Книга - Sir Alf

Sir Alf
Leo McKinstry


Since England’s famous 1966 World Cup victory, Alf Ramsey has been regarded as the greatest of all British football managers. By placing Ramsey in an historical context, award-winning author Leo McKinstry provides a thought-provoking insight into the world of professional football and the fabric of British society over the span of his life.Ramsey’s life is a romantic story of heroism. Often derided by lesser men, he overcame the prejudice against his social background to reach the summit of world football.The son of a council dustman from Essex, Ramsey had been through a tough upbringing. After army service during the war, he became a professional footballer, enjoying a successful career with Southampton and Tottenham and winning 32 England caps.But it was as manager of Ipswich Town, and then the architect for England’s 1966 World Cup triumph, that Ramsey will be most remembered. The tragedy was that his battles with the FA would ultimately lead to his downfall. He was sacked after England failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup and was subsequently ostracised by the football establishment. He died a broken man in 1999 in the same modest Ipswich semi he’d lived in for most of his life.Drawing on extensive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues in the game, author Leo McKinstry will help unravel the true character of this fascinating and often complex football legend.









Sir Alf

Leo McKinstry


A Major Reappraisal of the Life and Times of England’s Greatest Football Manager











This book is dedicated to the memory of Dermot Gogarty, 1958-2005

Another man of dignity, courage and leadership




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u4be16f9a-fb46-59e5-9434-fbbba8913640)

Title Page (#uba47ac4b-a104-502e-b573-20d73ff9a279)

Dedication (#ua8f6c7c7-acfd-50af-9ef2-fd261c3675ea)

Preface (#ubb3189d1-deb1-5466-a8f5-5792f4593d90)

Introduction (#ud706db77-1a36-5cef-a772-3f1954ea56f1)

ONE Dagenbam (#u682ef12a-902a-5b22-8f43-eceea7d46845)

TWO The Dell (#ufb25a90b-4ee7-500e-bef0-eeb6f1b58d72)

THREE White Hart Lane (#u514d3d69-991a-52b8-9bc3-9fa6e27a9d2e)

FOUR Belo Horizonte (#u1cda7351-54b9-5cc2-a1f1-5520479ccb07)

FIVE Villa Park (#litres_trial_promo)

SIX Portman Road (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN Lancaster Gate (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHT Lilleshall (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE Hendon Hall (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN Wembley (#litres_trial_promo)

ELEVEN Florence (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE Leon (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN Katowice (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN St Mary’s (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Preface (#ulink_7c29b38d-550e-586e-9422-231ff5984cb9)


Wembley, 30 July 1966. Amid scenes of jubilation, Geoff Hurst slams the ball into the top left-hand corner of the West German net. After a pulsating match, England are only seconds away from winning the World Cup. But as wave upon wave of ecstatic cheering echoes throughout the Wembley stadium, the England manager remains seated on the bench, showing not a flicker of emotion.

Sir Alf Ramsey’s almost superhuman calmness at the moment of victory has become one of the iconic images of the glorious summer of 1966. For all his outward imperturbability, no one had greater cause to rejoice than him. He was the true architect of England’s triumph, the man who had moulded his players into a world-beating unit. The experts and press had mocked when he had declared, soon after his appointment to the national job, that England would win the World Cup. After 1966, he was never laughed at again. Yet Ramsey was acting entirely in character on that July afternoon at Wembley. In his behaviour, he demonstrated the very qualities that helped to make him such a superb manager: his majestic coolness under pressure; his natural modesty which meant that he always put his players’ achievements before his own; his innate dignity and authority.

Since the World Cup victory, Sir Alf Ramsey has rightly been regarded as the greatest of all British football managers, winning at every level of the game. Through his tactical awareness, motivational powers and judgment of ability, he not only turned England into World Champions, but also, perhaps even more incredibly, he took unfashionable Ipswich Town from the lower reaches of the old Third Division South to the First Division title in the space of just six years. No other manager has been able to equal this record. Sir Alex Ferguson may have won a boardroom-full of trophies at Old Trafford, but he has been almost untested on the highest international stage. Similarly Sir Matt Busby, Brian Clough and Bob Paisley all gained the English championship and the European Cup, but none of them managed any national side, in Clough’s case to his bitter regret, having been turned down for the England job in 1977. Bill Shankly, the legendary boss at Anfield, and Stan Cullis, the iron manager at Molineux, each won three league titles and two FA Cups, but, again, their excellence was confined to the domestic arena. Of international British managers, Jack Charlton may have worked a near miracle with the Republic of Ireland but he could not do the same with any of his clubs, nor could Billy Bingham, who took modest Northern Ireland to successive World Cups in the eighties. Perhaps the man who comes closest to Ramsey was one of his successors at Portman Road, Sir Bobby Robson, who in his long and honourable career won the FA Cup and UEFA Cup with Ipswich Town, the Cup Winners’ Cup with Barcelona and two domestic championships with both PSV Eindhoven and Porto, as well as taking England to the semi-finals of the World Cup in 1990. But the greatest prize eluded him.

For all his extraordinary breadth of achievement, however, Sir Alf Ramsey has always been an elusive figure, an enigma whose life story has remained shrouded in mystery. A private, shy man, he was never at ease with the limelight and throughout his career had an awkward relationship with the media. Even those who worked with him for years, such as his secretary at Ipswich, Pat Godbold, or his longest-serving England player, Bobby Charlton, say that they never got to know him. Partly because of his insecurities about his humble upbringing, he built a protective shield around himself. In contrast to the expansive Sir Bobby Robson, who has written at least four versions of his autobiography, Alf never produced any memoirs, nor did he give many revealing interviews to the press.

There have been three previous books about Sir Alf, of varying quality. In 1970, the journalist Max Marquis wrote a thin, viciously skewed account, Anatomy of a Manager, which was based on recycling negative press stories about Sir Alf. It was hysterical in its vituperation, limited in its scope. Another book, England: The Alf Ramsey Years, by Graham McColl, published in 1988, dwelt entirely on his record as manager of the national team, though it did have the seal of Ramsey’s approval. A more comprehensive biography, Winning Isn’t Everything, was written in 1998 by Dave Bowler, who has also produced a superb life of Alf’s nemesis at Tottenham Hotspur, Danny Blanchflower. Bowler’s portrait was balanced and used much original testimony, and was particularly good on Alf’s tactical innovations. Yet it still left many aspects of Sir Alf’s life and career uncovered.

By dint of extensive research and interviews, I have sought to provide a fuller, more rounded portrait of this remarkable figure. I have been able to unearth new information about his upbringing, his marriage, his early social life, particularly when he was a player at Spurs, his relationship with his England team and the circumstances surrounding his sacking. During my research, I was intrigued to learn of the real reasons why England were knocked out of the World Cup in Mexico in 1970, when Sir Alf displayed a rare but disastrous neglect of certain logistical arrangements.

I have aimed to write more than just a conventional biography. By placing Ramsey in his historical context, I have also sought to analyse professional football and the fabric of British society over the span of his life. One of the many appealing features of Sir Alf’s story is the way it covered a revolution not only in soccer but also in social attitudes. The labourer’s son from Dagenham witnessed the end of the age of deference, the abolition of the maximum wage, the rise of the superstar player, the demise of amateur administrators, the collapse of rigid class structures, the first majority Labour government, the arrival of the permissive society and the disappearance of Empire. Ramsey himself, as a traditionalist in his personal outlook but a revolutionary on the soccer field, appeared to embody that fluid climate of resistance and change.

In helping me to cover this material, I owe a large debt to many people. A great number of ex-England and Ipswich footballers, who were managed by Alf, agreed to give interviews for this book, so I would like to record my thanks to: Jimmy Armfield, Alan Ball, Gordon Banks, Barry Bridges, Sir Trevor Brooking, Allan Clarke, Ray Clemence, George Cohen, John Compton, Ray Crawford, Martin Dobson, Bryan Douglas, John Elsworthy, the late Johnny Haynes, Ron Henry, Norman Hunter, Brian Labone, Jimmy Leadbetter, Francis Lee, Roy McFarland, Ken Malcolm, Gordon Milne, Alan Mullery, Andy Nelson, Maurice Norman, Mike O’Grady, Terry Paine, Alan Peacock, Mike Pejic, Ted Phillips, Fred Pickering, Paul Reaney, Joe Royle, Dave Sadler, Peter Shilton, Nobby Stiles, Ian Storey-Moore, Mike Summerbee, Derek Temple, Peter Thompson, Colin Todd, Tony Waiters and Ray Wilson. I must also express my gratitude to the many Southampton, Spurs and England footballers who gave me the benefit of their views about playing alongside Alf: Eddie Baily, Ted Ballard, Ian Black, Eric Day, the late Ted Ditchburn, Terry Dyson, Stan Clements, Bill Ellerington, Sir Tom Finney, Alf Freeman, Mel Hopkins, Tony Marchi, Arthur Milton, Derek Ufton and Denis Uphill. Ed Speight, a Dagenham-bred youth player at Spurs during Alf’s last days at White Hart Lane, generously showed me some of his correspondence with Alf.

I am, in addition, grateful to those journalists who gave me their views of Alf: Tony Garnett, Brian James, Ken Jones, David Lacey, Hugh McIlvanney, Colin Malam, Jeff Powell, Brian Scovell and Martin Tyler. I am especially indebted to Nigel Clarke, who knew Alf for more than 30 years and cowrote his column for the Daily Mirror in the eighties. Key figures at the FA during Alf’s reign, David Barber, Margaret Fuljames, Wilf McGuinness and Alan Odell, gave me many fascinating insights into Alf’s style of management, while I further benefited from speaking to Hubert Doggart, son of Graham Doggart, who chaired the FA committee that appointed Alf as England manager in 1962. Dr Neil Phillips, the national team doctor in the second half of Alf’s England career, could not have been more helpful with his advice and frank testimony.

Information about Alf’s early days in Dagenham was given by Cliff Anderson, George Baker, Jean Bixby, Phil Cairns, Charles Emery, Father Gerald Gosling, Pauline Gosling, Beattie Robbins, Joyce Rushbrook, Gladys Skinner and Tommy Sloan. Invaluable assistance about other aspects of Sir Alf’s life was provided by Terry Baker, Mary Bates, John Booth, Tommy Docherty, Anne Elsworthy, Peter Little, Margaret Lorenzo, Matthew Lorenzo, Bill Martin, Pat Millward, Tina Moore (widow of Bobby) and Bernard Sharpe.

Several experts were extremely generous in providing me with contact numbers and historical details: David Bull, author of an excellent life of Southampton stalwart Ted Bates; Rob Hadcraft, who wrote a fine study of Ipswich’s Championship-winning season in 1961-62; Kevin Palmer, amongst whose many works is a history of Spurs’ two titles in 1950-51 and 1960-61; and Andy Porter, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of ex-professionals’ careers. Pat Godbold, still working at Ipswich after more than half a century, not only gave me an interview about her time as secretary to Alf but also helped with Ipswich contacts. Roy Prince, archivist with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Association, shed some light on Sir Alf’s army career.

For all their help with other research material, I am grateful to staff at the BBC archives, the ITN archives, the British Newspaper Library, Southampton Central Reference Library, the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, the Probate Division, the Press Association, the library of the Daily Mail, Tottenham Hotspur FC, the Barking and Dagenham Record office at Valence House Museum, the Barking and Dagenham Recorder and the Football Association.

Lady Victoria Ramsey, Sir Alf’s widow, felt she could not co-operate with this book, though she did write to me expressing how devoted she was to her late husband.

I would like to thank Tom Whiting and Michael Doggart at HarperCollins for overseeing this project and giving me endless encouragement and support.

Finally, I owe a huge debt to my dear wife Elizabeth, who put up with the many, isolated months I spent in research and writing without complaint. I can never thank her enough for putting me on the path to becoming an author.

Leo McKinstry

Coggeshall, Essex, April 2006




Introduction (#ulink_7c29b38d-550e-586e-9422-231ff5984cb9)


15 May 1999. The ancient Suffolk church of St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich had never previously held such a large or distinguished congregation. Three hundred mourners were crowded tightly on its polished wooden pews, while hundreds more lined the streets outside. England’s greatest living footballer, Sir Bobby Charlton, sat near the front, looking more sombre than ever. Alongside him were colleagues from the World Cup-winning team of 1966, including the bald, bespectacled Nobby Stiles, the flame-haired Alan Ball and Bobby’s own gangly brother Jack, who had left his Northumberland home at first light to attend the event.

They had gathered on a bright afternoon to pay their last respects at the memorial service of Sir Alfred Ernest Ramsey, the former England and Ipswich manager who had died at the end of April after a long illness. The venerable provincial setting was appropriate to the man whose life was being honoured, since modesty was one of the hallmarks of his personality. For all his success as both player and manager, for all his brilliance as a leader, he continually shunned the limelight and was uneasy with public adulation. The august Gothic expanse of Westminster Abbey or the classical grandeur of St Paul’s would not have suited a farewell for this least bombastic of men.

The personal qualities of Sir Alf were referred to throughout the service. Afterwards, outside the church, former players spoke of his loyalty, his essential decency and his strength of character. ‘He was an incredibly special manager. I just loved being with him, because I knew everything was straight down the line,’ said Alan Ball. ‘He was responsible for the greatest moment I had as a footballer and I will never forget or be able to thank him enough for that,’ said Jack Charlton.

In a moving eulogy, George Cohen, another of the 1966 Cup winners, described Ramsey as ‘not only a great football manager but a great Englishman’. Highlighting the way Sir Alf would stick by his players, Cohen gave the example of the occasion when Sir Alf refused to give in to pressure from FA officials to drop Nobby Stiles from the 1966 side after a disastrous challenge on the French player Jacques Simon. Though the tackle, according to Cohen, had been ‘so late Connex South East would have been embarrassed by it,’ Sir Alf supported Stiles to the hilt and even threatened to resign if the FA ordered him to change the team. In a voice cracking with emotion, Cohen continued: ‘Sir Alf established a strong bond with his players who stood before every other consideration. We all loved him very much indeed. What Alf created was a family that is still as strong today in feeling and belief as it was thirty-three years ago when we won the World Cup.’ Cohen then speculated as to how Alf might have reacted to such words of praise. ‘If he is looking down at this particular moment, he is probably thinking, “Yes, George, I think we have had quite enough of that.” Finally, Cohen turned in the direction of Sir Alf’s grieving widow, Lady Victoria. ‘Alf changed our lives, not just because of what we achieved with him but because our lives were richer for having known and played for him. He was an extraordinary man. Thank you for sharing him.’

