The Football Man by Arthur Hopcraft

Author:Arthur Hopcraft [Hopcraft, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845138387
Publisher: MBI

5 Sir Alf Ramsey (and strategy)

In football, as in any sport, victory and defeat are repeatedly decided on the knife-edge of chance. Sir Alf Ramsey, manager of the England team since 1962, has applied himself more than anyone else in the game to blunting that murderous edge. Ramsey’s job is very different from that of a club manager, who puts a team together for long-term success and can concentrate his money and his faith in certain departments of his side, relying on the day-to-day contact of the players to sustain the dovetailing understanding any side needs. Ramsey has his players under his instruction only occasionally, and then briefly; so he has sought a team whose individual talents and personalities would cohere because of their nature, since time is such a frail ally. His first duty is to help England win the World Cup, he says; he succeeded in 1966 with a climactic final at Wembley stadium whose emotional tension brought even mature and discreetly dressed people to tears.

That match, in which England beat West Germany 4–2, was a constant crescendo of drama. England were leading 2–1 in the last minute of the normal ninety; fifteen seconds from the end the Germans equalized after a free kick dubiously awarded against Jack Charlton. The England players wrung our hearts with their exhaustion and dejection, as the two teams sank to the grass for the short interval before the half-hour of extra time, and the picture of Ramsey, stocky and grave, walking towards them without a suggestion of haste was unforgettable; he braced the spectators as well as the players. England outpaced the opposition comprehensively when the game restarted, and their last goal was Geoff Hurst’s marvellous shot into the roof of the net after a run of thirty yards in the final minute. In the delirious jubilation which followed, with players leaping about, lifting each other in the air, and some of them sobbing, Ramsey was still sedate, his smile the thinnest of slits between his lips. He moved abruptly only to stop the England players from exchanging shirts with their opponents. He had to be physically dragged by the players into the groups the photographers were trying to assemble. At last he allowed himself to be persuaded into what he clearly regarded as an excessively flamboyant gesture; he kissed the cup.

This public impassivity becomes a terse, contemplative wariness in private. Ramsey is not a popular man, either with other professionals in the game or with journalists, in the superficial sense of affable familiarity. His private personality, of course, could not possibly be the almost haughtily detached one which he offers to the world a very long arm’s length away; his public composure is an obsessive self-defence. But people who know him well – or, at least, see him frequently, which would be the same thing with most other men – have lots of stories to illustrate his incommunicability and none which have him telling jokes over large dollops of the hard stuff.

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