In which Puskás’s smile tells Billy Wright his England team are in trouble – Northern Ireland’s goalie chases his own teammate during a World Cup match – Stan Anderson’s trip to Chile ends in farce – Spurs give a performance that ‘no team there’s ever been or ever will be’ could have lived with.
A small group of young players from Watford Football Club, shepherded by player-coach Johnny Paton, arrive at the Empire Stadium, Wembley, in the early afternoon of Wednesday 25 November 1953.
They are in good time for the 2.15 p.m. kick-off of the match between England and Hungary, a game that Paton is particularly keen his charges should see. ‘Hungary are an exciting team,’ he tells them, ‘and you’re going to learn something about the game from them today.’
Others are less convinced. Charles Buchan, a former England player and one of the most respected commentators on the game, has written in the build-up to the match, ‘The clever ball-control and close passing of the Hungarians do not alarm me in any way.’
Buchan’s smugness reflects the insularity that pervaded English football at this time, a mulish refusal to admire Hungary in spite of the evidence: unbeaten in twenty-four games, unofficially ranked number one in the world and holders of the Olympic title. They are damned by being foreign.
Paton is not so blinkered. Having seen more of the world than most footballers during his service in the RAF, which included playing a great deal of football overseas, he is well aware that antiquated coaching methods and tactical dogma among English clubs are a serious worry for the prospects of the domestic game.
With his professional playing career coming to an end, he has acted on this concern by enrolling on the Football Association’s first coaching course at Lilleshall, one of the few initiatives that points towards a more enlightened future.
On this November afternoon Paton takes his unease with him to Wembley. He has no faith in the argument that because England have never lost at home against a team from outside the British Isles that Hungary are heading for defeat.
It is impossible to be sure but almost certainly Paton is at odds with most of the crowd of 100,000. He can tell from the banter that the majority, informed only by views such as Buchan’s, are expecting to witness confirmation of English football’s superiority.
Only some of them have taken much notice of reports that Hungary will parade a new style of football. Those who have and are unimpressed are in good company. Billy Wright, the England captain, says afterwards, ‘We completely underestimated the advances Hungary had made.’
He also confesses he ridiculed Hungary after the two teams first came onto the Wembley pitch. He told teammate Stan Mortensen, ‘We should be all right here, Stan,’ having observed the visitors wearing what looked more like shoes than boots. ‘They haven’t even got the proper kit.’
Outside the ground, people are paying the ticket touts good money to see Hungary put in their place: a tenner for the £2 10s top-priced tickets and more than £1 for the cheapest ones, sold originally for 3s. 6d.
Paton and his group have seats at one end, behind a goal. They watch the Hungary team warm up before kick-off, not by dashing about but by juggling the ball. Paton pays special attention to Ferenc Puskás. He notices that Hungary’s captain and emblematic star is all one-footed, but reckons that if he wanted to Puskás could keep the ball up all day with his foot, head, knee and shoulder. Around him Paton senses the spectators’ awe at what they are watching – and the match hasn’t even started.
Puskás continues to demonstrate his trickery until Wright, his fellow captain, joins him in the centre circle to toss the coin. It is the first time the two men have met. Puskás, having been intricately working the ball with his left foot, signs off by nonchalantly transferring it to his thigh and letting it run down his shin onto the centre spot.
Wright says afterwards that when Puskás then gave him a charming, you’ve-been-warned smile, he realised his earlier ridicule had been misjudged.
It is arguable that English football has never properly recovered from the stagnation that led to the 6–3 drubbing by Hungary in 1953 – and two defeats that followed in 1954: 7–1 to Hungary in a return friendly in Budapest and a 4–2 loss to Uruguay that eliminated England from the World Cup in Switzerland.
The 1966 World Cup triumph, greeted at the time as a new dawn, has become an ironic symbol of our continuing deficiencies. The English game is still admired for its commitment and endeavour, but neither of these dated virtues has done us much good in international tournaments, where technically superior sides have prospered.