Though the memorial service had been billed as ‘a celebration’ of Sir Alf’s life, it was inevitable that the day should also be wreathed in sadness at his loss. ‘I could not be more upset if he was family,’ said Sir Bobby Charlton. Big Ted Phillips, one of Ipswich’s strikers during Ramsey’s years at the Suffolk club, told me: ‘At Alf’s memorial service, I could not speak. There were tears rolling down my cheeks. They wanted me to say a few words, but I told them I couldn’t do it. Alf meant so much to me. He was a superb guy. He was unique. Under him at Ipswich, we were like a big family.’

Yet the sense of sorrow went much deeper than merely regret at the passing of one of England’s modern heroes. There was also a mixture of guilt, disappointment and anger that, during his lifetime, Sir Alf had never been accorded the recognition he deserved. He might have been the man who, in the words of Tony Blair, ‘gave this nation the greatest moment in our sporting history,’ but he was hardly treated as such by the football establishment. Throughout his career as England manager, many in the FA regarded him with suspicion or contempt. He was never given a winner’s medal for the 1966 World Cup victory, something that rankled with him right up to the moment of his death. His pay was always pitifully low, far worse than most First Division managers of his time, and when he was sacked in 1974, he was given only a meagre pension.

The last 25 years of his life were spent in a sad, twilight existence. The lack of money was compounded by the refusal of the football authorities to make any use of his unparalleled knowledge of the game. While football enjoyed an embarrassment of riches from the early nineties onwards, Sir Alf was left in uncomfortable exile, isolated and ignored. As late as 1996, the FA denied him any participatory role in the ceremonies to mark the opening of the European Championship in England. ‘I sometimes look back and become bitter about it. I achieved something perhaps no manager will ever do again, yet the wealth of the game passed me by. I would have liked to have retired in comfort, and have no worries about money, but that has not been the case. And I couldn‘t understand why, after I left the FA, nobody there was prepared to let me work for my country,’ he said in 1996.

This neglect of Sir Alf was symbolized by the absence from his memorial service of a host of key figures from the football world, despite the attendance of most of the 1966 side. Invitations were sent to all 92 Football League clubs, but only five of them were represented. Neither the then England manager Kevin Keegan nor any Premiership manager were present, though there were no fixtures that Saturday. Not one current England player showed up. As Gordon Taylor, Chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, put it afterwards: ‘It is amazing. If we cannot honour our heroes, what is the point of it all – and was there ever a greater hero for our game than Sir Alf? Everyone in the English game who could have been here should have been. It is a matter of simple respect.’

But in truth, outside the confines of his England squad, respect was something that Sir Alf had rarely been shown. The reluctance to honour him was not confined to the FA. Ever since the triumph of 1966, he had been the subject of a stream of criticism for his approach to football. His manner was condemned as aloof and forbidding, his methods as over-cautious and ultra-defensive. He was widely seen as the leader who hated flair and distrusted genius, a dull man in charge of a dull team. ‘Ramsey’s Robots’ were said to have taken all grace and romance out of football. ‘Alf Ramsey pulls the strings and the players dance for him. He has theorized them out of the game. They mustn’t think for themselves. They have been so brainwashed by tactics and talks that individual talent has been thrust into the background,’ claimed Bob Kelly, the President of the Scottish FA. The 1966 triumph was belittled as the fruit of nothing more than perspiration, dubious refereeing and home advantage.

Indeed, many critics went even further, claiming that winning the World Cup had been disastrous for British football in the long-term, because it encouraged a negative style of play. Particularly regrettable, it was said, was his abandonment of wingers in favour of a mundane 4-3-3 formation, which relied more on packing the midfield than in building attacks from the flanks. Sir Alf’s enthusiasm for the aggressive Nobby Stiles was seen as typical of his dour outlook, as was his preference for the hard-working Geoff Hurst over the more creative, less diligent Jimmy Greaves in the final itself against West Germany. In Alf’s England, it seemed, the workhorse was more valued than the thoroughbred. The doyen of Irish football writers, Eamon Dunphy, who played with Manchester United and Millwall, put it thus: ‘Alf came to the conclusion that his players weren’t good enough to compete, in any positive sense, with their betters. His response was a formula which stopped good players.’ Similarly, the imaginative Manchester City coach Malcolm Allison argued that ‘to Alf’s way of thinking, skill meant lazy’.

This chorus of criticism reached full volume in the early seventies, when Sir Alf became more vulnerable because of poor results. He was the Roundhead who kept losing battles. As England were knocked out of the European Championship by West Germany in 1972, Hugh McIlvanney summed up the mood against Alf:

Cautious, joyless football was scarcely bearable even while it was bringing victories. What is happening now we always felt to be inevitable, because anyone who sets out to prove that football is about sweat rather than inspiration, about winning rather than glory, is sure to be found out in the end. Ramsey’s method was, to be fair, justifiable in 1966, when it was important that England should make a powerful show in the World Cup, but since then it has become an embarrassment.

Some of the attacks grew vindictive, with Alf painted as a relic of a vanishing past, clinging on stubbornly to players and systems no longer fit for the modern age. His old-fashioned, stilted voice and demeanour were mocked, his lack of flamboyance ridiculed. In early 1973, soon after England had beaten Scotland 5-0 at Hampden, with Mick Channon performing well up front, the satirical magazine Foul! carried a cruel but rather leaden article entitled ‘Lady Ramsey’s Diary’, parodying the Private Eye series of the time about Downing Street, ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’. One extract ran:

He’s terribly worried about this Mr Shannon (sic). ’You see, my dear,’ he told me (it’s amazing how different he sounds after those elocution lessons), ‘we just can’t afford to have individuals playing so well. It undermines the whole team effort. Besides, people will start expecting us to score five goals in every game, and we can’t have that.’

The critics had their way in April 1974, when Sir Alf was sacked as manager after eleven years in the post. The FA’s decision was hardly a surprise, given England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup the previous autumn. But it still fell as a painful blow to Sir Alf, one from which he never really recovered. He once explained that only three things mattered to him – ‘football, my country and my wife’. Football had turned out to be a fickle mistress, and for the remainder of his years he carried a feeling of betrayal. ‘Football has passed me by,’ he said towards the end of his life.

Since his sacking, no other England manager has come near to the pinnacle he climbed. When he departed in 1974, it seemed likely that England might one day reach that peak again. In the subsequent 30 years and more, however, the national side has endured one failure after another, with just two semi-finals in major championships during those three decades. Yet it should also be remembered that before Sir Alf’s arrival as manager in 1963, England’s record was equally dismal, having never gone further than a World Cup quarter-final; indeed in 1950, the national side suffered what is still the greatest upset in the history of global soccer, losing 1-0 to the unknown amateurs of the USA. Set in the context of England’s sorry history, therefore, the extent of Sir Alf’s achievement becomes all the more remarkable, putting into perspective much of the carping about his management.

He might not have inspired electrifying football, but for most of his reign he achieved results that would have been the envy of every manager since. Nobby Stiles told me: ‘I cannot say enough in favour of Alf Ramsey. His insights were unbelievable. I would have died for him.’ It is a telling fact that the 1970 World Cup in Mexico is the only occasion when England have ever gone into a major tournament as one of the favourites to win it – in 1966, England, still living with the burdens of their past record, were regarded as outsiders. The status that England had earned by 1970 in itself is a tribute to the supreme effectiveness of Ramsey’s leadership. Moreover, his success in 1962 in bringing the League Championship to Ipswich Town, an unheralded Third Division club before he took over, is one of the most astonishing feats in the annals of British football management, unlikely ever to be surpassed.

Yet even now, as nostalgia for the golden summer of 1966 becomes more potent, the memory of Sir Alf Ramsey is not one treasured by the public. He is nothing like as famous as David Beckham, or George Best or Paul Gascoigne, three footballers who achieved far less than him on the international stage. In his birthplace of Dagenham, he seems to have been airbrushed from history. There is no statue to him, no blue plaque in the street where he was born or the ground where he first played. No road or club or school bears his name. The same indifference is demonstrated beyond east London. When the BBC recently organized a competition to decide what the main bridge at the new Wembley stadium should be called, Sir Alf Ramsey’s name was on the shortlist. Yet the British public voted for the title of the ‘White Horse Bridge’, after the celebrated police animal who restored order at the first Wembley FA Cup Final of 1923 when unprecedented crowds of around 200,000 were spilling onto the pitch. With all due respect to this creature, it is something of an absurdity that the winning manager of the World Cup should have to trail in behind a horse. As one of Ramsey’s players, Mike Summerbee, puts it: ‘Alf Ramsey’s contribution to international football was phenomenal. Yet the way he was treated was a disgrace. We never look after our heroes and in time we try to pull them down. I tell you something, they should have a bronze statue of Alf at the new Wembley. And they should call it the Alf Ramsey stadium.’

Part of the failure to appreciate the greatness of Alf Ramsey has been the result of his severe public image. He was a man who elevated reticence to an art form. With his players he could be amiable, sometimes even humorous, but he presented a much stonier face to the press and wider world. The personification of the traditional English stiff upper lip, he never courted popularity, never showed any emotion in public. His epic self-restraint was beautifully captured at the end of the World Cup Final of 1966, when he sat impassively staring ahead, while all around him were scenes of joyous mayhem at England’s victory. The only words he uttered after Geoff Hurst’s third goal were a headmasterly rebuke to his trainer, Harold Shepherdson, who had leapt to his feet in ecstasy. ‘Sit down, Harold,’ he growled. Again, as the players gathered for their lap of honour, they tried to push Alf to the front to greet the cheers of the crowd. But, with typical modesty, he refused. This outward calm, he later explained, was not due to any lack of inner passion but to his shyness. ‘I’m a very emotional person but my feelings are always tied up inside. Maybe it is a mistake to be like this but I cannot govern it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with showing emotion in public, but it is something I can never do.’

Nowhere was Ramsey’s awkwardness more apparent than in his notoriously difficult relationship with the media. Believing all that mattered were performances on the field, he made little effort to cultivate journalists. ‘I can live without them because I am judged by the results that the England team gets. I doubt very much whether they can live without me,’ he once said. Hiding behind a mask of inscrutability, he usually would provide only the blandest of answers at press conferences or indeed none at all. He trusted a select few, like Ken Jones and Brian James, because he respected their knowledge of football, but most of the rest of the press were given the cold shoulder. He also had a gift for humiliating reporters with little more than a withering look. As Peter Batt, once of the Sun, recalls: ‘There was a general, utter contempt from him. I don’t think anyone could make you feel more like a turd under his boot than Ramsey. It is amazing how he did it.’ This hostile attitude led to a string of incidents throughout his career. Shortly after England had won the World Cup, for instance, Ramsey was standing in the reception of Hendon Hall, the team’s hotel in north-west London. A representative of the Press Association came up to him and said:

‘Mr Ramsey, on behalf of the press, may I thank you for your co-operation throughout the tournament?’

‘Are you taking the piss?’ was Alf’s reply.

On another occasion in 1967, he was with an FA team in Canada for a tournament at the World Expo show. As he stood by the bus which would take his team from Montreal airport to its hotel, he was suddenly accosted by a leading TV correspondent from one of Canada’s news channels. The clean-cut broadcaster put his arm around England’s manager, and then launched into his spiel.

‘Sir Ramsey, it’s just a thrill to have you and the world soccer champions here in Canada. Now I’m from one of our biggest national stations, going out live coast to coast, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And, Coach Ramsey, you’re not going to believe this but I’m going to give you seven whole minutes all to yourself on the show. So if you’re ready, Sir Ramsey, I am going to start the interview now.’

‘Oh no you fuckin’ ain’t.’ And with that, a fuming Coach Ramsey climbed onto the bus.

Such dismissiveness might provoke smiles from those present, but it ultimately led to the creation of a host of enemies in the press. When times grew rough in the seventies, Alf was left with few allies to put his case. The same was true of his relations with football’s administrators, whom he regarded as no more than irritants; to him they were like most journalists: tiresome amateurs who knew nothing about the tough realities of professional football. ‘Those people’ was his disdainful term for the councillors of the FA. He despised them so much that he would deliberately avoid sitting next to them on trips or at matches, while he described the autocratic Professor Harold Thompson, one of the FA’s bosses, as ‘that bloody man Thompson’. But again, when results went against Sir Alf, the knives came out and the FA were able to exact their revenge.

The roots of Sir Alf’s antagonism towards the media and the FA lay in his deep sense of social insecurity. He was a strange mixture of tremendous self-confidence within the narrow world of football, and tortured, tongue-tied diffidence outside it. He had been a classy footballer himself in the immediate post-war era, one of the most intelligent full-backs England has ever produced, and was never afraid to set out his opinions in the dressing-rooms of Southampton and Spurs, his two League clubs. Performing his role as England or Ipswich manager, he was the master of his domain. No one could match him for his understanding of the technicalities of football, where he allied a brilliant judgement of talent to a shrewd tactical awareness and a photographic memory of any passage of play. ‘Without doubt, he was the greatest manager I ever knew, a fantastic guy,’ says Ray Crawford of Ipswich and England. ‘He had a natural authority about him. You never argued with him. He was always brilliant in his talks because he read the game so well. He would come into the dressing-room at half-time and explain what we should be doing, and most of the time it came off. He was inspirational that way.’ Peter Shilton, England’s most capped player, is just as fulsome: ‘From the moment I met Sir Alf I knew he was someone special. He was that sort of person. He was a man who inspired total respect. Any decision he made, you knew he made it for the right reason. He had real strength of character. I have been with other managers who were not as strong in the big, big games. But Alf could rise above the pressure and dismiss irrelevancies.’

