The Great English Final by David Tossell

Author:David Tossell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: stanley matthews, fa cup, football, english football, british, soccer, history, wembley
Publisher: Pitch Publishing (Brighton) Ltd
Published: 2013-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

8

THE PEOPLE’S CHAMPION

“We remember him as a slightly humped, stiff-looking figure, rather like a Meccano man, darting suddenly towards and away from transfixed defenders, the ball not kicked by his feet but nudged between them, deftly and gently like butter being chopped up by a two-pat grocer.” – Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man.

IT WAS a simple rubber ball that helped turn Stanley Matthews into the great player he was universally acknowledged to be; the kind of sportsman to whom a nation was happy to give its wholehearted support as he strove to achieve his burning ambition. Whether banging that childhood toy against a wall for hours on end, or taking it down to the local waste ground with friends, Matthews never let it out of his sight.

In that respect, the man who would figuratively stand apart from most of his fellow professionals was just like the majority of his peers. “All we did was kick a ball around the street,” said Doug Holden, who would wear the opposition’s number seven jersey in the 1953 final. “We ran to school kicking a tennis ball, kicking it against the wall and trapping it. Everything is so coached and organised now from a young age, but we did our own thing.”

By the age of nine, as a child growing up in the Staffordshire town of Hanley,19 Matthews had advanced to dribbling his ball around strategically placed chairs in his back garden. “Any ball control I displayed later in life as a professional footballer can be traced back to those times,” he acknowledged.

One of four brothers, he had initially been reluctant to admit to his father, Jack, that he had no intention of following the paternal sporting route into the boxing ring. But as Jack, a barber, watched his teenaged son’s dedication to rising early to work on fitness and speed, he was driven to offer assistance, forging a close bond between father and son. No one was more proud than Jack when Stan was chosen to represent England Schoolboys and, at 14, was offered the chance to sign as an apprentice for Stoke City – an opportunity at which he jumped, despite being a fan of local rivals Port Vale.

It was a memorable first day at the Victoria Ground, where he was ordered to clean two changing rooms by trainer Jimmy Vallance, but also met Vallance’s daughter, Betty, who was to become his first wife. His first season with the club, 1930/31, not only taught him the skills of a skivvy and an office boy, it also offered him the valuable realisation that he needed to adjust his style of wing play to achieve more consistent success. “In those days you waited until the defender was on top of you and then tried to jink your way round him,” he explained in his autobiography.

To remedy the occasions when such an approach didn’t work, he developed a strategy to run straight at the full-back rather than waiting to invite the challenge. A successful experiment in a reserve game against Manchester City convinced him of this method.

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