had become the foundation of successful teams, both at home and abroad, clearly didn’t translate to international football – or, indeed, to the elite level of club competition. On the way to winning the second of three straight European Cups with a fluid style that saw players interchanging positions at will, Ajax had beaten Arsenal home and away, after which head coach Stefan Kovacs observed, ‘I was a little surprised that Arsenal seemed to have so few ideas. All they did was concentrate on the long ball down the middle.’ It was another damning indictment of the English game.
So were the comments of Bertie Mee after he, Dave Sexton, Ron Greenwood and Don Howe watched Ajax put four past Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals one season later. ‘English sides don’t give the opposition time to play, nor do they give them the space in which to play,’ he said dismissively. Football Monthly reacted by writing, ‘What makes Mee’s statement so regrettable is not that it lacks sanity or purpose, but that he should assess the sum total of English soccer aspirations in these negative, barren terms.’346
ALF GARNETT: Cor blimey, that’s the trouble with this country today. It’s like being on a boat with no captain – and no crew
Till Death Us Do Part, ‘Three-Day Week’
(Johnny Speight; BBC TV, 1974)
The prioritisation of the national team became a talking point that would dominate the sport as thoughts turned to the 1974 World Cup. Malcolm Allison went as far as suggesting that the FA Cup be cancelled for a year to create more breathing space in the season’s suffocating schedule.
‘Responsibility for defeat was laid firmly at the feet of Sir Alf Ramsey,’ wrote Ken Jones of the Wembley nightmare against West Germany, ‘but how much of it should have been accepted by a system which permits such a critical match to be okayed in ludicrous circumstances?’ Referring to the withdrawal of McFarland and Colin Todd because of Derby’s important League game two days later, Jones cited a ‘League system which has become ridiculously unwieldy and almost unmanageable. There is no doubt in my mind that there were at least seven England players at Wembley who were not entirely committed to the action. It could be disastrous if England are unable to qualify for the World Cup in two years’ time. Let’s not overlook that possibility.’347
Even Ramsey was eventually forced to concede that some of his players in the West Germany game had been distracted. ‘I felt the game against the Germans would be enough in itself to motivate them,’ he said, with justification. ‘I should have done more to make them aware of their responsibilities.’348
Jones, whose work for the Mirror group and Goal magazine made him one of the country’s most influential football writers, was not letting up, although his next blast conflated the problems of the England team with the lack of open, entertaining football on offer most Saturdays. ‘A negative attitude has become so common to the experience of spectators throughout the Football League,’ he observed, suggesting that the First Division was so competitive that it produced ‘too many matches of a critical nature’. Bill Nicholson contributed his complaint that there was no time in the diary to practise technical skills, while Jones concluded, ‘Overwhelming interest has created a situation where we now watch sub-standard football. It is reflected in the inadequacies of the England team and the failure of English clubs to make a lasting impression in the European Cup.’349
This wrapping up of national team results with a lack of exciting football tended to reflect the writer’s overall lament for English football rather than offering a robust critique of the deficiencies of Ramsey’s side. After all, its greatest achievement had not exactly been a triumph of flamboyance. When, at the end of September, FA chairman Sir Andrew Stephen suggested that ‘the time is ripe to have a long look at the state of the game’ it was not so much the performance of the England team that concerned him as it was three elements that he felt were forcing attendances down: too much competitive football – presumably a dig at the Football League; too much television coverage – ditto; and ‘the madness that takes place on the terraces’.
Yet any fears the country was feeling about England in the 1974 World Cup still centred mostly on what would happen when they arrived for the finals in West Germany, not on the formality of winning a three-team group against Poland and Wales. Had it not been so, maybe the FA might have thought twice about its decision, two days after Stephens’s pronouncement, to ban two of England’s most talented young footballers, Todd and Alan Hudson, from two years of international football. Their crime was to withdraw from the England Under-23 team’s tour of East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union in order to give themselves a full summer’s rest.