Yet Sir Alf never felt comfortable when taken out of the reassuring environment of running his teams. All his ease and self-assurance evaporated when he was not dealing with professional players and trusted football correspondents. He could cope with a World Cup Final but not with a cocktail reception. ‘Dinners, speeches,’ he used to say of the FA committee men, ‘that’s their job.’ Amongst the Oxbridge degrees of the sporting, political or diplomatic establishments, he felt all too aware of his humble origins and lack of education. Born into a poor, rural Essex family, he left school at fourteen and took his first job as a delivery boy for the Dagenham Co-op. To cope with this insecurity, Sir Alf devised a number of strategies. One was to erect a social barrier against the world, avoiding all forms of intimacy. That is why he could so often appear aloof, even downright rude. From his earliest days as a professional, he was reluctant to open up to anyone. This distance might have been invaluable in retaining his authority as a manager, but it also prohibited the formation of close friendships.

Pat Godbold, his secretary throughout his spell as Ipswich manager from 1955 to 1963, says: ‘I was twenty when Alf came here. My first impression was that he was a shy man. I think that right up to his death he was a very shy man. You could not get to know him. He was a good man to work for, but I can honestly say that I never got to know him.’ Sir Alf guarded the privacy of his domestic life with the same determination that he put into management. The mock-Tudor house on a leafy Ipswich road he shared with Lady Victoria – or Vic, as he always called her – was his sanctuary, not a social venue. Anne Elsworthy, the wife of one of the Championship-winning Ipswich players of 1962, recalls Sir Alf and Lady Ramsey as a ‘a very private couple. After he retired, I would occasionally see them in Marks and Spencer’s in Ipswich, but all they would say would be ‘Good morning’. They were not the sort to stand around chatting in a supermarket. When Alf went to play golf, he would just go, complete his round. He would not hang around the bar.’

Another strategy was to reinvent himself as the archetypal suburban English gentleman. The impoverished Dagenham lad, who could not even afford to go to the cinema until he was fourteen, was gradually transformed in adulthood into someone who could have easily been mistaken for a stockbroker or a bank-manager. The pinstripe, made of the finest mohair, was a suit of armour to protect from his detractors. When he went to Buckingham Palace to collect his knighthood in 1967, he went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that he was dressed in the exactly the correct attire. But by far the most obvious change was in his voice, allegedly the result of elocution lessons, as he dropped his Essex accent in favour of a form of pronunciation memorably described by the journalist Brian Glanville as ‘sergeant-major posh’. Like Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, Sir Alf occasionally betrayed his origins when he slipped into the vernacular of his childhood, as on the embarrassing occasion in a restaurant car travelling to Ipswich when, in the presence of the club’s directors, he told a waitress during dinner, ‘No thank you, I don’t want no peas.’

Tony Garnett, the Suffolk-based journalist who covered Ipswich’s great years under Sir Alf, told me: ‘He did drop some real clangers when he was trying to talk proper, as they say. One of the best was when Ipswich went abroad after they had won the championship and Alf began to talk about going through ‘Customs and Exercise.’ Nobody dared to correct him. He could not do his ‘H’s properly, nor his ‘ings’ at the end of a word.’ With his attempts at precision, his lengthy pauses, his twisted syntax and his frequent repetition of the same phrase – ‘most certainly’ and ‘in as much as’ were two particular favourites – it seemed at times that he was almost trying to master a foreign tongue.

The Blackpool and England goalkeeper in the 1960s, Tony Waiters, who led Canada to the 1986 World Cup finals and has wide experience of working in America, says: ‘It was always worth listening to Alf. But occasionally he would fall down on his pronunciation or would drop an “H” every so often. As a coach myself, I am aware that if you say the wrong thing, it could come back to haunt you. And sometimes Alf would give an indication that this was not his natural way of speaking. He was very deliberate in what he said. I work with a lot of people who are coaching in their second language. Generally speaking they slow down because they are thinking ahead and almost rehearsing in their own mind what they are going to say. With Alf, it was always good stuff but maybe he had to do a bit of mental gymnastics as he prepared to speak.’

For all his anxiety about his accent and his appearance, Sir Alf could never have been described as a snob. Just the opposite was true. He loathed pretension and social climbing, one of the reasons why he so disliked the fatuities of the FA’s councillors. David Barber, who has worked at the FA since 1970, beginning as a teenage clerk, recalls Alf’s lack of self-importance: ‘Right from the moment I first took a job there, I was not in the slightest bit overawed by him. Though he was the most famous man in football at the time, he was down to earth. He was very nice, treated me like a colleague, not an office boy. He was uncomfortable with the press and FA Council members and in public could be a shy man, but with people like me, whom he worked with on a daily basis, he could not have been more friendly.’

Utterly lacking in personal vanity, Alf deliberately avoided the social whirl of London and was unmoved by fashionable restaurants and hotels. His knighthood did not change him in the slightest, while he always retained a fondness for the activities of his Dagenham youth, such as a visit to the greyhound track accompanied by a pint of bitter and some jellied eels. As reflected by his penurious retirement, he refused to exploit his position for personal gain, unlike most of his successors; in fact, it was partly his repugnance at commercialism that led to his downfall.

Alf’s favourite self-preservation strategy, though, was to ignore the world outside and retreat into football, the one subject he really understood. Since his childhood, he had been utterly obsessed with the game. He was kicking a ball before he was learning his alphabet. It was the great abiding passion of his life. When he was truly engaged with the sport, his introversion would disappear, the barriers would fall. Apart from his wife, nothing else had the same importance to him. As his captain at Ipswich, Andy Nelson, remembers: ‘He was a very private, quiet man, very unhappy to have any conversation that was unrelated to football. When we went on the train, we used to have a little card school. Roy Bailey, our goalkeeper, was a big figure in that. Alf would come into our compartment and start talking about football. And then Roy would say, “Anyone seen that new film at the pictures?” You would literally be rid of Alf in two minutes. He’d be off, gone.’ Hugh McIlvanney told me that he could see the change in Alf’s personality as soon as he shifted the ground onto football. ‘Alf liked a drink and he could get quite bitter when he was arguing about football. That front of restraint, which was his normal face for the public, was pretty superficial; he quite liked to go to war. All the insecurity he so obviously had socially did not apply for a moment to football. He was utterly convinced of his case – and with good reason. He was a great manager in any sense.’

It is impossible to deny that, in his obsession with football, Sir Alf was a one-dimensional figure. He had a child-like affection for movies, especially westerns and thrillers, enjoyed pottering about his Ipswich garden and was genuinely devoted to Vickie. But he was uneasy with any discussions about politics, current affairs or art beyond privately mouthing the conventional platitudes of suburban conservatism. An unabashed philistine, he turned down an offer to take the England team to a gala evening with the Bolshoi Ballet during a trip to Moscow in 1973; instead, he arranged a showing of an Alf Garnett film at the British Embassy. He had an ingrained xenophobic streak, and had little time for any foreigners, in whose number he included the Scots. In fact, his dislike of the ‘strange little men’ north of the border was so ingrained that one Christmas, when he was given a pair of Paisley pyjamas as a present, he soon changed them at the shop for a pair of blue and white striped ones.

Nigel Clarke, the experienced journalist who worked more closely with Sir Alf than anyone else in Fleet Street and wrote his column for the Daily Mirror in the 1980s, provides this memory: ‘Alf was certainly conservative with a small ‘c’. But he was not a worldly man and we never really talked about current affairs or wider political issues. He was just happy talking about football. I think that was partly because he knew the subject so well. He could talk about football until the cows came home. He never wanted to discuss governments or religion or anything like that. His life revolved around football. He had little conversation about anything else. His face would lighten up when you mentioned something about the game. We would be sitting in the compartment of a train, going to cover a match for the paper, and Alf would be dozing. Then I might refer to some player and his eyes would open, he would sit up instantly, and say, ‘Oh really, yes, I know him. I saw him play recently.’ He just loved football, loved anyone who shared his passion for it.’

When it came to football itself, Sir Alf Ramsey was anything but a one-dimensional figure. Beneath his placid exterior, the flame of his devotion to the game burned with a fierce intensity. It was a strength of commitment that made him one of the most contradictory and controversial managers of all time. He was a tough, demanding character, who could be strangely sensitive to criticism, a reserved English gentleman who was loathed by the establishment, an unashamed traditionalist who turned out to be a tactical revolutionary, a stern disciplinarian who was not above telling his players to ‘get rat-arsed’. His ruthlessness divided the football world; his stubbornness left him the target of abuse and condemnation. But it was his zeal that put England at the top of the world.




ONE Dagenbam (#ulink_4599549c-dc3d-5123-abfe-6144da9e5a3d)


The Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin, the avuncular leader of the Conservative Party in the inter-war years, was not usually a man given to overstatement. But in 1934 he was so impressed by the new municipal housing development at Becontree in Dagenham that he was moved to write in an official report:

If the Becontree estate were situated in the United States, articles and newsreels would have been circulated containing references to the speed at which a new town of 120,000 people had been built. If it had happened in Vienna, the Labour and left Liberal press would have boosted it as an example of what municipal socialism could accomplish. If it had been built in Russia, Soviet propaganda would have emphasized the planning aspect. A Pudovkin film might have been made of it – a close up of the morning seen on cabbages in the market gardens; the building of the railway lines to carry bricks and wood, the spread of the houses and roads with the thousands of busy workers, gradually engulfing the fields and hedges and trees. But Becontree was planned and built in England where the most revolutionary social changes can take place and people in general do not realize they have occurred.

The Becontree estate was certainly dramatic in conception and scale. It was first planned in 1920, when the London County Council saw that a radical expansion in the number of homes would be needed to the east of the city, in order both to provide accommodation for the men returning from the Great War and to alleviate the terrible slum conditions of the East End. This was to be Britain’s first new town, a place providing ‘homes fit for heroes’. The scheme to convert 3000 acres of land into a vast urban community was, as the LCC’s architect boasted, ‘unparalleled in the history of housing’. The establishment of the Ford motor works in Dagenham in 1929 was a further spur to the urbanization of the area. By 1933, with the building programme reaching its peak, the LCC proclaimed that, ‘Becontree is the largest municipal housing estate in the world.’

Right in the midst of this gargantuan sprawl, untouched by bulldozer or bricklayer, there stood a set of rustic wooden cottages. These low, single-storey dwellings had been built in 1851, when Dagenham was entirely countryside. For all their quaintness, they were extremely primitive, devoid of any electricity or hot running water. And it was in one of them, Number Six Parrish Cottages, Halbutt Street, that Alfred Ernest Ramsey was born on 22 January 1920, the very year that saw the first proposals for the Becontree Estate. The row of Parrish Cottages remained throughout the development of the estate, an architectural and social anachronism holding out against the tide of modernity. They did not even have electricity installed until the 1950s and they were not finally pulled down until the early 1970s. In one sense, the cottage of his birth is a metaphor for the life of Alf Ramsey: the arch traditionalist, modest in spirit and conservative in outlook, who refused to be swept along by the social revolution which engulfed Britain during his career.

For much of his early life, Ramsey was not completely honest about his date of birth. In his ghost-written autobiography, published in 1952, he stated baldly that he was born ‘in 1922’, without giving any details of the month or the day. Now the reason for this was not personal vanity but sporting professionalism. When Ramsey was trying to force his way into League football at the end of the Second World War, a difference of two years could make a big difference to the prospects of a young hopeful, since a club would be more likely to take on someone aged 23 than 25. In such a competitive world, Ramsey felt he had to use any ruse which might work to his advantage. His dishonesty was harmless, and it passed largely unnoticed until after he received his knighthood in 1967. Having been asked to check his entry for Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage, Sir Alf decided not to mislead that most elevated of reference works. As Arthur Hopcraft put it in the Observer, ‘Alf Ramsey the dignified, the aspirer after presence, could not, I am convinced, give false information to the book of the Peerage.’ But by then the issue of his age had ceased to matter; in any case, because of the stiffness of his character, he had always seemed much older than his stated years.

Parrish Cottages may have become outdated with the arrival of the Becontree Estate, but when Alf Ramsey was an infant they were typical of rural Dagenham, where farming was still the main source of subsistence. ‘Dagenham was like a little hamlet. It was much more countrified until they built the big estate. There was a helluva lot of open space here in the twenties,’ says one of Alf’s contemporaries Charles Emery. ‘Most people think of Dagenham as an industrial area. But until I was six there was nothing but little country lanes. I saw Dagenham grow and grow,’ Alf wrote in 1970. A reflection of that environment could be seen at the Robin Hood pub in the north-west of the borough, where customers drank by the light of paraffin or oil lamps, and the landlord had to double as a ploughman. As one account from 1920 ran: ‘A customer would enter the bar and finding it empty, would shout across the fields for the landlord. After a time he would arrive, and wiping his hands free from the soil, would draw a pint of beer, have a talk about the weather, and then depart again to the fields.’

A striking picture of life in Dagenham in the early twenties was left by Fred Tibble, who died in 2003 after serving as a borough councillor for 35 years. He grew up with Alf, often playing football and cricket with him, and remembered him as ‘a very quiet boy who really loved sport’. The late Councillor Tibble had other memories:

We were very much Essex, we were country people. Many people came to the village selling things. There was a muffin man, who would come to the area once a week, ringing a bell with a tray of muffins on his head. The voluntary fire brigade was based in Station Road in the early 1920s, and when the maroon sounded, men would have to leave their jobs and homes to man the appliances. It could be difficult in the daytime, as they would have to try to get the horse which was being used for the milk round. At the weekends and summer evenings, the police used a wheel-barrow to take drunks from the pub to the police station. The drunks would be strapped into the barrow. We always found that amusing. Sometimes we would climb up the slaughterhouse wall to take a look at cattle being pole-axed. We often hoped to get hold of a pig’s bladder, which we could stuff with paper and play football with.