For years the clubs had done little to make the job of a professional footballer significantly more rewarding than clipping tickets on a bus. At the same time they appeared bewitched by the idea that football was – and always would be – as much a game of brawn as refinement, even in the matter of committing fouls: while English footballers openly clogged, the rest did nasty little things on the quiet.
Keep the ball on the island, went the unofficial motto, let the foreigners fiddle, fake and fudge if they wished.
England refused an invitation from Uruguay, the hosts, to take part in the first World Cup in 1930 and remained snootily resistant to doing so in 1934 and ’38 when the finals were held much closer to home, in Italy and France.
Their absence from the inaugural championship was particularly damaging. It meant they did not witness the performances of the outstanding Uruguay team, who played a style of football recognisable as the genetic forerunner of the modern game.
Bernard Joy, like Buchan a former England international turned journalist but with a more discerning eye, was one of the first English commentators who did recognise this. After seeing Uruguay play he wrote, ‘By marrying short passing to intelligent positional play, the Uruguayans made the ball do all the work, and so kept their opponents on the run.’
It was hardly surprising then that when England did finally agree to play in the first post-war World Cup in 1950, and qualified for the finals in Brazil, their set-up and performances proved woefully inadequate.
As was the Football Association’s way, it was not the manager, Walter Winterbottom, but the FA’s one representative on the trip, Arthur Drewry, a Grimsby fish merchant, who chose the England teams who played in the three group matches in Brazil. A fortunate win over Chile and 1–0 defeats by the United States (the derided outsiders of the group) and Spain meant England were out of the competition.
England’s elimination was bad enough. Worse still, though, was that no one seemed particularly interested in the important lessons that were to be gleaned from that 1950 competition, which saw Uruguay crowned champions for the second time.
The FA flew everybody straight back home after England’s third defeat. And with no television and only limited press coverage, the derelict state of English football remained a ridiculously kept secret from domestic coaches and the general public.
Of the very few who did reflect on what had gone wrong and how things might be put right, the defender Alf Ramsey was the most significant. He would be appointed England manager twelve years later and four years after that would win the World Cup.
One or two also noticed other things beyond the South American style of play. The ever-astute Stanley Matthews picked up on the lightweight boots worn by the Brazilians and took a pair to the Co-operative Wholesale Society in Manchester who agreed to copy them.
And Matthews and others could not fail to register that not all overseas sportsmen were as skint as English footballers. On his way to Brazil, via Canada, Matthews had caused amazement among Canada’s press corps when he revealed how little he earned compared to ice hockey players of Matthews’s equivalent stature.
For the World Cup finals in Brazil, while the FA fought hard to peg the England players’ match fees at £20, the host nation’s players were on £200 a man in the group stages. More envy-inducing still, each Brazil player was on a promise of £10,000 to win the title.
England did qualify from their groups to reach the quarter-finals at the 1954 and 1962 World Cups, but both times went no further. In 1958, when the four home nations qualified for the finals and were kept apart in the groups, it was Northern Ireland and Wales who reached the quarter-finals, while England and Scotland were eliminated. As in 1954, the Scots finished bottom of their group.
The 1958 World Cup, particularly the finals in Sweden, was the first time the British public became properly engaged in the global game. Not only were the successes of Northern Ireland and Wales widely reported, so was the dazzling brilliance of Brazil, especially that of their seventeen-year-old forward Edson Arantes do Nascimento, aka Pelé.
Playing on European soil, the Brazilians, gaudy in dress and deed, transformed the idea that football need be a monochrome exercise in hoofing the ball about. The South Americans demonstrated technical talent, which included sleight of foot, that was still a novelty in Europe despite the efforts of Hungary. Their exuberance and deft execution were captured on newsreel and disseminated around the world.