So much for the apparent sympathy of the FA chairman, who’d felt that there was ‘too much football’. Instead FA secretary Denis Follows announced, ‘They have been told they are not wanted by England for two years.’ And so much for consistency. Madeley had told England he did not want to go the World Cup in Mexico, but was in the full squad the following season. In the Sunday Express, Danny Blanchflower reflected the general astonishment at the punishment for Hudson and Todd by writing, ‘This is good news for the Great Train Robbers. They can feel relieved now they were not confronted by the FA Committee.’
Hudson had been bitterly disappointed not to have made his full England debut that spring against Northern Ireland after Bobby Moore told him that Ramsey was going to play him. Meanwhile, Todd – described by Kenny Dalglish as ‘the most difficult defender I ever played against’350 – argued that his loyalties lay with his family. ‘I honestly didn’t expect any disciplinary action,’ he said. ‘I just did what I thought was right, which was to take my wife Jenny and our son away for a holiday. I was honest about it. I could have pretended to be injured.’351
With the fates, and the FA, conspiring to keep Hudson well away from the England team, it was another rising star, Kevin Keegan, who made his debut when a new World Cup campaign began with a narrow win in Cardiff. The warning signs of a disappointing 1-1 draw in the return against Wales at Wembley were then disregarded in the wake of a 5-0 thrashing of Scotland in Glasgow early in 1973. The Scottish FA’s centenary celebrations were dumped on by England’s strike force of Mick Channon, Allan Clarke and Chivers. And then a clean sweep of the Home Internationals sent England off in a confident frame of mind to eastern Europe, the centrepiece of the trip being the World Cup contest against Poland. According to Jimmy Hill, defeat and subsequent failure to qualify would ‘have a disastrous effect on English football for a number of years’.352 For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.
After drawing in Czechoslovakia, England arrived at the Slaski Stadium in Chorzow, part of the mining city of Katowice. Maybe it was the dark, forbidding environment that persuaded Ramsey that there was tough, unforgiving work to be done and this was no place for the frivolity of three up front. The day before the game he approached Channon to tell him, ‘I’m leaving you out tomorrow. I’m going to put in a destructive player in your place.’ Storey was back in a line-up that would be wearing unfamiliar yellow shirts. ‘I was stunned,’ said Channon. ‘To me, it was the biggest crime in the world that he left me out – an attacker – for Peter Storey, a midfield defending player.’353
Ramsey, who had misread the selection needs against West Germany a year earlier, was immediately questioned in the BBC’s World Cup Grandstand studio for his apparent timidity. ‘Despite everything, he still picks a side to stop him losing,’ argued Brian Clough, who would shortly be transferring his opinions to ITV. Clough’s view of Poland was that they were ‘amateurs’ and, ‘I don’t think they would grace the finals of the World Cup.’ Yet, he continued, ‘This is still not good enough for Alf. He has still selected a side which is cautious.’