It was a country life that young Alf relished, especially because it provided such scope for football. He wrote in Talking Football:

Along with my three brothers, I lived for the open air from the moment I could toddle. The meadow at the back of our cottage was our playground. For hours every day, with my brothers, I learnt how to kick, head and control a ball, starting first of all with a tennis ball and it is true to say that we found all our pleasure this way. We were happy in the country, the town and cinemas offering no attractions to us.

But it was also a deprived existence, one that left him permanently defensive about his background. ‘We were not exactly wealthy,’ he admitted euphemistically. His later fastidious concern for his appearance stemmed from the fact that his family was poorer than most in the district, so he was not always dressed as smartly as he would have liked. If anyone commented on this difference, he retreated further into his shell, ‘We grew up together in Halbutt Street. Alf was very introverted, not very forthcoming. I sometimes went to his house, a very old cottage, little more than a wooden hut. His family were just ordinary people. He was not especially well-turned out as a child. That only came later, when he bettered himself,’ says his contemporary Phil Cairns.

Alf’s father, Herbert Ramsey, made a precarious living from various manual activities. He owned an agricultural small-holding, while on Saturdays he drove a horse-drawn dustcart for the local council. He also grew vegetables and reared a few pigs in the garden at the front of Parrish Cottages. He has sometimes been described as ‘a hay and straw dealer’, though it is interesting that when Alf married in 1951, he referred to his father’s occupation as a ‘general labourer’. Others, less generously, have said he was little more than a ‘rag-and-bone man’. Alf’s mother, Florence, was from a well-known Dagenham family called the Bixbys.

Pauline Gosling, who was a neighbour of the Ramseys in Parrish Cottages, recalls:

The cottages had outside toilets and no hot water. If you wanted a bath, you had to heat up the water in a copper pan and then fill a tin tub by the fire. Friday was usually bath night. There was no electricity, so you had to use oil lamps. If you wanted to go out to the toilet at night, you had to take one of those. Alf’s mother was a lovely lady. She and my mother were very close. They were a quiet family, very private, like Alf. They had worked the land for years around Dagenham. My own great-grandfather used to work on the land with Alf’s great grand-dad.

Gladys Skinner, another former neighbour, says:

There was an outside loo in a little shed in their back garden. You could see their tin bath hanging up on the wall outside. They were never a family to tell other people their business. Alf’s mother was a dear old thing. When they were installing electricity round here, she wouldn’t have it, said it frightened her. Alf’s father was also a very nice man. He sometimes kept pigs and we would go round have a look at the little piglets in the garden.

Alf always maintained that his was a close family. ‘My mother is in many ways very like me. Like me she doesn’t show much emotion. She didn’t, for instance, seem very excited when I received my knighthood. But she is very human and I like to think I was like her in that respect,’ he wrote in a 1970 Daily Mirror article about his life. He also felt that, despite the lack of money, his parents had taught him how to conduct himself properly. ‘He told me that he was brought up very strictly and that is why he was such a stickler for punctuality and courtesy. He said that it was part of his upbringing to be courteous and polite to people,’ says Nigel Clarke.

Alf was one of five children. He had two older brothers, Len and Albert, a younger brother Cyril, and a sister, Joyce, though he was the only one to go on to achieve public distinction. Cyril worked for Ford; Len, nicknamed ‘Ginger’, became a butcher; and Joyce married and moved to Chelmsford. Albert, known in Dagenham as ‘Bruno’, was the least inspiring of the siblings, utterly lacking in Alf’s ambition or focus. A heavy drinker, he earned his keep from gambling and keeping greyhounds. Alf himself was always interested in the dog track, liked a bet and was a shrewd gambler. But he never allowed it to dominate his life in the way that Albert did. ‘Bruno was a big chap. I can picture him now, with a trilby turned up at the front. He had a great friend called Charlie Waggles and the two of them never went out to work. At the time I thought that was terrible. They just gambled on the dogs,’ says Jean Bixby, who grew up in Dagenham at this time. In later life, Bruno’s disreputable life would cause Alf some embarrassment.

From the age of five, Alf attended Becontree Heath School. Now demolished, Becontree Heath had a roll of about 200, covering the ages of four to fourteen. Alf was neither especially diligent about his lessons nor popular with his fellow pupils. ‘I was never particularly clever at school. I seem to have spent more time pumping at footballs and carrying goalposts,’ Alf once said. ‘He was a year above me but I remember him all right. Know why? ’Cos he looked like a kid you wouldn’t get to like in a hurry,’ said one of them in a Sun profile of Sir Alf in 1971. For all his introspection, Alf was not a cowardly child, as he proved in the boxing ring at school. ‘I weighed only about five stones, but I was a tough little fighter. I won a few fights,’ he later recalled. But when he was ten years old, he was pulverized in a school tournament by a much larger opponent. ‘He was about a foot bigger than I was and I was as wide as I was tall. I was punched all over the ring.’ That put a halt to his school boxing career, though for the rest of his life he retained a visible scar above his mouth, a legacy of that bout. Alf was also good at athletics, representing the school in the high jump, long jump, and the one hundred and two hundred yards. And he was a solid cricketer, with a sound, classical batting technique.

But, as in adulthood, football was what really motivated Alf Ramsey. ‘He did not have much knowledge of the world. The only thing that ever seemed to interest him was football,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was very withdrawn, almost surly, but he became animated on the football field.’ From his earliest years, Alf demonstrated a natural ability for the game, his talent enhanced not only by games in the fields behind Parrish Cottages, but also by the long walk to and from school with his brothers. To break the monotony of the journey, which took altogether about four hours a day, the boys brought a small ball with them to kick about on the country lane. On one occasion, Alf accidentally kicked the ball into a ditch, which had filled with about three feet of water after heavy rainfall. He was instructed by his brothers to fish it out. So, having removed his shoes and socks, he waded in, soon found himself out of his depth, and was soaked to the skin. On his return home, he developed a severe cold and was confined to bed for a week. He wrote later: ‘That heavy cold taught me a lesson. I am certain that those daily kick-abouts with my brothers played a much more important part than I then appreciated in helping me secure accuracy in the pass and any ball control I now possess.’

Alf’s ability was soon obvious to his schoolmasters. One of his teachers, Alfred Snow, recalled in the Essex and EastLondon Recorder in 1971: ‘I was teaching at Becontree Heath Primary and I taught Alf Ramsey for two years. I remember him particularly well because he was so good on the football field. It didn’t really surprise me to see him get where he has.’ At the age of just seven, Alf was placed in the Becontree Heath junior side, in the position of inside-left. His brother Len was the team’s inside-right. Alf’s promotion to represent his school meant that, for the first time, he had to have proper boots. His mother went out and bought him a pair, costing four shillings and eleven pence – with Alf contributing the eleven pence from the meagre savings in his own piggy bank. ‘If those boots had been made of gold and studded with diamonds I could not have felt prouder than when I put them on and strutted around the dining room, only to be pulled up by father. “Go careful on the lino, Alf,” he said, “those studs will mark it,”’ Alf’s ghost-writer recorded in Talking Football.

By the age of just nine, Alf, despite being ‘a little tubby’, to use his own phrase, had proved himself so outstanding that he was made the school’s captain, commanding boys who were several years older than himself. He had also been switched to centre-half, the key position in any side of the pre-sixties era. Under the old W-M formation which was then the iron tradition in British soccer, based around two full-backs, three half-backs, two wingers and three forwards, the centre-half was both the fulcrum of the defence and instigator of attacks. It was a role ideally suited to Alf’s precocious footballing intelligence and the quality of his passing.

His performances brought him higher honours. He was selected to play for Dagenham Schools against a West Ham Youth XI, then for Essex Schoolboys, and then in a trial match for London schools. But in this match, Alf’s diminutive stature told against him. He wrote:

I stood just five feet tall, weighed six stone three pounds and looked more like a jockey than a centre-half. In that trial, the opposing centre forward stood five feet, ten and half inches and tipped the scale at 10 stone. After that game I gave up all hopes of playing for London. That centre-forward hit me with everything but the crossbar, scored three goals and in general gave me an uncomfortable time.

Compounding this failure, a rare outburst of youthful impetuosity led to a sending-off for questioning a decision of the referee during a match for Becontree Heath School. The Dagenham Schools FA ordered him to apologize in writing to both the referee and themselves. He did so promptly, but it was not to be his last clash with the authorities.

For all such problems, Alf had shown enormous potential. ‘He was easily the best for his age in the area,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was brilliant, absolutely focused on his game. He was taking on seniors when he was still a junior. Everyone in Dagenham who was interested in football knew of Alf because he was virtually an institution as a schoolboy. He was famous as a kid because of his football.’ Jean Bixby’s late husband Tom played with Alf at Becontree Heath: ‘Alf was a very good footballer as a boy. Tom said that he had great control and confidence. He always wanted the ball. He would say to Tom, “Put it over here.”’

Yet Alf’s schoolboy reputation did not lead to any approaches from a League club. He therefore never contemplated trying to become a professional footballer when he left Becontree Heath School in 1934. ‘I was very keen on football but one really didn’t it give much thought. There was no television then, and football was just fun to do,’ he told the Dagenham Post in 1971. Instead, he had to go out and earn a living in Dagenham to help support his family; this was, after all, the depth of the Great Depression in Britain, which spawned mass unemployment, social dislocation and political extremism. Alf first applied for a job at the Ford factory, where wages were much higher than elsewhere. But with dole queues at record levels, competition for work there was intense and he was rejected. Following a family conference about his future, he then decided to enter the retail trade, beginning at the bottom as a delivery boy for the Five Elms Co-operative store in Dagenham. The occupation of a grocer might not be a glamorous one, but at least it was relatively secure. People always needed food, and the phenomenal growth in the population of Dagenham in the 1930s provided a lucrative market for local businesses. In addition, there was a high demand for grocery deliveries in the area, because public transport was poor.

Alf immediately demonstrated his conscientious, frugal nature by giving the great majority of his earnings to the family household. ‘Every day I’d cycle my way around the Dagenham district taking to customers their various needs. My wages were twelve shillings a week. Of this sum, I handed over ten shillings to my mother, put a shilling in the box as savings and kept a shilling for pocket-money,’ he wrote. After several years carrying out these errands, Alf graduated to serving behind the counter at the Co-op shop in Oxlow Lane, only a short distance from his home in Halbutt Street.

He later claimed to be happy in his job, but what he missed was football. For two whole years, he could not play the game at all, since he had to work throughout Saturday and there was no organized soccer in Dagenham on Thursdays, when he had his only free afternoon. But then, in 1936, a kindly shopkeeper by the unfortunate name of Edward Grimme intervened. Grimme had noticed that a large number of talented Dagenham schoolboy footballers were being lost to the game because of their jobs. So he decided to set up a youth team called Five Elms United. Because of his excellent local reputation, Alf was soon asked to join. He had no hesitation in doing so, despite the weekly sixpence subscription, which left him hardly any pocket money. But he did not care. He was once more involved with the game he loved.

Grimme’s Five Elms United held their meetings on Wednesday evenings and played on Sunday mornings in a field at the back of the Merry Fiddlers pub. Playing on the Sabbath was officially banned by the FA in the 1930s. Strictly speaking, after breaking this rule, Alf Ramsey should have been obliged to apply for reinstatement with the Association, once he became a League player, by paying a fee of seven shillings six pence. ‘I was most certainly conscious that Sunday football was illegal then but it presented me with the only opportunity to play competitive football. Technically, I suppose, never having paid the reinstatement fee, I should never have been allowed to play for England or Spurs or Southampton,’ Alf wrote later. So, in effect, the World Cup was won by an ineligible manager.

Playing again at centre-half, Alf showed that none of his ability had disappeared, despite his two-year absence from the game. In fact, he was physically all the more capable because of his growth in height and his regular exercise on the Co-op bicycle. Tommy Sloan, now one of the trustees of the Dagenham Football club, saw Alf play regularly before the war on the Merry Fiddlers ground: ‘It was quite a good pitch there. All the lads played in the usual kit of the time, big shin guards and steel toe caps in their boots. Alf was a very impressive player. He used to tackle strongly, but fairly. He had a very powerful kick, especially at free kicks. He was subdued, never threw his weight about and was a model for any other youngster.’ Alf himself felt he benefited from the demanding nature of those teenage games with Five Elms, ‘I have often looked back upon those matches. Most of them were against older and better teams but we all learnt a good deal from opposing older and more experienced players. They were among the most valuable lessons of my life.’

It is interesting that many of the traits that later defined Alf Ramsey, including his relentless focus on football, his taciturnity and his attempt at social polish, were apparent in his teenage years. For all the poverty of his upbringing in Parrish Cottages, he had nothing like the usual working-class boister-ousness of his contemporaries. George Baker, who grew up near Halbutt Street and later became head of the borough’s recreation department, told me: ‘I was born within two years of Alf and I knew him and his brothers. As a lad, he was not like the locals. He somehow seemed a bit intellectual, a bit distant. He spoke a little bit better than the rest of us. He was pleasant, but he was different.’ Beattie Robbins came to know him in the thirties, because one of her relatives worked with him in the Co-op: ‘I remember him as well spoken, just as he was in later life. He was very nice, but seemed quite shy. I knew him best when he was about 17. He was polite, dignified, a very reserved person. We once went on a coach trip to Clacton with the Five Elms team and he sat quietly on the bus at the front. He did not play around much like some of the others. His life seemed to be just football.’

As he grew older, Alf appeared only too keen to distance himself from his Dagenham roots. The journalist Max Marquis wrote sarcastically in his 1970 biography of Ramsey, ‘There are no indications that Alf is overburdened with nostalgia for his birthplace…in fact the impression is inescapable that he would like to forget all connections with it.’ His Dagenham contemporary Jean Bixby, who worked with Alf’s brother Cyril at Ford, argues: ‘The trouble with Alf Ramsey was that he tried to make himself something that he wasn’t. He went on to mix in different circles and he tried to change himself to fit in with those circles. Yes, even as a child he was slightly different, but he was still ordinary Dagenham. Then he went away and changed. He was not one of the boys anymore. He became conservative, not like the others who all stuck together. He was one apart from them.’

