Natural by David Tossell

Author:David Tossell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

WEMBLEY: ONE YEAR LATER

‘Winning the World Cup had a profound effect on some people. It changed the lives of Alf Ramsey and Geoff Hurst. But, contrary to popular belief, it didn’t change mine.’

IT remains one of the most frequently asked questions about Jimmy Greaves. Just what effect did the disappointment of 1966 have on his career, on his life? Two interconnected theories abound: that it sent his career into freefall; and/or it precipitated his journey towards alcoholism. Yet only through the lens of hindsight are his final years in football examined so gloomily, a case of looking for clues when you know the unfortunate outcome. Maybe he wasn’t ever again the phenomenon he had been in the years between 1958 and 1965. Perhaps the simple fact of age – and the tightening of defences in an era of increasing pragmatism – would have made that impossible anyway, even if he had been the hat-trick hero of 1966.

The man who ended up wearing that mantle, Geoff Hurst, once said, ‘It haunts me a bit that it was the start of the slide for Jimmy.’ Yet Hurst is probably being too hard on himself. A simple dismissal of Greaves’s post-World Cup years does not stand up to close scrutiny. The following season, he would score another 25 League goals and win the FA Cup. Two years later, he finished as the First Division’s top scorer for the first time in four years, a remarkable sixth time overall. He was not exactly a spent force. In the 1968-69 season there was a clamour for him to be back in the England team.

None of which is intended to minimise the long-term impact on his life. There are so many complex and intertwined factors relating to his alcoholism that it would be naïve not to factor the disappointment of the World Cup into that conversation. Author David Miller was right to point out that ‘no one, not even Jimmy himself, can ever be absolutely sure how much the emotional trauma gnawed at his soul over the next five years and helped to undermine his stability, judgement and self-discipline’.

That he suffered is indisputable. ‘That moment began Jimmy’s disenchantment with football,’ argued his great friend, Bobby Moore. World Cup colleague John Connelly recalled, ‘He was sick. It was the most disappointing thing of his [football] life.’ In 1991, there was a reunion to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the World Cup victory, with the squad pictured on the balcony of the Kensington Royal Garden Hotel, where they had celebrated their victory all those years earlier. Greaves was the notable absentee. George Cohen admits, ‘Jimmy was obviously very upset and I have never ever mentioned it to him to this day, and would never do so.’

Journalist Martin Samuel, who spent many hours talking with Greaves, says, ‘I always thought it must have hurt him much more than he would ever let on. What he has done to deal with it is decide that he will say that it didn’t bother him.

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