A near-post mix-up involving Moore allowed Poland a seventh-minute lead and, immediately after half-time, the captain was caught in possession by Wlodzimierz Lubanski, who went on to beat Peter Shilton. Moore owned up to an ‘unforgiveable error’ but said that his attempt to get clear of his opponent and pick out a pass was ‘a move I’ve done thousands of times’.354
‘After such a magnificent career, Bobby had a bad game,’ said Chivers. ‘For all the great games that he had, that was one of his worst.’355 Maybe it was finally time to consider the man widely regarded as Moore’s natural successor, Colin Todd. Oh, hang on …
England’s response in Katowice was delivered by Alan Ball, who fouled Leslaw Cmikiewicz with 11 minutes remaining and then grabbed his opponent by the throat and attempted to knee him in the region of his red shorts, believing that the Polish player had tried to put his boot in the face of Peters. Ball was shown a red card – joining Mullery as the only men sent off on full England duty – and had to be restrained and ushered away by trainer Harold Shepherdson. Earlier, Lubanski had been carried from the field – and out of Poland’s World Cup campaign – after a challenge by McFarland, which journalist Brian Glanville saw as a metaphor. ‘When Roy McFarland dragged down the Polish forward … as he broke clean through the English defence, something, I think, died in our football.’356
Once more, the result left Ramsey exposed to criticism. Even former disciple Jack Charlton was forced to admit to ‘big doubts about the way he is tackling things now’. Recalling the aftermath of the game, McFarland revealed Ramsey’s own feelings of culpability. ‘The only thing you could drink out there was beer, so we ordered a couple of crates. We were all disappointed and sat in Bally and Bobby’s room talking about how poorly we had performed. There was a knock and Alf came in and said, “Can I join you boys?” and then said, “It was my fault. We didn’t get that near post sorted out.” He drank his beer, persuaded everyone he was to blame and walked out.’357
Concerns quickly arose over England’s ability to prepare properly for the must-win return game against Poland at Wembley on 17 October, a match described by Mike Langley in the Sunday People as ‘the thundercloud hanging over the new season’. Failure, he said, would be ‘a cataclysm’. Rodney Marsh, meanwhile, felt that the English game was in such a sorry state that ‘it will be almost nonexistent in 10 years’ if England failed to qualify.
The typical timeline for an England home game was that players would make their way to the team hotel during the Sunday after a full League programme and be checked over by the team’s medical staff. ‘We used to sit by the phone on Sunday afternoons and Sunday nights waiting for the pull-outs,’ said Fred Street, who inherited those anxious waits when he became the England team physiotherapist in 1974. ‘Out of a squad of 22 you would get four most games who would pull out, and then you would have to call up the stand-bys. And that had often upset a player, knowing he was only a stand-by. They see themselves as a makeweight and they are probably not going to get a game anyway. So here we are on Monday with a squad of 22 and of those I would probably keep half a dozen out of training. If anyone had turned up on a Sunday night really suffering, I would send them back to the club to get ready for the following Saturday.’358
Players who were fit enough could look forward to a maximum of two full training sessions in which to reacquaint themselves with team-mates and develop enough understanding to achieve victory. The military-trained ‘amateurs’ of Poland, the English press delighted in pointing out, would have been together for months by the time they kicked off at Wembley.
With no prospect of the Football League agreeing to postpone the First Division programme on Saturday 13 October, a compromise suggested by many was for the League Cup games scheduled in the previous midweek to be played on Monday night, allowing Ramsey to have a few additional days with his squad before players returned to their clubs for the weekend. It did nothing to lessen the risk of injury right before England’s most critical game for years, but it could aid the cause of cohesiveness. ‘Everything possible must be done to help Sir Alf,’ Clough suggested, correctly noting that the reputation of the entire English game was at stake. Yet Manchester City manager John Hart, while promising to do all he could to help England qualify, added, ‘But I also want Manchester City to win the League Cup.’ After all, the outcome of City’s second-round tie against Walsall had a far greater impact on Hart’s employment than England’s result. That the onus should be on the clubs to ‘do the right thing’ was both unfair and, frankly, unrealistic, especially when there were managers such as Newcastle United’s Joe Harvey, who said, ‘I am getting fed up to the teeth with Sir Alf Ramsey’s perpetual moaning. He should know his players by now and they in turn should know each other.’
The fact that, only a few weeks before the Poland game, the Football League management committee spent their time examining ways of cashing in on a new ‘Spot the Ball’ competition rather than debating ways of assisting the England team was greeted by the Daily Express’s David Miller thus: ‘While the League fiddles, football burns. Why not go the whole hog, Mr Hardaker, cancel the players’ contracts and have bingo on Saturday afternoons like the derelict cinemas?’