At the heart of this unease, it has often been claimed, was a feeling of embarrassment not just over the poverty of his upbringing, but, more importantly, over the ethnic identity of his family. For Sir Alf Ramsey, knight of the realm and great English patriot, was long said to come from a family of gypsies. This supposed Romany background was reflected in the family’s fondness for the dog track, in the obscure way his father earned his living and in Alf’s own swarthy, dark features. ‘I was always told that he was a gypsy. And when you looked at him, he did look a bit Middle Eastern,’ says his former Tottenham Hotspur colleague Eddie Baily. Alf’s childhood nickname in Dagenham, ‘Darkie Ramsey’, was reportedly another indicator of his gypsy blood. ‘Everyone round here referred to him as “Darkie” and it was to be years later that I found out his name was actually Alf,’ recalled Councillor Fred Tibble. Even today, in multi-racial Britain, there is less tolerance towards gypsies than towards most other ethnic minority groups. And the problems of prejudice would have loomed even larger in the much more homogenous Britain of the pre-war era. In a Channel Four documentary on Sir Alf broadcast in 2002, it was stated authoritatively that ‘Alf had to put up with casual racism. Dagenham locals believed that he came from a gypsy background and so inherited his father’s nickname, Darkie Ramsey.’

There is no doubt that Alf was acutely sensitive about these claims and this may have accounted for some of his habitual reserve. The journalist Nigel Clarke, who knew him better than anyone else did in the press, recalls this incident on tour:

The only time I ever saw Alf really angry was when we were going through Czechoslovakia in 1973 with the England team – in those good old days the press would travel with the team. We were all sitting on the coach as it drove past some Romany caravans. And Bobby Moore piped up, ‘Hey, Alf, there’s some of your relatives over there.’ Alf went absolutely crimson with fury. He would never admit to his Romany background and hated to discuss the subject. He used to say to me, ‘I am just an East End boy from humble means.’ But it was always accepted in the football world that he was a gypsy.

The rumours might have been widely accepted but that did not make them true. Without putting Sir Alf’s DNA through some Hitlerian biological racial profile, it is of course impossible to be certain about his ethnic origins. Indeed, the whole question could be dismissed as a distasteful irrelevance were it not for the fact that the charge of being a gypsy seems to have played some part both in Alf’s desire to escape his background and in the whispers against him within the football establishment. Again, Nigel Clarke believes that the issue may have influenced some snobbish elements in the FA against him: ‘Alf had a terrible relationship with Professor Sir Harold Thompson. An Oxford don like that could not stand being lectured by an old Romany like Alf. That’s when he began to move to get his power back and remove Alf’s influence.’

Yet it is likely that much of the talk about Alf’s gypsy connections has been wildly exaggerated, even invented, while the eagerness to turn a childhood nickname into a badge of racial identity seems to have been based on a fundamental error. According to those who actually lived near him, Alf was called ‘Darkie’ simply because of the colour of his thick, glossy black hair. In the 1920s in the south of England, ‘Darkie’ was a common moniker for boys with that hair type. ‘The Ramseys were definitely not of gypsy stock,’ says Alf’s former neighbour Pauline Gosling. ‘That is where that TV documentary got it wrong. I used to call him ‘Uncle Darkie’. Alf got his nickname at school, only because he had very dark hair as a young child. It was nothing at all to do with being a gypsy. I know that for a fact.’ Jean Bixby is of the same view: ‘His brother Cyril and I worked in the office at Fords and he was a quiet, decent chap. I have heard it said that Alf was a gipsy, but to know Cyril, I could not believe it. Cyril did not seem to be from gypsy stock at all.’ Nor did the family’s ownership and farming of the same plot of land in Dagenham for several generations match the usual pattern for travelling people moving from one area to another. In fact, some of the land used for the building of the Becontree Estate around Halbutt Street had originally been owned by Alf’s grandfather and was sold to the council. As Stan Clements, who played with Alf at Southampton in the 1940s, argues. ‘I never thought Alf was a gypsy. I cannot see that at all. When I first met him, his entire appearance was immaculate. And gypsies don’t own land for generations.’ Alf’s widow denied that he was gypsy. ‘That wasn’t true. I don’t know where that came from,’ Lady Victoria has told friends. And Alf himself, when asked about his origins in a BBC interview, snapped, ‘I come from good stock. I have nothing to be ashamed of.’

Yet, despite this protestation, there always lurked within Alf a sense of distaste about his Dagenham upbringing. He went out of his way to avoid the subject and seemed to resent any mention of it. Terry Venables, who also grew up in Dagenham and later was one of Alf’s successors as England manager, experienced this when he was selected for the national side in 1964, as he recalled in his book Football Heroes:

When Alf called me into the England set-up, my dad said to me, ‘Tell him I used to work with Sid down the docks. He was Alf’s neighbour and he’ll remember him.’ It sounded reasonable at the time. Now picture the scene when I turned up for my first senior England squad get-together. For a start, I was in genuine awe of Alf, who came over and shook my hand. ‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘Fine, thank you very much,’ I replied. ‘By the way, my dad says do you remember Sid? He was your next-door neighbour in Dagenham.’ Had I cracked Alf over the head with a baseball bat he could not have looked more gob-smacked. He stared at me for what seemed like a long, long time. He didn’t utter a single word of reply; he simply came out with a sound which if translated into words would have probably read something like, ‘you must be joking’. He must have seen I was embarrassed by this but he certainly did not make it easy for me.

Ted Phillips, the Ipswich striker of Alf’s era, recalls a similar incident when travelling with Alf through London:

We were on the underground, going to catch a train to an away game. And this bloke came up to Alf:

‘Allo boysie, how you getting on?’ He was a real ole cockney. Alf completely ignored him, and the bloke looked a bit offended.

‘I went to bloody school with you. Still on the greyhounds, are ya?’ Alf still said nothing.

When we arrived at Paddington, we got off the tube and were walking through the station when I said to Alf:

‘So who was that then?’

And he replied in that voice of his, ‘I have never seen him before in my life.’

It was the change in Alf’s voice that most graphically reflected his journey away from Dagenham. Terry Venables, like several other footballers from the same area, including Jimmy Greaves and Bobby Moore, always retained the accent of his youth. But Alf dropped his, developing in its place a kind of strangulated parody of a minor public-school housemaster. The new intonation was never convincing, partly because Alf was a shy man, who was without natural articulacy and could be painfully self-conscious in public, and partly because his limited education meant that he lacked a wide vocabulary and a mastery of syntax. Hugh McIlvanney says:

Alf made it hard for some of us to like him because of the shame he seemed to feel about his background. We all understand there can be pressures in those areas but the voice was nothing short of ludicrous. There were some words he could not pronounce and the grammar kept going for a walk. That could be a problem for any human being but, for Alf, it almost became a caricature.

In his gauche attempts to sound authoritative, particularly in front of the cameras or the microphone, Alf would become stilted and awkward, littering statements with platitudes and empty qualifying sub-clauses. One extreme example of this occurred when he was being interviewed on BBC Radio in the early sixties:

‘Are you parents still alive, Mr Ramsey?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘In Dagenham, I believe.’

In his 1970 biography, when Ramsey was still England manager, Max Marquis gave a vivid description of Alf’s style. Describing his language as ‘obscure and tautological’, Marquis said that Ramsey

is unable to communicate with any precision what he means because he will never use a single-syllable word when an inappropriate two-syllable word will do and he dots his phrases with some strange, meaningless interjections…His tangled prose, allied with his capacity for self-persuasion, has made for some of his quite baffling pronouncements. In public he lets words go reluctantly through a tightly controlled mouth: his eyes move uneasily.

Because Ramsey never felt in command of his language, he could vary wildly between triteness and controversy. He could be absurdly unemotional, as when Ipswich won the League title in 1962, perhaps the most astonishing and romantic feat in the history of English club football.

‘How do you feel, Mr Ramsey?’ said a breathless BBC reporter, having described him as ‘the architect of this miracle’.

‘I feel fine,’ replied Ramsey, as if he had done nothing more than pour himself a cup of tea.

Yet this was also the man who created a rod for his own back through a series of inflammatory statements, like his notorious description of the 1966 Argentinian team as ‘animals’ or his claim in 1970 that English football had ‘nothing to learn’ from the Brazilians. As Max Marquis put it, ‘Ramsey is like a bad gunner who shoots over or short of the target.’

A serious-minded youth, always striving for some kind of respectability, Alf did not have as strong a working-class accent as some of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his speech could not help but be influenced by his surroundings. ‘Dagenham had its own special brogue, and Alf spoke with that,’ says Phil Cairns, ‘It was a sort of bastardized cockney. He certainly had that accent as a child. I did notice how his voice changed when he got on in life. It was so obvious. When he had a long conversation, you would hear that he made faux pas.’ Eddie Baily, who was Alf’s closest friend at Spurs, told me of the difference he saw in Alf once he had gone into management with Ipswich Town:

He was cockney to me but I noticed his voice changed after he left Tottenham. When I saw him after that, his voice was refined. I would say to him, ‘What are you doing? Where did all this come from? You’re speaking very well, my old soldier.’ He would just laugh at that. I could always have a go at him. But I think the position that he took made him want to be a little bit better when he had to do negotiations and all that.

It has always been alleged that this distinct change in Alf Ramsey’s voice was as a result of his taking elocution lessons in the mid-fifties. Indeed, the idea of Alf’s elocution lessons has become more than just part of football folklore: it is now treated as a fact. Both Ramsey’s previous biographers, Max Marquis and Dave Bowler, state without any reservation that he underwent such instruction. The late John Eastwood, who wrote a massively authoritative history of Ipswich football, reported that ‘it was well known that Alf took himself off for the two-hour elocution lessons to a woman at the ballroom dancing school near Barrack Corner in Ipswich’. Another, far less believable, version has been put forward by Rodney Marsh, the charismatic striker of the seventies and later Sky TV presenter, who has claimed that Ramsey took ‘elocution lessons, paid for by the FA, around the time of the World Cup in 1966’. Anyone who knew about either the parsimony of the FA or Alf’s contempt for the Association’s councillors would know that this assertion was nonsense.

Yet the absurdity of Marsh’s statement only exposes the weakness of the conventional wisdom that Alf underwent elocution training. The fact is that ever since his youth, Alf was on a mission to improve himself – and a key element of that was to change his speaking voice, adopting the received pronunciation he heard from BBC broadcasters on the wireless, from officers in the army and from directors at League clubs. There was nothing reprehensible about this. Before the mid-sixties, working-class boys of ambition were encouraged to believe that retaining their accents could be a barrier to progress in their careers. Edward Heath, the son of a Broad-stairs carpenter, adopted the elevated tones of Oxford before embarking on his rise to the top of the Conservative party.

With Alf there was no sudden dramatic switch in his voice from ‘Cor Blimey’ Dagenham to his imitation of the plummy vowels of the establishment; rather it was a gradual process, beginning in his teenage years and climaxing when he became manager of Ipswich. Over a long period his accent, never the strongest, grew milder until it was subsumed within his precise, artificial style of speech. From his earliest years as a professional footballer in the 1940s, Alf was seeking to improve himself in manner and appearance.

Stan Clements, who was training to become a civil engineer when he knew Alf at Southampton and was therefore more socially perceptive than most footballers of the time, says:

I always thought all those stories about his having elocution lessons were a load of old codswallop. His voice had a slight accent but it was controlled. It was not cockney but Essex. I would have said that when he was in the army and became a sergeant – and in those days there was a big difference in class between non-commissioned staff and the officers – he would have got to know the officers and there is no doubt that this influenced his speech.

Other Southampton contemporaries of the 1940s back up Clements. Pat Millward, whose husband Doug played for the Saints and then under Alf at Ipswich, recalls: ‘Alf always spoke very nicely, even at Southampton. He did not use slang much, unlike the others. I’m sure he never had elocution lessons.’ Eric Day, who played up front for the Saints, agrees: ‘He was so taciturn, self-effacing. He always spoke in that very clipped sort of way. He thought his words out before he spoke them.’ Mary Bates, who worked at the Southampton FC office during Alf’s time, makes this interesting point: ‘Even during his time at Southampton, his voice changed, not noticeably at first but certainly there was a difference. If I look back from 1949 to 1945, there was a marked change.’

The same story can be told when he went to Tottenham Hotspur, where again he was no loud-mouth shouting the odds in a broad vernacular. ‘He sounded as if he came from the country. He spoke very slowly with a rural twinge in his accent, a sort of country brogue. It was the same as you would find in people from Norwich, a burr,’ remembers Denis Uphill. Equally revealing is the memory of Ed Speight, who himself was born in Dagenham and joined Tottenham in 1954: ‘He was a gentleman. He always spoke very quietly; rarely did I hear him swear. When he spoke, the top lip did not move. It was all from the lower mouth. Very clipped, staccato stuff.’ Tony Marchi, who was another young player at Spurs in the early fifties, goes so far as to say that, in his memory, ‘Alf had much the same voice when he was at Spurs as when he became England manager. It never really altered.’

The reality was that, by the early fifties, Ramsey was already beginning to demonstrate those concise, somewhat convoluted tones which were to become so much a part of his public character. Through listening to the radio and reading improving texts, he sought to acquire a more refined voice. In 1952, when he was still at Spurs, he had written about his lifestyle in Talking Football:

In the evening I usually have a long read for, like Billy Wright, I have found that serious reading has helped me develop a command of words so essential when you suddenly find yourself called upon to make a speech. People, remember, are inclined to forget that speechmaking may not be your strong point. With this in mind, I always try hard to put up some sort of show when asked to say a few words.