Brazil hammered Sweden 5–2 in the final after conceding an early goal. The match’s defining images were photos of Pelé, still not filled out into full-blown manhood, weeping uncontrollably on the shoulders of teammates. He was utterly overcome by his own success, which included two outstanding goals, and that of the team.
Of the four home teams who played in those 1958 finals, Northern Ireland, whose record of being the least populous country to reach the finals would survive until Trinidad and Tobago did it in 2006, were the most impressive.
Their success in reaching the last eight, against tough opposition all the way, owed much to their adapting better than the others to the way the game was being played beyond the British Isles. And this was mainly down to their captain, Danny Blanchflower, who, just as he had started doing at Tottenham, took over managing the side once the players were on the field.
McParland says that while the majority of Football League clubs deployed their players in the rigid formations that had been laid down in the 1920s – and which Hungary had deftly picked to pieces at Wembley five years earlier – Northern Ireland were trying new things.
‘We had four or five players who could play in midfield,’ McParland says, ‘and Danny would set it all up, crowding the middle of the park when necessary, but also getting players forward at the right time.’
It is impossible to say whether English football would have prospered if it had followed Blanchflower’s creed: that the game was not about battering and/or boring opponents to death but playing, as Hungary and the South Americans did, with style and a flourish and being tactically inventive.
It did not happen because English clubs failed to connect the Irishman’s presence with the success of the teams in which he played and dominated with his personality. Or, if they did make the connection, they ignored it out of an inbred distrust of what they saw as too much swank and not enough graft.
After he retired as a player Blanchflower turned to being a manager, but soon despaired of setting English football on a new course. In frustration he switched to making a living as a shrewd media observer.
Blanchflower’s role in helping to steer Northern Ireland to the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Sweden was at least the equal of what he achieved as the captain of Spurs.
Northern Ireland’s heroics had started in the qualifying competition when they eliminated Italy, which was, quite simply, an extraordinary result.
The Italians had been world champions in 1934 and 1938 and had reached the finals of every World Cup they had entered. A draw against the Irish would have seen them through. The fact that the match was being played in Belfast was not expected to be nearly enough of an advantage for Blanchflower’s team to survive.
What undermined Italy’s effort was that the tie, instead of being wrapped up in ninety minutes on the afternoon of Wednesday 4 December 1957, mutated into a six-week saga. This was after the Belfast-bound match referee, István Zsolt of Hungary, became stranded in fog in London.
Although the match went ahead in Zsolt’s absence, it was downgraded to a friendly when the Italians refused to give official recognition to a substitute ref. It ended 2–2, which would have been enough for Italy to go through.
The long delay would play right into Northern Ireland’s hands, partly because it must have rattled Italy that the so-called friendly was such an ugly affair. Having to come back to Belfast could not have been an enticing prospect.
Not only did ‘both teams kick lumps out of one another’, as McParland puts it, in that first fixture, serious crowd trouble at the end incensed the visitors. One Italian newspaper described the Belfast troublemakers as ‘barbarians of a primitive epoch’ and the debate about what should happen next reached government level in both countries.
On top of this the extended pause before the rearranged fixture in late January ideally suited the artful Blanchflower.
He had marked the visitors’ vulnerabilities in the friendly and insisted the Northern Ireland team gather three days before the rescheduled match. During this unusually long time to prepare, Blanchflower drummed into the players tactics that involved disregarding the formations that English club teams regarded as sacrosanct. They would ambush the Italians with swift breaks from midfield.
In this way Northern Ireland controlled the game, demonstrating that the virtues of the traditional British way could be successfully allied to new ideas. Italy even accepted that their 2–1 defeat was down to the Irish being the better team.
Blanchflower’s leadership and McParland’s goals – he scored five of the team’s tally of six – were the foundations of Northern Ireland’s feat of reaching the quarter-finals of the 1958 world finals. That they reached the knockout stage at all surpassed most expectations after they were drawn in a group with holders West Germany and Argentina, the 1957 South American champions, who flopped badly to finish in last place.