Finally, Hardaker’s men instructed clubs to implement the League Cup compromise. After which, England went out and thrashed Austria 7-0 at Wembley, a result that seemed to lend weight to the arguments of those such as Harvey and eased the nation’s nerves about the more important events of three weeks later. The pessimists were given ammunition when Poland’s Under-23s held their English counterparts to a goalless draw at Plymouth the night before the real thing, and Green warned his readers in The Times, ‘[England] may well require one special virtue. It is patience.’ More common, though, was the view expressed by Channon that ‘the Poles just didn’t compare in skill, flair or method and I can’t see them being so fortunate again’.359
An unchanged line-up from the Austria game saw England field Channon, Chivers and Clarke up front, while Hunter was preferred to Moore at the back. Yet the men supposedly carrying the country’s hopes all the way to West Germany got no further than the Wembley penalty area before being mugged by the 6ft 4in Polish goalkeeper. Jan Tomaszewski’s brilliance might not have deterred Clough from telling his new ITV audience that he was merely ‘a clown’ – a comment Brian Moore was man enough to challenge – but it was sufficient to ensure that England would be absent from the World Cup finals for the first time since they deigned to enter the 1950 tournament. Having recovered from near disaster when he almost rolled the ball to the feet of Clarke, Tomaszewski – like Netzer – chose Wembley as the venue for the game of his life.
The entire match appeared to be played out in a flurry of mayhem in the Poland penalty area. Bodies flew everywhere to block shots; the ball bounced back off the woodwork; and the goalkeeper – when not flapping like an overworked traffic cop – pulled off a series of miraculous saves. None was better than the low parry to his right to deny Bell, shortly before stretching towards his left post to keep out Clarke’s header. ‘This is the most incredible first half of football I have seen for a very, very long time,’ gasped commentator Hugh Johns, before describing another leaping save against Channon.
‘If I could turn the clock back and play that game again, I’d want virtually everything to be the same again,’ said Bell. ‘We absolutely paralysed them that night and it was the most one-sided international I ever played in.’360 In the dressing-room at half-time, Ramsey assured his players to keep playing as they were and a goal would come. It was impossible, on the evidence of the first 45 minutes, to believe anything else.
Into the second half. A Currie blockbuster pushed away; a Channon volley into the side netting; and then … disaster. Hunter lost a tackle on the touchline. ‘The ball should have ended up down the North Circular Road,’ he said. ‘Like an idiot, instead of putting it out of play, I … tried to lift it over with my right foot. Well I must have had a brain seizure at that moment because I never did that.’361 Hunter allowed a break that ended with Jan Domarski shooting under Shilton’s body. ‘It went too quickly for me to get down and save,’ the keeper explained,362 while Hunter recalled, ‘He could have thrown his cap on it.’363
Now there was a disallowed effort by Channon to add to the drama and, finally, an England goal by Clarke from the penalty spot, with Shilton unable to watch at the other end of the field. But there were no more goals; just more saves, against Currie, against Clarke, against Channon, against everyone, it seemed. Ramsey’s caution delayed any substitution until the introduction of Kevin Hector with a couple of minutes left, an inertia described by Miller in the Daily Express as ‘the most inexplicable tactical blunder of his controversial career’. According to Ramsey’s biographer, Leo McKinstry, Daily Mirror journalist Nigel Clarke was told later by Sir Alf that his watch had stopped and he didn’t realise how little time was left.
Hector had been constantly asking an official near the England bench how much time remained and was taken by surprise when Ramsey ordered him to get ready for action. He ripped off the two tracksuits he was wearing for warmth, while Keegan did the same in the belief that he was the ‘Kevin’ for whom Ramsey had called. Hector stumbled on without instruction or warm-up and immediately had a header blocked from point-blank range. ‘I headed it well, but the defender was on the line and it just hit him on the knee,’ said the previously uncapped Derby forward. ‘I could have been an overnight hero.’364 After one further goal-line clearance from Bell’s shot, with Tomaszewski again flailing around like, dare it be said, a clown, the whistle blew on what Johns called ‘one of the blackest days’ for English football.
