1966 by Bobby Charlton

Author:Bobby Charlton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473545540
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

9. The Legacy of Dunc

THAT URGE TO reach out, to take hold of something made tangible by all the work and the self-examination which had followed the abrupt awakening on that winter night in Paris, was for me quite overwhelming in the early morning of Monday 11 July 1966 – the first day of the World Cup.

I opened the curtains of the room I shared with Ray Wilson, looked up to a cloudless blue sky and then quickly drew them together again because Ray was sleeping like a baby. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could and went down to the breakfast room.

I wanted this day to fly, I wanted to be in command of all of it – and the twenty days that followed – and to be able to say that this indeed was the time of my football life, one from which I didn’t take a single regret.

I was twenty-eight years old and had played sixty-eight times for England, seventeen times more than the closest to me in experience, Jimmy Greaves.

I spanned the epochs of Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney, two of the greatest players the world would ever see, and this one newly inhabited by youngsters like Alan Ball and Martin Peters, who carried no other weight of memory, or disappointment, beyond their own freshly minted ambition.

By the sharpest comparison, in an England shirt, and in the company of such as Johnny Haynes and Billy Wright, I had known moments of great hope often but invariably consumed by another reality – one of futility and despair that we would never move on to a truly competitive level in the World Cup, never know the surge of conviction that we had created new horizons that really could be achieved. On so many occasions I’d had reason to wonder if I was packing my bags on a road leading nowhere.

So, yes, this was my time, England’s time. It had to be. Too many possibilities had been created, too much hard work done, for it not to be.

Our ancestors had introduced football to the world, rightly considered it a gift of great value, but the generations that followed made the critical misunderstanding that we would always own it, always be the arbiters of what was right about it and what was wrong.

One result, which in the next weeks had to be reshaped and swept away, was that we had barely scratched the surface of the game’s greatest tournament, and if anyone needed some perspective on this scandal of waste and arrogance it was surely provided by Uruguay, whom we would be facing at Wembley in a few hours. Perhaps not just Uruguay, though; maybe we also had to beat the worst aspects of our football nature and chief among them was that complacency which came with the misapprehension that we were in some way innately superior, that if success had been delayed for so long it was, ultimately, still inevitable.

Four years earlier in Chile we had ‘celebrated’

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