The one time Blanchflower lost control of his team was during an incident that was pure pantomime but went virtually unnoticed. If it had happened in a World Cup today, newspapers everywhere would have carried the story. McParland describes the shenanigans in Northern Ireland’s ranks in their opening match, a 1–0 win over Czechoslovakia:
‘Czechoslovakia bombed us for about ten, fifteen minutes, but it didn’t help that our little left-half, Bertie Peacock of Celtic, got on to Harry Gregg, our goalkeeper, for not coming off his line to take a ball that had come across the goalmouth.
‘Bertie was the next-door neighbour to Harry where he was born in Ireland, but this did not stop Harry from taking offence and running after Bertie.
‘Meanwhile their outside-right’s got the ball. I’d come across to stop him from getting a cross in, holding him out on the wing, but behind me Harry’s still running after Bertie to give him a punch and Alfie McMichael, our left-back, is shouting, “Get back in the goal, Harry!” Luckily they did not score. If they had they might have destroyed our World Cup.’
For their five matches in those 1958 finals, which were crammed into twelve days in three different cities, the Northern Ireland players each received £250 – ‘Subject to tax’, McParland points out, with feeling.
The scale of what Alf Ramsey and his team achieved in 1966 should be judged bearing in mind that, even as late as the 1962 World Cup in Chile, England’s national team was a relic from its ‘keep it on the island’ past.
The lessons of the 1953 Hungary defeat still had not been fully learnt. Walter Winterbottom, the England manager, complained that it remained impossible to modernise the team when most club managers were frightened of the risks involved in trying new things.
These risks included the fairly common one of offending fogeyish members of the club board, stern keepers of the rule that nothing good ever came from innovation. They were suspicious of everything from messing with how teams lined up to the very idea that players should earn more than their lowly pegged wage.
It was no better at national level. England selection had stayed in the hands of the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who made up the membership of the Football Association. In 1962, Winterbottom experienced the same frustration he had twelve years earlier in Brazil when having to defer to a fish merchant over picking the team.
And being chosen to play for England was reward enough. The players should accept what money they were offered for the priceless honour of representing their country.
Stan Anderson, who was a member of England’s World Cup squad in 1962, still sounds pained when he talks about this priceless honour, particularly the way the FA treated him throughout his disjointed international career.
His problems started in 1957 when, appearing in an under-23 international against Bulgaria in Sofia, he became the first player in an England shirt to be sent off.
Towards the end of the match, Anderson says, he went over to take a throw-in. As he did so, a Bulgarian player ran across him, spitting at him for good measure. ‘So I just went bang and hit him. And, of course, he went down as though I’d killed him and the referee sent me off.’
Bill Nicholson, who was in charge of the team, confronted Anderson later: ‘What the hell were you doing, Stan?’
Anderson said that no one had ever spat at him before and he wasn’t going to let it pass without a response. ‘I told Bill that if I went outside now and he did it again I’d thump him again.’
Nicholson was sympathetic but said the FA would want to know what happened. They would send him, Anderson, a letter.
In fact, the only thing Anderson received from the FA was an indefinite suspension. Nothing else. No letter ever arrived. ‘They just made their decision and that was it. I never got the opportunity to go down to London to tell them what happened.
‘I did whack him and he went down like a ton of bricks but nobody should spit at people. What aggrieved me at the time was that this fella was apparently well known as a thug who went round spitting at people.’
The suspension lasted until 1962, by which time Sunderland had been in the Second Division since 1958. At the end of March Anderson took a call from a friend who told him he had been picked to play for the full England team.
‘Piss off, that’s ridiculous,’ Anderson said, although he knew he had been playing well. ‘They’re not going to pick me. I’m in the Second Division.’
‘I’m telling you, Stan,’ the friend said, ‘you’ve been picked for England to play against Austria at Wembley.’
The friend was right and Anderson achieved his life’s ambition to play at Wembley in what was a comfortable 3–1 win.