The matter-of-fact headline in The Times – ‘England fail to qualify for World Cup finals’ – was as stark and damning as the statistics that England had failed to convert 31 goal attempts and 20-odd corners into victory. Green’s observation that ‘what England truly lacked this night was some guiding star’ was a little harsh in light of such dominance, while Ramsey’s public acceptance that ‘in life one has many disappointments’ demonstrated the same kind of equanimity with which he greeted his greatest triumph.
Others were less guarded about their emotions. ‘Losing that game hurt me more than anything else I have ever experienced in football,’ Chivers recalled, significantly referring to a drawn game as a defeat. ‘In the dressing-room all the players were devastated and in tears.’365 Hunter agreed that he was ‘devastated’, but would not admit to tears, while Clarke was too depressed to turn up to film an advert for NatWest the following day.
Much would be made in the 21st century of the ‘golden generation’ of English footballers unable to win the World Cup: Beckham, Lampard, Gerrard, Rooney, Cole and Ferdinand. For the likes of Bell, Chivers, McFarland and Channon, the cream of their own era, the chance of merely appearing in the tournament finals at the peak of their powers had been denied them. ‘World Cups only come around every four years and I’d mainly been a substitute in Mexico, so this had been my big chance,’ said Bell, perhaps the most complete English footballer of the early 1970s. ‘I remember Alf telling us that the squad of 1974 was better than the one that had won it in 1966.’366
England’s failure gave observers further freedom to air the dissatisfaction with Ramsey that had been building for three years. According to different analysts’ views he had followed a ‘grey groove of predictability’ and wasted the years since 1970 with ‘an over-cautious approach’. And it was now safe to lambast the manager on light entertainment shows. ‘I think we’ve got three main problems with the England team,’ said Mike Yarwood in the guise of Brian Clough on Parkinson. ‘Sir. Alf. Ramsey. I’d blame him for the Test matches if I could.’
Joe Mercer said England were now ‘a third-rate nation’ but suggested that Ramsey’s biggest problem was that he was ‘a bad public relations officer’ – an area of strength that Mercer would soon be bringing to the role on a temporary basis.367 Mercer would certainly never have dreamt of undermining the football knowledge of the fourth estate in the abrasive manner of Ramsey when he told reporters in 1973, ‘I was interviewed by a news man this morning and he seemed to think there were millions of people who think that the type of football I encourage England to play was dull, lacked flair. The word flair keeps cropping up and other words that infer you know absolutely nothing about the game of football.’
England’s failure meant the state of the national game being exposed to scrutiny. To make matters worse, Liverpool would soon be beaten in the second round of the European Cup by Red Star Belgrade. Bill Shankly’s dismissive ‘would our public watch the sort of football they play on the Continent?’ was not a response designed to challenge anyone to look seriously at any problems, but privately he’d made some important notes for the future direction of his team. Bobby Charlton’s optimistic assertion that this was ‘the start of a brave new world for English football’ didn’t find many supporters, although David Gregory, editor of the drum-banging Shoot!, urged readers to ‘take pride in their heart-rending battle’ against Poland. Yet when the magazine had run a recent article on Britain’s teams in Europe, it seemed appropriate that the union flag that had formed the background graphic to the page had been printed upside down, the universally recognised signal of distress.