Even the keenest advocate of the Victorian philosophy of self-help could not have put it better. And by the time he reached Ipswich in 1955, his voice only required a more few coats of varnish, not an entire rebuild. It seems likely that the varnish was provided, not by elocution lessons, but by more self-improvement allied to his connection to the most aristocratic boardroom in the country, whose number included a baronet and a nephew of the Tory Prime Minister.

Though some did not believe him, Alf was always adamant that he had not undergone any course in elocution. He stated in that Mirror article of 1970:

I must emphasize that I am not a cockney. I make the point because I have been accused of taking elocution lessons. And told that it is to my credit that I had taken them. The truth is that I have not had elocution lessons. I wish I had. They might have been a help to me. All this business, however, is not important to me. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. I’m proud of my family, my parents and of all that has happened to me in my life.

As Alf indirectly admitted there, if he had really taken such lessons, it is improbable that he would have found communication so difficult. Nigel Clarke says:

I once pulled his leg about the rumour of his so-called elocution lessons, and he bristled and said, ‘That is absolutely not true.’ He then explained that he used to listen to the BBC radio announcers and modulated his tones to match theirs. I am sure that is true. I mean Alf would not even have known what the word elocution meant.




TWO The Dell (#ulink_b86ed921-89b0-5dec-a53c-32191fad0eaf)


A local government study of Dagenham in 1938 described the local population thus:

Many are rough diamonds, but still diamonds. There is a general readiness to help each other when in trouble, a readiness to support various causes (but only after protracted and heated argument), an appreciation of good music, the usual fondness for Picture Palaces and an undue attachment to the Dance hall.

Eighteen-year-old Alf Ramsey could not easily have been described as a Dagenham ‘rough diamond’. He showed no interest in dancing, was shy with women despite his dark good looks, had few musical tastes and avoided arguments except when they involved football. He had, however, developed an enthusiasm for the movies, one that was to stay with him all his life and would cause much amusement to the players under his management. He saw his first film when he was fourteen, a jungle adventure with Amercian B-movie star Jack Holt in the leading role. Alf soon had acquired a particular fondness for westerns, which so often revolved around the theme of a tight-lipped heroic outsider triumphing over the natives, the bad guys or the corrupt authorities.

But his first love remained football. During the 1937-38 season, he was playing better than ever at centre-half with Five Elms United, as he recorded himself: ‘Since leaving school I had developed into quite a hefty lad, and in my heart I knew I had improved my football.’ His exploits in the Five Elms defence brought him to the attention of Portsmouth, one of the country’s senior League clubs. He and two other Five Elms players were approached by experienced scout Ned Liddell, who was for a time manager of Brentford, and asked if they might be interested in signing for Portsmouth as amateurs. Before this, claimed Alf, the thought of becoming a League player ‘had never entered my mind. After all, I was too modest to think I was anything much as a footballer. I just played the game for fun and the exercise that went with it.’

For a young man obsessed with the game, the chance to play at the highest level was a glittering prospect. But he hesitated for a moment. Apart from some natural uncertainty about his ability, Alf was also worried about the financial insecurity of life in League football. After all, hundreds of youths were taken on every year by the 88 League clubs but very few of them made a decent living. Alf already had a secure job in the Co-op store in Oxlow Lane near his home; by 1938 he had graduated from delivery boy to counter hand and bill collector, the latter a role which required a certain amount of toughness. ‘Going out to collect the bills occupied Monday morning as far as I was concerned. There were no embarrassing moments when collecting money. People either paid or they didn’t, but in the main they paid.’

But when Alf met Ned Liddell again, he was assured that there would be no problem about keeping his Co-op job if he signed as an amateur. Moreover, Alf’s family were not opposed to the idea. ‘Well, son, it’s up to you,’ said his mother. So Alf, now relishing the thought of joining a top club, filled in the forms and sent them off to Fratton Park, Portsmouth’s ground. He waited eagerly for a reply. None came: not a letter, a card, a telegram, a word from Ned Liddell. The weeks passed in silence until Alf gave up hope. ‘No one, it seemed, was interested in young Ramsey of Dagenham,’ he wrote later.

Portsmouth’s gross discourtesy was a seminal experience for Alf. It left him with a profound distrust of the men running football, the club directors and officials who treated players with such haughty contempt and undermined careers with barely a thought. He came to share the view of Harry Storer, the hard-nosed Derby County manager who once questioned the right of a certain director to be an FA selector. Having been told that this director had been watching the game for 50 years, Storer replied: ‘We’ve got a corner flag at the Baseball Ground. It’s been there for 50 years and still knows nothing about the game.’ As Stanley Matthews, who suffered from the administrators’ arrogance as much as anyone, ruefully commented: ‘Players were treated as second-class citizens. Football was a skill of the working class but those who ran our game were anything but.’ Portsmouth’s rudeness ensured that Alf, when he became a manager, never acted in such a cavalier manner; his concern for the well-being of professionals was one of the reasons he always inspired such loyalty.

Ignored by Portsmouth, Alf carried on working at the Oxlow Lane Co-op for the next two years, playing football in the winter, cricket in the summer. Nigel Clarke recalls:

I happened to mention to him one day that my son loved cricket. The next time we met at Liverpool Street station he turned up with a bat. It was a 1938 Gunn and Moore triple-spring, marked with the initials of his club, The General Co-operative Sports and Social Club. Alf said to me, ‘Make sure he uses it well. This one made plenty of runs for me.’

He also occasionally went with his brothers to League matches at Upton Park; the first ever match he saw was West Ham against Arsenal, during which he was particularly impressed with the Gunners’ deep-lying centre-forward and play-maker Alex James, ‘a chunky little fellow in long shorts’.

As with millions of other Britons, the quiet routine of Alf’s provincial life was shattered with the arrival of the Second World War. In June 1940, ten months after the outbreak of hostilities, Alf was called up for service in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and was despatched to a training unit in Truro. It is a reflection of the narrowness of Alf’s upbringing that he looked on his first journey to Cornwall with excitement rather than trepidation. Taking ‘so famous a train as the Cornish Riviera was in itself a memorable experience for me. As a matter of interest, until I travelled to Cornwall, the longest journey I had undertaken was a trip to Brighton by train,’ he wrote. The thrill continued when he arrived in Truro and was billeted in a top-class hotel, which had been commandeered by the army. ‘This proved another memorable moment for me. It was the first time I had ever been into a hotel! Even with us sleeping twelve to a room on straw mattresses could not end for me the awe of living in a swagger hotel.’

Throughout his life Alf frequently appeared to be a naïve, other-worldly character, oblivious to political considerations, and that was certainly true of his delight at his surroundings in Cornwall. At the very time Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for its survival as a nation, Alf was writing to his parents about the joy of ‘living in a luxury hotel’. Yet that set the tone for Alf’s war. He was luckier than most soldiers, spending all his years of active service up to VE Day on home soil. Never did he have to endure any of the brutal theatres of conflict like North Africa, Italy or Normandy. Attached to the 6th battalion of his regiment, his duties were in home defence, ‘guarding facilities, manning road blocks, and preparing against German paratroop drops,’ says Roy Prince, the archivist of the Duke of Cornwall’s Regimental Association. In retrospect, it was not dangerous work, though it was demanding, as Alf recalled: ‘The physical training we were so frequently given added inches to my height, broadened my chest and in general I became a fitter young fellow than when I reported for duty as a grocery apprentice from Dagenham.’

Unlike so many whose lives were ruined by the genocidal conflict of the Second World War, Alf found military service almost wholly beneficial. It brought him out of his shell, and helped demonstrate his innate qualities of leadership. In 1952 he wrote:

I have since reflected that to join the Army was one of the greatest things which ever happened to me. From my, to some extent, sheltered life, I was pitchforked into the company of many older and more experienced men. I learnt, in a few weeks, more about life in general than I had picked up in years at home. The Army, in short, proved a wonderful education.

The aura of authority that Alf always possessed – which had seen him become captain of his school’s team at the age of just nine – led to his promotion to the rank of Quarter-Master Sergeant in an anti-aircraft unit. Nigel Clarke has this memory of talking to Alf about his army service:

He told me that he absolutely loved it and that his greatest times of all were down on the Helford River in Cornwall. It was in the army, he said to me, that he first really learned about discipline and about being in charge of people, taking command and giving orders. He used to say, ‘I have never been very good at mixing with people but you have to in the army or else you are in trouble.’

The greatest benefit of all was that it enabled Alf to play more football than he had ever done previously – and at a higher class. Within a few months of arriving in Cornwall, he had been transferred to help man the beach defences at St Austell; there he became part of the local battalion team, captaining the side and playing at either centre-half or centre-forward. He was then moved to various other camps along the south coast before reaching Barton Stacey in Hampshire in 1943, where he was fortunate to come under the benign influence of Colonel Fletcher, a football obsessive who had played for the Army. Because of the war, several League professionals were in Alf’s battalion side, including Len Townsend of Brentford and Cyril Hodges of Arsenal. Impressed by such strength, Southampton invited the battalion to visit the Dell for a preseason game on the 21 August 1943. The result was a disaster for Ramsey’s men, as they were thrashed 10-3. ‘The soldiers are a very useful battalion team but they had not the experience to withstand the more forceful play of the Saints,’ reported the Southern Daily Echo. It was Alf’s first experience of playing against top-flight players and he found it something of a shock. ‘At centre-half I was often bewildered by the speed of thought and movement shown by the professionals we opposed.’ Despite the depressing scoreline, Ramsey’s men had shown some promise, for a week later they were invited back to the Dell to play against Southampton Reserves. This time Sergeant Ramsey’s side provided much more effective opposition, winning 4-1.

Ramsey’s performances in these two games had aroused the interest of Southampton. More than a month later he was summoned to Colonel Fletcher’s office. Initially believing that he had committed some military office, Ramsey feared he was about to be reprimanded.

‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ said Colonel Fletcher when Ramsey arrived in his office. Alf was at once relieved, knowing that the Colonel would hardly have been so friendly if he was about to punish him. ‘I have just had a telephone call from Southampton Football Club,’ continued the Colonel. ‘Apparently they are short of a centre-half for their first team tomorrow and would like you to play for them. Well, Sergeant, how do you feel about the idea?’

Ever cautious and modest, Alf then muttered something about his ‘lack of experience’. Colonel Fletcher had little truck with such diffidence. ‘This is a big opportunity, Ramsey,’ he said, looking hard at the raven-haired sergeant. ‘I suppose you have at some time or another considered becoming a professional footballer.’ Alf, ignoring his abortive connection with Portsmouth, claimed untruthfully that he had ‘never given it a thought’. But he assured the Colonel that he was ‘prepared to give it a try’. Without another word, Fletcher was back on the phone to Southampton, reporting that Sergeant Ramsey was available for the match against Luton Town at Kenilworth Road. Alf admitted that, once he left the Colonel’s office, he ‘did a little tap-dance with delight. Even the orderly sitting behind a small desk forgot that I was a sergeant and joined in the laughter’.

Alf was instructed to report at Southampton Central railway station the following morning before the train journey to Bedfordshire. When he turned up that Saturday morning, 9 October 1943, he was met by the elderly, bespectacled secretary-manager of Southampton, Jack Sarjantson, a figure rare in the annals of League history for both the longevity and the range of service to his club. He had been appointed a Southampton director as early as 1914, had become club chairman in 1936, then resigned during the war to act as secretary-manager, before returning to the boardroom to serve as chairman and later vice-president in the 1950s. For all his advanced years, he was also something of a ladies’ man, who, in the words of the Southampton historian David Bull, ‘had a way of flirting with the young wives and girlfriends at the club’s social functions’.

After introducing Alf to the other Southampton players, Sarjantson then asked Alf about his expenses. According to his 1952 autobiography, Alf told his manager that his only claim was for his ‘twopenny halfpenny tram fare from my billet’. In response, Sarjantson ‘dived into pocket’ and pulled out the exact amount. But later, in 1970, Alf gave a much more convincing version, one that reflects the flexible attitude of clubs towards expenses in the days of the maximum wage:

I told Mr Sarjantson that since we were stationed in Southampton I did not have any expenses. He said, ‘Well, if I give you thirty bob is that enough to pay for your taxi fare?’ I said it was more than enough. It was the first time anyone had given me any money for playing.

Alf was equally flexible about his age. In his 1952 book he claimed that when he played against Luton, ‘I had just reached the age of twenty-two’. In fact, he was only three months away from his 24th birthday.

Having sorted out Alf’s expenses so generously, Sarjantson then produced a set of forms for him to sign as an amateur. After his last experience with Portsmouth, this time Alf was only too glad to know that his signature would definitely be followed by a match. ‘As the London-bound train swished through Eastleigh station, I signed for Southampton Football club,’ recorded Alf. On the train up to Luton, he sat beside the Saints inside-forward Ted Bates, later to be manager at the Dell, and who, like Alf, had been a grocery delivery boy in his teens and whose wife Mary was soon to become the first female assistant secretary in League football. ‘Throughout the journey, he told me what I could expect from football: the kind of teams we would be meeting and other little facts which meant a great deal to a new recruit,’ wrote Alf. His first appearance for the Saints was a tight match, one that left him disappointed with his own performance, which he felt was far below the standard of the rest of the side. Ten minutes from the end, Southampton were winning 2-1, when Alf gave away a penalty. ‘I remember tackling someone rather hard,’ he said in 1970. Luton scored from the spot and Alf sensed that ‘several of my colleagues were giving me black looks’. Fortunately Don Roper restored the lead for Southampton soon afterwards, so Alf’s first outing resulted in victory. And he had perhaps been too hard on himself: the view of the Southern Daily Echo was that ‘the defence as a whole functioned satisfactorily’.

They did far worse in their next game, when Southampton were beaten 7-1 by Queen’s Park Rangers in the League South, the makeshift wartime replacement for the Football League. ‘Ramsey at centre-half rarely countered the combined skill of the opposing centre-forwards,’ said the local press. But Sarjantson, with stretched wartime resources, did not drop the faltering defender immediately. Alf played three more League South games in that 1943-44 season before being posted with his battalion to County Durham. Despite his mixed fortunes, he had enjoyed his brief spell with the club. ‘What fascinated me was meeting the players, sitting with them, having lunch on the train, talking football. All very interesting. It left a great impression on me, and probably started my ambition to become a professional footballer,’ he wrote in 1970.