It would no doubt have dismayed Anderson to be told at this point that he would play only once more for England. This was ten days later against Scotland in Glasgow, a match that Anderson says was an education with more than 130,000 packed into Hampden Park.
Although he does not say as much, by the way he tells the story of the rest of his international career, he feels he was harshly treated. His resentment clearly resides with those inexplicably qualified officers who, in his estimation, ran the English game applying an unfathomable logic. These were the same men who, without a word, had cast him adrift for so long after his 1957 sending-off.
He starts his account of what happened in his second and last full international with the match almost over: ‘Scotland were winning one-nil with a few minutes to go when the ball came across and Johnny Haynes, running in, met it with probably his best ever header. It hit the underside of the bar and dropped in – and no one will ever change my mind that it did drop in. But the ball span back out and the linesman didn’t give it. Scotland then went down our end, scored a penalty and we got beat 2–0.’
Anderson then went to Chile for the 1962 World Cup but never played. And he remains convinced that if England had drawn at Hampden he would have kept his place in the side. ‘I know I would,’ he says.
Anderson tells the story of his World Cup experience with an anecdote that encapsulates the sort of logic that so frustrated him.
He sat out the three preliminary games – defeat by Hungary, victory over Argentina and a draw with Bulgaria – but then received a boost to his hopes of being picked for the quarter-final against Brazil.
Harold Shepherdson, the trainer, came to his room to tell him that Walter Winterbottom wanted him to attend the next day’s training. ‘And when I turned up,’ Anderson says, ‘there was Gerry Hitchens, Jimmy Greaves, Bryan Douglas and me – only four of us – and I thought I was in the side for the Brazil game.’
Shepherdson was on the halfway line with several balls around him. ‘Come with me, Stan,’ he said. ‘I want you to serve balls to these three players.’ And again Anderson thought he must be in the side. ‘Good ball, Stan. Now send one to Bryan…’
‘But I wasn’t picked and I couldn’t understand why they’d got me to feed them the balls when it should have been the player who was going to play. What was the point in me doing it?’
England lost 3–1 to Brazil, who went on to retain their world title, and Anderson was not called on again; his final service to his country having been what he clearly felt was an exercise in futility.
No one epitomised English football’s ‘keep it on the island’ mentality quite like Alan Hardaker, the Football League’s long-standing secretary.
Hardaker started working for the League in 1951, before taking over as full-time secretary in 1957. Previously he had been an ordinary player who, aged twenty-three, declined professional terms offered by Hull City in order to start his apprenticeship as a bureaucrat working as secretary to the Lord Mayor of Hull.
As Football League secretary, Hardaker displayed his unattractive brand of conservatism with his comment to a national newspaper that having to deal with ‘wogs and dagos’ was the reason he opposed English clubs entering international competitions.
Largely as a result of this attitude, Chelsea were persuaded not to enter the inaugural European Cup in 1955. The French sports newspaper L’Équipe had nominated the English champions, along with fifteen other European sides, to represent the cream of the Continent’s clubs.
Polish team Gwardia Warszawa took Chelsea’s place – to the satisfaction of Little Englanders and to the detriment of the English game’s prospects of keeping up with foreign competition. Nor, on reflection, can the Chelsea club and players have been particularly happy to miss out on the financial benefit.
The resounding success of the first European Cup, won in style by Real Madrid, instantly instated the Spanish champions as the Continent’s most glamorous club and ensured the competition’s future.
Despite this Hardaker and his ilk still wanted nothing to do with it. But Manchester United, the new English champions, refused to be bullied into following Chelsea’s example. They went ahead and entered the 1956–57 competition.
But it was not until ten years later that Celtic, directed by their impressive manager Jock Stein, became the first British club to reach a European Cup final – a feat they celebrated with a spectacular victory.
Like Blanchflower, Stein had the vision to stray beyond the traditional British way of playing. He worked on ideas such as zonal marking, before the name existed, but above all he stressed the importance of players expressing themselves outside the confines of any particular system.