Many observers blamed the managers who perpetuated the unimaginative nature of League football, discouraging the free thinking that might have solved the problem of Poland. Ajax coach Kovacs, a frequent critic, said, ‘When I watch an English team all I see are 11 faceless gladiators chasing around as though the clubhouse was on fire.’368 West Ham’s Ron Greenwood, who remained endearingly out of step with most of his peers, asked, ‘Can you blame [Ramsey] if the players don’t have sufficient intelligence?’ Yet Ken Jones wrote of the ‘pomposity’ of leading managers, adding ‘If they feel that professional footballers are incapable of thinking for themselves then it is high time that they did something about it. Unless they do we shall continue to witness the inadequacy which infests our technique when it is set against foreign opposition.’ English football was breeding ‘moronic athletes’, he concluded.369
Even Hardaker was forced to admit that it was time to examine the structure of League football and perhaps reduce the strain on the top players. Rotation in this age was merely something farmers did with their crops, not an option for First Division managers. Ted Croker, who could have chosen an easier week to be taking over from Denis Follows as secretary of the Football Association, spoke of ‘fundamental problems to be tackled’ and agreed with Hardaker when he said, ‘We are asking our leading players to be both artists and artisans. It could be that when it matters most there are not too many reserves of strength to draw upon.’
Such apparent appetite for revolution did not signify immediate change. Hardaker’s dismissive comment on BBC Radio in the game’s build-up that failure to win would be ‘a terrible thing for six weeks and then everyone will forget about it’ proved to be not far off the mark when it came to the game’s administrators. It would not be until the end of the 1980s that the Football League lessened the burden on the leading teams by reducing the top division over the course of two seasons from 22 to 20 teams.
An opinion poll by the Harris Organisation, commissioned the day after the Poland game, showed that only 21 per cent of fans thought that the ‘heavy League programme’ was the chief cause of England’s omission from the World Cup finals. And while modern times might have seen #RamseyOut trending on social media, a mere 15 per cent blamed the manager.
Don Revie believed there was ‘no need for Alf to go’, while Ramsey loyalist Alan Ball turned the blame on an apathetic football public that was continuing to desert the League game and pick and choose its internationals. ‘It was a disgrace to see only 60,000 turn up for the World Cup tie against Wales,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, the fans turned out when we played Poland, but we needed them more against Wales. The English public don’t deserve a successful national team and if they haven’t got one at present, it’s only fitting.’370
Yet Ball’s Arsenal team-mate Bob McNab was among those who felt Ramsey, considered a tactical innovator in leading an underwhelming Ipswich Town team to the League title, had been left behind by the demands of an evolving game since 1966 and allowed his team to become complacent. McNab, whose own England career was fleeting, recalled seeing warning signs four years earlier. ‘[England] training was Mickey Mouse. We went to Mexico and South America for several weeks in the summer of 1969 and it was the biggest waste of time of my life. I had never seen such amateurish training since I was at Huddersfield. It was like a pub trip. Not that we were drinking, but we never trained properly. The other players didn’t notice it because they were part of it. They would be leaning on the post and talking. It was a joke.’371
The Football Association appeared undecided about Ramsey’s level of culpability. After an initial statement expressing the FA Council senior committee’s ‘unanimous support and confidence’ in the manager, FA vice-chairman Sir Harold Thompson, a bullying character who had a low opinion of managers,¶ insisted at a later meeting that such sentiments ‘did not represent the feeling of all members of the Council’.
With his contract up for renewal in June 1974, and a desire to increase a £7,200 annual salary that paled against the wages of other leading managers, Ramsey was in no mood to offer his resignation. He remained in charge for a home defeat against Italy in November and when he spoke early in 1974 about the conflict between the country’s interest and the priorities of the clubs, he said, ‘I have lived with these difficulties for ten years and I shall go on living with them.’ Ironically, a friendly in Portugal in April further highlighted those issues. Having already named Stan Bowles, Frank Worthington and Trevor Brooking in a new-look squad, he lost his Liverpool and Leicester players – including both goalkeepers, Ray Clemence and Peter Shilton – to an FA Cup semi-final replay and saw Revie withdraw Leeds duo Hunter and Madeley the day before departure. Complaining that clubs ‘should be punished’, he included six debutants in a rewritten teamsheet,** before witnessing a lifeless 0-0 draw. He then got on with naming 20 players for the summer Home Internationals and European tour.