Yet Alf, with such limited experience, was still plagued by lack of belief in his own ability and worries about finance. It is striking that when he was stationed in Durham, he played little senior competitive football. He turned out for his battalion in one match at Roker Park against Sunderland, but failed to do enough to persuade Sunderland’s manager, Bill Murray, to invite him to play in any wartime games, even though the relaxed registration rules of the period allowed a soldier to guest for almost any club he wanted – one reason why the garrison town of Aldershot was packed with star servicemen like Tommy Lawton. And when Alf was posted back to Southampton at the beginning of the 1944-45 season and performed well in a trial match, he once more hesitated about becoming a professional after Sarjantson had offered him a contract with Southampton, earning £2 per match. Alf was never one to make swift decisions. He told Sarjantson, with a touch of boldness that masked his inner doubts: ‘Although I’ve played in professional football as an amateur, I know practically nothing about it. And what if I don’t like the club?’ Sarjantson replied that if Alf wanted to leave the club at the end of the season, Southampton would not stand in his way. Having received that assurance, Alf agreed to sign. He was finally a professional footballer

Just before the start of the 1944-45 season, Alf picked up an injury, playing for his battalion against – ironically – Southampton. It was therefore not until Christmas that he had his first game as a professional. And it could have hardly been a bigger fixture, as Arsenal took on Southampton at White Hart Lane, Highbury having been badly bombed. Facing the legendary centre-forward Ted Drake, Alf had the best game of his career to date. He admitted he was a ‘little overawed’ at the start, but, according to the Southern Daily Echo, ‘Ramsey, stocky and perhaps an inch shorter than Drake, did much that pleased, although the Arsenal leader scored two goals.’ Ramsey, for the first time, had proved that he could make it at the highest level; his confidence soared as a result. And it went up even further when, as a result of injuries to other players, he was switched from centre-half to inside-left. When Southampton beat Luton 12-3 in March 1945, the second highest score in the club’s history, Alf scored four times, with the Echo commenting that ‘he can certainly hammer a ball’.

Altogether Alf made 11 League South appearances that season. At its close, Sarjantson asked him to sign again for the club. Alf agreed to do so, but 1945-46 turned out to be a frustrating season, as he made little real advance on the previous year. He played just 13 of the 42 League South matches, and was frequently asked to play up front as centre-forward, not his favourite position because of his lack of speed. ‘I was nothing else than a stop-gap and was happier playing at centre-half. ’ But his natural football ability shone through wherever he played, in the front line or in defence. He scored a hat-trick in a 6-2 win over Newport and was lethal in two successive games against Plymouth. The writer and Southampton fan Bob Holley has left this account of Ramsey as a dashing striker, scoring twice in a 5-5 draw at the Dell in August 1945, delighting Saints fans in the painful aftermath of the war:

It is difficult now to picture how drab everything was in the summer of 1945, the bombsites, the shortages, clothes ‘on points’ and food rationing still in force, and how deprived we all felt of professional sport. Small wonder that, in the first post-war season, so many fans crammed through the turnstiles each Saturday despite the fact that there were only two makeshift Leagues – the pre-war First and Second Division clubs divided geographically, north and south.

Turning to the game against Plymouth, he wrote that it

left us breathless and excited and not particularly bothered that we had dropped a point. Their centre-forward scored a hat-trick. Our centre-forward, however, had bagged two. He was a tearaway sort of player, shirt sleeves flapping, hair all over the place, not particularly skilful as I remember but able to ‘put himself about’ as centre-forwards were expected to do in those days. His name? Ramsey, Alf Ramsey – or ‘Ramsay’ as the programme for this game, and indeed many thereafter incorrectly put it.

The biggest cause of frustration, however, was not programme misspellings or positional changes, but the fact that in December 1945, when most of Britain was trying to return to peacetime normality, Sergeant Ramsey was shipped off to Palestine by the War Office. He was there for six months, and once again his gift for football leadership quickly emerged, as he was asked to captain a Palestine Services XI, a team which contained such distinguished players as Arthur Rowley, who scored more goals in League football than any other player, and Jimmy Mason, the brilliant Scottish inside-right. On his return home in June 1946, Alf found a letter from the new Southampton manager, Bill Dodgin, the former Saints captain who had taken over from Sarjantson at the end of the war. Dodgin told Ramsey that he wanted to meet to discuss the terms of a new contact. At the same time, the Dagenham Co-op were offering Alf a return to his old job behind the counter. It may now seem absurd that Alf could have even been tempted by this latter offer, yet, as he admitted himself, a sense of vulnerability ran through his blood. ‘What folk forget to mention,’ he told his mother, ‘are the failures. Football is not as easy as some would have you think. Anyway, I’m not convinced that I am good enough to earn my living at the game.’

Alf agreed to meet Dodgin in a sandwich bar at Waterloo, just the sort of mundane venue with which he was most comfortable throughout his life. Dodgin told Ramsey that they were prepared to pay him the weekly sum of £4 in the summer, £6 in the season, and £7 if he got into the League. With his characteristic mix of self-confidence and wariness, Alf told the Southampton manager that the offer was not good enough. ‘I wanted to start a career in football – but not on £4 a week,’ he explained later. It is a measure of Alf’s importance to the club that his strategy worked. He was invited down to the Dell and offered enhanced terms: £6 in the summer, £7 in winter and £8 if he got into the League side. This time he accepted.

But immediately after he signed, his concerns about money again came to the surface. Because in the summer of 1946 he was still officially in the armed forces, awaiting demobilization, Alf did not receive the £10 signing-on fee to which professionals would normally be entitled in peacetime. In his 1952 book, Talking Football, Alf claimed, ‘That did not matter.’ The reality was very different. Alf was actually furious at missing out on his £10. Mary Bates, who had taken up her position as Southampton’s Assistant Secretary in August 1945 after working for the Labour Party in Clement Attlee’s landslide general election victory, has this recollection:

£10 was quite a lot at that time. And this day he came to sign as a professional. When he arrived in the office he was in his infantry gear.

‘What are you doing in your uniform?’

‘I haven’t quite left the army yet.’

‘Well, until you do, I can’t pay your signing on fee. You’ll have to wait until you’re demobbed before I can officially sign you on. Those are my instructions.’

He nearly went beserk at those words. He was so upset. He had obviously been expecting the money. It was very unlike Alf, who was normally so calm. He was usually very nice, gentlemanly. But he did almost lose his temper on this occasion. He was usually very pleasant, but he was not very pleasant about losing his £10.

After seven years of disruption, the Football League officially resumed in August 1946. But, after all the drawn-out negotiations over Alf’s contract, it was hardly a glorious return to professional football for him. Still unclear about his correct position, he began the season in the reserves. In the autumn, however, coach Bill Dodgin and trainer Syd Cann made a crucial move, one that was to completely change Alf’s playing career. Sensing that Alf was uncomfortable at both centre-forward and centre-half, they suggested that he moved to right-back. It was exactly the right place for Alf, one that exploited his ability to read the game, to judge the correct moment for intervention and to make the telling pass.

Though he had been a fine footballer in his youth, he had never been blessed with the sort of exceptional natural talent which defines true greatness. After all, he had never fulfilled his ambition to play for London Schoolboys; nor had any League club shown any serious interest in him before the war; and his performances with Southampton since 1943 had been inconsistent. His prowess on the field had lain more in his mental strengths: his coolness under pressure, the respect from other players and his gift of anticipation. Now, with a characteristic spirit of determination, Alf set about moulding himself for his new role at full-back. He sought to improve his technique with long hours of practice on the training ground, working particularly on the accuracy and power of his kicks. He raised his fitness levels, not just by training in the gym, but also by taking long walks through the Southampton countryside. Above all, he strove to develop a new tactical awareness. Fortunately for Alf, the trainer at Southampton, Syd Cann, had been a full-back with Torquay United, Manchester City and Charlton, and was therefore able to pass on the lessons of his experience through practice sessions and numerous talks over a replica-scale pitch – measuring one inch to the yard – in the dressing-room at the Dell. The master and pupil developed a close relationship, as Cann later recalled in a BBC interview:

My first memories of Alf were as a centre-forward. He played several times there in the reserves, not too successfully, and I felt that perhaps he had better qualities to play as a full-back. And after discussions with the manager Bill Dodgin, we decided to try him in this position. We spent a lot of time in discussions, Alf and I. He was a very keen student. He wanted to learn about the game from top to bottom. We had a football field painted on the floor of the dressing-room at Southampton and Alf came back regularly in the afternoons, spending hours discussing techniques and tactics. I have never known anyone with the same sort of application, with the same quickness of learning as Alf Ramsey. He would never accept anything on its face value. He had to argue about it and make up his own mind. And once he had made up his mind that this was right, it was put into his game immediately. I spent hours on the weaknesses and strengths of his play. He accepted, for instance, that he was inclined to be weak on the turn on and in recovery. So we worked on that so he became quicker in recovery. Very rarely was he caught out. He was the type of player who was a manager’s dream because you could talk about a decision and he would accept it and there it was, in his game.

Ramsey’s diligence soon had its reward. On 26 October 1946 Alf was selected for Southampton’s Division Two game at home to Plymouth, after the regular right-back Bill Ellerington had picked up an injury. Eight years after that fruitless approach from Portsmouth, Ramsey was finally about to play League football, and he was understandably nervous. When Saturday afternoon arrived, however, he was helped by the reassuring words of his fellow full-back and Saints captain Bill Rochford: ‘You’re not to worry out there. That’s my job. It’s another of my jobs to put you right, so always look to me for any guidance.’ That encouragement was very different to the ridicule often accorded to debutants. But then Rochford was very different to the cynical old pro more worried about his own place than the fortunes of the side. Uncompromising, passionate, selfless, he was hugely admired by his fellow Southampton players. ‘He was the Rock of Gibraltar,’ says Eric Day. Bill Ellerington, Alf’s rival for the right-back position, reflects:

Bill Rochford was my mentor. We called him Rocky. He was a good captain. It’s easy to be a good captain when you’re winning. But when the chips were down, Bill was great at keeping us going. He could tear you off a few strips. Once against Bradford we were winning 3-0 with only about ten minutes to go and I flicked the ball nonchalantly back to the keeper and it went out for a corner. 3-1. Then they had a free kick. 3-2. We managed to win with that score but afterwards Bill tore me to shreds for being casual. He was right.

Rochford’s guidance helped Alf through his first game, as Southampton won easily. ‘Steady Alf, I’m just behind you,’ the captain would shout during the game. But Alf quickly recognized how deep was the gulf between the League and the type of soccer he had previously experienced. Alf wrote in Talking Football:

It dawned on me how little about football I know. Everybody on the field moved – and above all else thought – considerably quicker than did I. Their reactions to moves were so speedy they had completed a pass, for instance, while I was still thinking things over.

After one more game in the first team, Alf was sent back to the reserves once Bill Ellerington had recovered.

It was inevitable that Alf should find it a struggle at first to cope. The only answer was yet more practice, learning to develop a new mastery of the ball and a more sophisticated approach. Again, he was indebted to the influence of his captain Bill Rochford:

Playing alongside him made me realize that there was considerably more to defending than just punting the ball clear, as had become my custom. During a match I made a mental note of how Rocky used the ball; the manner in which he tried to find a colleague with his clearances; the confidence he always displayed when kicking the ball at varied heights and angles.

The great difficulty for Alf was that, no matter how much he improved his game, his path back to the first team was blocked by Bill Ellerington, who was one of the best full-backs in the country and would, like Alf, win England honours in that position. ‘Bill was a great tackler and a terrific kicker of the ball. He could kick from one corner flag to the opposite corner, diagonally, a good one hundred yards – and that was with one of those big heavy old balls,’ says Ted Ballard, another Southampton defender of the era.

Alf managed to play a few more first-team games that year but his big break game in January 1947, in rather unfortunate circumstances for Bill Ellerington. That winter was the bitterest of the 20th century. Week upon week of heavy snow hampered industry, disrupted public transport and so seriously threatened coal supplies that the Attlee government was plunged into crisis. More than two million men were put out of work because of the freeze, while severe restrictions were placed on the use of newsprint. Football, too, was in crisis. In the Arctic conditions, 140 matches had to be postponed. In the games that went ahead, the lines on the icy pitches often had to be marked in red to make them clear. Such was the public frustration at the lack of football that when Portsmouth managed to melt the snow at Fratton Park using a revolutionary steam jet, the club was rewarded with a crowd of 11,500 for a reserve fixture.

The freeze also had a direct effect on Alf’s career. Towards the end of January, Southampton went to the north-east resort of Whitley Bay, in preparation for a third-round FA Cup tie against Newcastle. Alf, as so often at this time, was a travelling reserve. One afternoon, the senior players went out golfing. In the cold weather, most of them wore thick polo-neck jerseys – except Bill Ellerington, who braved the course in an open-neck pullover. That night ‘Big Ellie’ felt terrible; he woke up the next morning wringing wet. He was rushed to hospital, where he was quickly diagnosed to be suffering from pneumonia. ‘I completely collapsed and ended up in hospital for three months. I did not come out until April,’ says Ellerington. One man’s tragedy is another’s opportunity. Alf was drafted into the side against Newcastle, and he showed more confidence than he had previously displayed, though he was troubled by Newcastle’s left-winger, Tommy Pearson, as the Saints lost 3-1 in front of a crowd of 55,800, by far the largest Alf had ever experienced.

With Ellerington incapacitated, Alf was guaranteed a good run in the side, and he kept his place for the rest of the season, growing ever more assured with each game. In February 1947 the Daily Mirror predicted that ‘only a few weeks after entering the big time, Alfred Ramsey is being talked of as one of the coming men of football’. The paper went on to quote coach Bill Dodgin, who paid tribute to Alf’s dedication: ‘You can’t better that type of player. The player who thinks football, talks football and lives football is the man who makes good.’