Stein assembled a team of players who came from within 30 miles of the club’s Glasgow ground. And after Celtic’s exhilarating 2–1 win in Lisbon over the cynically efficient Italian side Inter Milan in the 1967 final, their manager said, ‘We did it playing football – pure, beautiful, inventive football.’
A year later, a George Best-inspired Manchester United, directed by another exceptional Scottish manager, Matt Busby, succeeded Celtic as European Cup winners, thrashing the Continent’s former masters Benfica 4–1 at Wembley.
If there were a British team who might have conquered Europe before Celtic, it was the Tottenham side operating under Blanchflower’s enlightened on-field leadership.
Spurs qualified for the 1961–62 European Cup and their participation alerted an unsuspecting Cliff Jones to what riches, in every sense, international club competition had to offer. His account of Spurs’ first two European matches, a preliminary round tie against Polish side Górnik Zabrze, is full of wide-eyed wonder at the world that Hardaker would have rather Jones did not glimpse.
Jones had played with distinction for Wales at the 1958 World Cup finals in Sweden, where visiting teams received limited support. But a home tie against foreign opposition in a club competition was of a completely different order. He describes the second leg against Górnik at White Hart Lane as the ‘one match that stood out for me during my time at Spurs’.
The away leg, Tottenham’s debut in Europe, was dramatic enough. Spurs came back from 4–0 down soon after the break to narrow the deficit to 4–2 with Jones’s goal the first by a Tottenham player in Europe.
‘We were in with a shout, but Bill Nicholson wasn’t impressed with us, he wasn’t pleased,’ Jones says. ‘The press, they weren’t pleased with us either; they gave us quite a bit of stick. It was because of this, I think, that for the second leg we were really buzzing, we just couldn’t wait to get out there.
‘As we came out onto the White Hart Lane pitch with the Górnik side, the noise from the 62,000 crowd was just incredible. They were amazing; they lifted us.
‘We were looking at the Górnik players and straightaway they were on the back foot. In Górnik the atmosphere hadn’t been great. There was the ground, then there was the running track, and then there was something else – so the crowd was well away from the playing area. But at White Hart Lane the crowd was on top of them and you could see they were in trouble.
‘Right from the off we just got at ’em. Bobby Smith had a shot, the goalkeeper tipped it over the bar and from then on the noise was just one complete roar.
‘I was fortunate to get a hat-trick and I would say I have never experienced an atmosphere like it. The final score was 8–1, 10–5 on aggregate.
‘It was the start of the glory nights as they were called, and that night we played … I don’t think there’s any team who’s been or will ever be – and I’m including Barcelona, Real Madrid, Man United – who could have lived with us. That night we would have beaten anybody, I don’t care who they were. We just slaughtered them. And Górnik, they were a top side. The majority of them were Polish internationals. But they just never stood a chance. We overran them.’
Tottenham also swept through the next two rounds, against Feyenoord and Dukla Prague, victories that put them into a semi-final against Benfica, the defending champions.
Two towering contests followed. Benfica won the first leg in Lisbon 3–1 in front of 86,000. Jimmy Greaves and Bobby Smith had goals ruled out for offside. Unconfirmed reports have it that Smith’s was disallowed despite two defenders being posted on the line.
Benfica went 4–1 up on aggregate in the second leg at White Hart Lane, where 64,448 spectators jammed the stands. Spurs then hit back with two goals, the second a Blanchflower penalty, but in a desperate finish – in which the post twice saved Benfica and Dave Mackay’s header landed on the crossbar – the visitors held out.
Blanchflower observed later of the European Cup that it was hard to imagine ‘a more potent or popular soccer competition’, and described playing in it as ‘the greatest emotional experience of my career’.
It did not matter anymore that Alan Hardaker was not listening. His island kingdom was crumbling. Players and fans had experienced something they would not be denied and the English game was on the move.