Yet, as Croker would later reveal, a decision had been taken in February to sack him. ‘We had to bow to popular opinion,’ he explained.372 Croker, who had a sharper commercial brain than most at FA headquarters, also saw the traditionalist Ramsey as an impediment to his desire to monetise the England team through kit sponsorship and the like. The FA’s international committee approved Ramsey’s departure by a narrow vote at its April meeting and the executive committee applied its rubber stamp. On 1 May, the public were told that Ramsey had been fired.
Stoke City full-back Mike Pejic, a young player recently introduced by Ramsey to the England squad, was brought to tears by the news, while Allan Clarke recalled the sacking as ‘diabolical’, adding, ‘There is not another country in the world who have got rid of such a brilliant manager’ – which was certainly not true but reflected Clarke’s view that ‘we would go through walls for him’.373
The contrary element of human nature meant that those who had spent years criticising Ramsey now mourned for the only manager to win England the World Cup and attacked the FA for its callousness. The fact that Ramsey was apparently offered no opportunity to publicly resign was disrespectful, many felt, of his contribution to English football. Even Ball, with an eye on his own England future, could not hold back. ‘I’ll have to watch what I write otherwise I’ll be in trouble with the authorities,’ he told his readers in Shoot!. ‘I must confess I have lost a little faith in the men who rule our football.’
FA chairman Stephen explained, ‘We had to look at the quality of our game and we realised we had been falling behind the rest of the world, particularly since 1970.’ After 113 games in charge of England, Ramsey was given no offer of a future role with the FA or an official testimonial match. Instead he left with a mere £8,000 pay-off, a £1,200 annual pension and ‘a feeling of despair, sadness and terrific disappointment’.
I want all the world to see
To see you’re laughing and you’re laughing at me
‘Down Down’, Status Quo (Francis Rossi, Bob Young;
Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music
Publishing Group, 1974)
Brian Moore could see it coming. ‘Certainly, it would be futile to condemn Manchester United on this one performance on the opening day of the season,’ he told viewers of The Big Match, ‘but there were people last season who said that rather than their troubles being over when they avoided relegation it could be that they were just beginning. They might be fairly near the truth.’
But one didn’t need to be sitting on an elevated commentary gantry to see that United’s defeat at Highbury on the first day of the 1973-74 season was symptomatic of a chronic malaise, not an opening-day hiccup. Tommy Docherty had lifted United up to 18th place after taking over for the second half of the previous season but had been forced to abandon any romantic residue of the Busby era. ‘I got a shock when I joined how many poor players there were in the first team,’ recalled defender Martin Buchan, who had arrived at Old Trafford shortly before Docherty. ‘The squad was a curious mixture of superstars and lads who would not have got a game in Aberdeen reserves.’374
Docherty’s only option, especially after going without victory in his first six weeks in charge, was to turn an ugly face to the world. It did not take long for David Meek to warn his Manchester Evening News readers, ‘Manchester United’s fight for their First Division lives is going to be a rugged one. It’s going to upset the purists.’
‘The Doc did the best with what he had,’ said Buchan. ‘Defensively, we weren’t one of the worst and you worked on things during the week with the intention of scoring more goals than the opposition, but we didn’t do it often enough.’375 Writing in Goal during the summer, Ken Jones would lament United’s unattractive image, revealing that two testimonial committees had recently chosen not to have United as opponents for their players. ‘What we are forced to accept is a different Manchester United,’ he concluded.376
Docherty’s rebuilding efforts at Old Trafford revolved around signing several players who had made his Scotland team; men such as Arsenal’s George Graham and Celtic’s Lou Macari. Now, with George Best absent and Bobby Charlton retired, United’s third superstar of the Sixties, Denis Law, found himself beginning the new season across the city at Maine Road after Docherty deemed him surplus to requirements. It was the fact that the Scotland striker heard that news on television rather than from his manager that so angered him. With a new house in the Manchester area and a testimonial game against European champions Ajax coming up, Law had been considering retirement. Instead, feeling betrayed by a man who had once claimed he had a job for life at Old Trafford, he signed for Manchester City.
United followed their defeat at Arsenal with wins against Stoke City and Queens Park Rangers, but Stan Bowles claimed, ‘They’re the worst team we’ve ever met.’ And when goalkeeper Alex Stepney scored from the penalty spot against Birmingham City five weeks later, it was a sign of the disarray enveloping Old Trafford. Even more so when he still held the position of joint-top scorer with two goals as the final game of 1973 arrived. Even Stepney claimed that it was a poor reflection on Docherty’s management.
Docherty and Busby extended an olive branch to George Best, whom they had visited in hospital during the summer when he was recovering from a thrombosis in his leg. ‘We weren’t blessed with too many good players,’ Docherty would admit. ‘Matt and I had a chat one day and it was it was on his suggestion; he thought it would be a good idea to bring George back. I was trying anything because we were a bit desperate.’377
Bearded and bloated, Best experienced two victories during a 12-game comeback, scoring twice and performing capably enough. But only rarely did he evoke memories of even two years previously. After a 3-0 defeat at QPR on New Year’s Day, he failed to turn up for training on the Thursday before an FA Cup tie against Plymouth Argyle. Such absences, he claimed, would be indulged in his new agreement with Docherty, but when he turned up at Old Trafford on Saturday he was told he was not playing. He would not do so for United again. ‘I think Tommy handled the George Best situation very well,’ said Graham. ‘Everyone knew George had a problem, but everybody thought that his ability would overcome everything. It was a brave decision, but that was Tommy. He didn’t shy away from it.’378 Docherty admitted, ‘I wanted to be the man who handled George Best, but I couldn’t.’379
United entered 1974 in the relegation places – increased to three that season – and never escaped them. Secure enough at the back, they scored only 38 goals. At one point, Busby told Docherty, ‘Let’s go out with dignity.’ By the time of their final home game, United needed to beat neighbours City to have a chance of staying up, although it would need Norwich City to take points off Birmingham City to carry those hopes into their last match at Stoke. Anxiety and aggression were the dominant forces in a crowd of 56,996, with news that Birmingham had hit back to lead 2-1 at half-time adding to the incendiary atmosphere. With seven minutes to play Francis Lee scuffed a shot across goal and Law, with nonchalance bordering on reluctance, back-heeled the ball into the net. Far from enjoying any kind of revenge over the people who had discarded him, the faraway look on Law’s face betrayed his horror at having perpetrated such an act on the club he still loved.
Scores of fans, displaying more disorientation than violent intent, entered the field of play from both ends of the ground. Referee David Smith met both managers before the game resumed – without Law, who had allowed himself to be substituted.†† As smoke rose from the Stretford End, United full-back Stewart Houston was almost tackled by a lone spectator in black Oxford bags and grey jacket. Emboldened, a few more intruders emerged and before long the field was engulfed, forcing the players to run for cover. An appeal to the fans, notably from Busby rather than Docherty, was a waste of breath and the game was abandoned. The Football League rightly allowed the result to stand. Even if United had won, or had the game been replayed, they were down, thanks to Birmingham’s victory.
In the post-Alex Ferguson era, Manchester United managers have been dismissed for far lesser crimes than relegation. Louis van Gaal was even dispensed with only hours after winning the FA Cup. But there was something about Docherty, especially after the struggles of McGuinness and O’Farrell, that meant he still felt like the right man in the right place at the right time. As Richard Kurt and Chris Nickeas put it so neatly in The Red Army Years, ‘A Seventies Old Trafford was surely no place for an O’Farrell – but it was made for the Doc, Seventies Man incarnate. Put him in a kipper tie, in Man About the House, next to a Party Seven or behind the wheel of a Capri – does he not fit perfectly within your mental image?’380
Busby announced, ‘I believe in Tommy Docherty; that he’s capable of making the club great again.’ You could have made a baseball cap in United red out of such a statement.