One particularly important match for Alf took place at the Dell in April against Manchester City, when he had the chance to witness at first hand City’s veteran international full-back Sam Barkas, who, at the age of 38, was playing his last season. Ramsey was immediately captivated by the skills of Barkas and decided to make him his role model. ‘It was the most skilful display by any full-back I had seen,’ he told the Evening News in 1953. ‘The brilliance of Barkas’ positional play, his habit of making the other fellow play how he wanted him to play, all caught my eye. What impressed me most of all was Sam Barkas’ astute use of the ball. Every time he cleared his lines he found an unmarked colleague,’ he wrote later.

Exactly the same attributes were to feature in Ramsey’s play over the next eight years; one of Alf’s greatest virtues was his ability to absorb the lessons of any experience. In his quest for perfection, he was constantly watching and learning, experimenting and practising. As Ted Bates put it in an interview in 1970:

Alf was very single-minded. He would come to the ground for training and he wanted to get on with it – no messing about. I believe he was a bit immature then but you could not dispute his single-mindedness. He sole interest was in developing his own game. He was the original self-educated player – all credit to him for that. But he always had this polish – it is the only word – and it made him stand out in any team.

Alf’s soccer intelligence, allied to a phenomenal dedication to his craft and an unruffled temperament, made him a far more effective player than his innate talent warranted. Eric Day says:

He had a very, very good football brain. If he hadn’t, he would not have played where he did, because he was not the most nimble of players. Not particularly brilliant in the air, because he did not have the stature to jump up. But he was a decent tackler and a great passer. He could read the game so well, that was his big asset. That was why he became such a great manager.

Ted Ballard has the same assessment:

He was a great player, a super player. He was a quiet man, very strict on himself, very sober and trained hard. The only thing he lacked was pace; he could be a bit slow on the turn because he was built so heavily round the hip. But he made up for it with the way he read the game so well.

Stan Clements, who played at centre-half and was himself a shrewd judge of the game, told me:

He was two-footed. You would not have known the difference between one foot and the other. He was a tremendously accurate passer. When he kicked the ball, it went right to the other player’s foot. All the forwards in front of him always said that when Alf gave them the ball, it was easy to collect. They liked that because they could pick it up in their stride. His judgement of distance, his sense of timing was just right. The point about Alf was that he was so cool. One of the remarkable things about him was that at free-kicks and corners, when the goalmouth was crowded, he seemed to have the ability almost to be a second keeper on the goal-line. He seemed always to be able to read exactly what was going on. His anticipation was superb. He was always in the right position to chest the ball down and clear it. He must have saved us at least a goal every other game. He understood football better than most people. I always knew he would make a good manager, because of his ability to size up the game. Bill Dodgin and Syd Cann, the trainer, used to have this layout on the floor of our dressing-room, with counters for the players. And they would use this to analyse our tactics, especially in set-pieces. Alf was always very good at understanding all that; he would take it all on board quickly.

Alf was so dedicated that, even at the end of the 1946-47 season, when he returned to Dagenham, he carried on practising in the meadows behind his parents’ cottage: ‘I used to take a football every morning during those months of 1947 and spend an hour or two trying hard to “place it” at a chosen spot.’ Alf knew that only by developing his accuracy would he be successful in adopting the Sam Barkas style of constructive defence. The hard work paid off, and Alf did not miss a single game during the 1947-48 season; indeed, he was the only Southampton player to appear in all 42 League fixtures. Such was the strength of Ramsey’s performances that Bill Ellerington, who had gradually recovered from his illness, could not force his way back into the side, though, as he told me, that did not lead to any personal resentment:

I was working hard to get back. I am not being heroic but it was either that or packing the game in. But Alf was playing really well. He was a good reader of the game, a good player of the ball in front of him. A bit slow on the turn but he was made that way. On tackling, he knew when to go in and not to go in. And he made more good passes than most players. He was always cool. There was no personal rivalry between us. I never even dreamed about animosity or anything like that. We were just footballers. Mind you, looking back, Alf was ambitious. He was a hard lad to get to know. He was not stand-offish, but you could never get at him. He was not one of the boys. We travelled everywhere by train in those days, and I was part of a card school, but Alf did not join in. He never got in trouble, because he was not interested.

As Bill Ellerington indicates, Alf’s personality did not change much once he became a successful professional. He remained undemonstrative, reserved, unwilling to mix easily. ‘He would not go out of his way to talk to anybody,’ recalled Ted Bates, ‘but if you wanted his advice, he’d give it. When we played, early on, I roomed with him, and he was always the same, very quiet, getting on with his job.’ Eric Day, the Southampton right-winger, used frequently to catch the train from Southampton to London because his parents lived in Ilford:

I saw him a lot but there was never much conversation. I am not a great talker and Alf certainly wasn’t one. Whenever we chatted, it was only ever about football. He could be a bit short with people, though he was never rude. Alf didn’t suffer fools gladly, I’ll tell you that. He was a bit secretive; he just didn’t chat. Maybe that’s because he was a gypsy. Gypsies are extremely close-knit; they keep it in the family. You never heard him shouting, not on the field or in the dressing-room or on the train. If he had any strong feelings about anyone, he just kept them to himself. He was a very honest bloke. He did not like talking about people behind their backs. You never heard him tear anyone to shreds. He was very modest. There was nothing of the star about him.

The Southampton goalkeeper of the time, Ian Black, highlights similar traits:

Once he had finished training, you seldom saw him. That is fair enough. People are made in different ways. But it did not make him any the less likeable. I think he had quite a shy nature; he was friendly enough but he did not like much involvement with others. Though he would talk plenty about the game, he was not much of a conversationalist otherwise.

Throughout his time at Southampton, Ramsey lived in digs owned by the club, which he shared with Alf Freeman, one of the Saints’ forwards. The two Alfs had served together in the Duke of Cornwall’s Regiment, though Freeman had seen action in France and Germany in 1944-45. Now in his mid-eighties and with his powers of communication in decline, Freeman still retains fond memories of living with Alf:

We had good times together in the army. We were pretty close then. In our Southampton digs, we were looked after well by our landlady. Alf was a lovely man but he was very, very quiet. He was shy and never talked much. Unlike most of us players, he did not smoke or drink much. He always dressed smartly. He liked the cinema, and also did a lot of reading, mainly detective stories.

The late Joe Mallet, who was one of Southampton’s forwards, told Alf’s previous biographer in a powerfully worded statement that Ramsey and Freeman had fallen out:

They were close but they had a disagreement and though they lived together Alf would never speak to Freeman. If you got on the wrong side of Alf, that was it, you were out! You couldn’t talk him around; he would be very adamant. If he didn’t like somebody or something, he didn’t like them. There were no half measures! He was a man you could get so far with, so close to, and then there was a gap, he’d draw the curtain and you had to stop. I don’t think he liked any intrusion into his private life. Alf wouldn’t tolerate anything like that. He’d be abusive rather than put up with it.

But today Freeman has no recollection of any such dispute: ‘There was never any trouble between us. I don’t know where Joe Mallet got that stuff about a disagreement. That just wasn’t true. I always got on well with Alf. He was a good man to me. I liked him very much.’

Pat Millward came to know Ramsey better than most through Alf’s friendship with her husband Doug, who played for both the Saints and Ipswich. Though she recognizes that Alf’s diffidence could come across as offensive, she personally was a great admirer:

People used to think that Alf was difficult because he did not have a lot to say. He would just answer a question and then walk away. A lot of people did not like him. They thought he was too quiet, too pleased with himself. ‘He fancies himself, doesn’t he? Who does he think he is?’ they would say, without really knowing him. But I loved him. He was just the opposite of what some people thought. He was down-to-earth, never bragged, never put on airs, never went for the cheers. And he was such a gentleman, always polite and well-mannered. I remember I was working in the restaurant of a department store in Southampton, and the store had laid on an event for the players, where they were all to receive wallets, and their wives handbags. The gifts were set out on two stands and the players could take their choice. Alf was among the first to arrive. But he held back until all the rest of them had taken what they wanted.

‘Shouldn’t you get your wallet?’ I asked.

‘No, Pat, it’s fine. Let the others get theirs.’

He was a special man. Doug thought the world of him. He was never a joker, but if he liked you, he showed it. On the other hand, if he didn’t like you, he had a way of ignoring you.

Revelling in professional success, Alf was more fixated with soccer than ever. But he still enjoyed some of the other pursuits of his youth, like greyhound racing and cricket. Bill Ellerington recalls:

We would often go to the dog track near the Dell on Wednesday evenings and Alf would come with us. Looking back, he was a very good gambler. There would be six races, six dogs each, and Alf would just go for one dog. Whatever the result, win or lose, he finished. He was not like most of the boys, chasing their money. He was very shrewd. At the time, I just accepted it, but looking back, it showed how clever he was. I always felt there was a bit of the gambler about him, even when he was England manager in the 1966 World Cup. He had this tremendous, quiet self-confidence about him.

Stan Clements also remembers Alf’s enthusiasm for the dogs, but feels that Alf’s lack of social skills has been exaggerated:

Alf was a nice fella once you knew him, easy to get on with. He had worked for the Co-op and was good with figures. His family were involved in racing greyhounds, in fact some of them used to live on that, so he knew about gambling. At that time in the late 1940s, dog-racing was extremely popular; it was a cheap form of entertainment for the working-class. Alf would usually go to the dogs on a Wednesday with Alf Freeman. He was also good on the horses. He was very quick at working out the odds. He was not tight with his money, or anything like that. He was quite prepared to open his wallet. He was a cool gambler; you never saw him get excited. He would put his bets on in a controlled manner. He would assess the situation. He could lose without it affecting him. In everything he did, he was never over-the-top. He always had control of himself. He enjoyed a drink, but he was not a six pints man.

Speedway racing was another interest of Alf’s and he would regularly visit the local track at Bannister Court near the Dell. He became good friends with the local racer Alf Kaines, and he persuaded Southampton FC to allow Kaines to join the players sometimes for physical training during the week. Stan Clements also remembers that Alf displayed an innate sense of co-ordination in every sport:

He was the sort of individual who was always good with the round ball. Some of us began to play golf. We had a little competition and the one who made the lowest score got a set of clubs. And who won? Alf, of course. When we were playing snooker, he was very controlled, so he did not miss many shots. The same was true of his cricket. We were once playing a match in Portsmouth and the opposition had a couple of good bowlers who were attached to Sussex. Our team was put together at the last minute, just from those who wanted to play – and Alf was not one of them. But all of us went down to the match, some of us, like Alf, just as spectators. Soon the opposition were running through us like anything. Then Alf Freeman told us that Alf had been a good cricketer in the army, so he suggested that Alf go in. Alf was a bit reluctant, as he was wearing a navy blue suit at the time. But we persuaded him to don his pads over his dark trousers. So he went out to bat like that. And immediately he stopped the rot, scoring a half century. It was not wild stuff, but controlled, sensible hitting. Nothing silly but he played all the shots.

A couple of beers, a day at the cricket, a night at the dog track, these were the main forms of entertainment for the footballers of the late 1940s, just as they were for most of the working class. In contrast to the multi-millionaires of today’s Premiership, most professionals then remained close to the ordinary public in terms of earnings and lifestyle. None of the Southampton players, including Alf, owned a car, while most of them lived in rented accommodation. Almost all their travel was undertaken by rail and if they had to change trains in London, they took the tube, with their kit following in a taxi. Their official wages were not that far divorced from those of clerical staff. The average pay in the League in 1948 was just £8 a week and the maximum wage was set at £12, despite the fact that the clubs and the FA were enjoying record-breaking attendances. That year, 99,500 people paid £391,000 to see England play Scotland at Wembley, yet the 22 players involved received just £20 each, their payments amounting to little more than 1 per cent of the total gate. Even worse, they were punitively taxed on their earnings by the Labour government, so they actually received only £11 in their pockets. Looking back, former Saints winger Eric Day comments:

It was not a very glamorous life. I was paid £6 a week in the winter, £4 in the summer, £2 for a win and £1 for a draw. Plus the club charged me 30 bob a week for rent. So I did not have much left over. Certainly I could not have dreamt of having a car. But I felt I was lucky. I had been in the forces for six years, and to come out as a free man, and then to be paid for playing football was something beyond my imagination.

Goalkeeper Ian Black shares the same view about the effect of the war:

The wages were decent compared to manual work. I think footballers of my generation were more concerned about conducting themselves properly. Most of us had been in the forces, not the best times of our lives, and I suppose coming from that environment created a deep impression. Many of us just felt lucky to be playing football and did not want to spoil it.

Apart from the dismal financial rewards, the other drawback that the players of Alf’s generation had to contend with was the poor equipment and facilities. The bleak, down-at-heel atmosphere of post-war Britain extended all too depressingly to football. Training kit was poor, pitches were a mud-heap – when they were not frozen – and the cumbersome boots were more fit for a spell in the trenches. The classic English soccer footwear remained the ‘Mansfield Hotspur’, which had first been designed in the 1920s and made a virtue of its solidity, with its reinforced toe and protection for two inches above the ankle. The two main types of ball, the Tugite and the Tomlinson T, were equally robust. Both tended to absorb mud and moisture, becoming steadily heavier and larger as a match progressed. As goalkeeper Ian Black recalls: ‘There was not much smacking in the ball from a distance then. When it was wet, if you managed to reach the half-way line, it was an exceptional kick.’ Bill Ellerington says:

The ball was so heavy in those days. Beckham could not have bent it on a cold, damp February night. The ball used to swell right up during a game. If you did not hit it right, you’d have thought you’d broken your ankle. If you headed the ball where the lace was, you felt you’d been scalped. You had to catch it right. Our shin pads were made of cane and the socks of wool so they got heavy in the damp. The facilities were terrible at the Dell. We had a great big plunge bath and just one or two showers. In February, when the pitches were thick with mud, the first in got the clean water. At the end, the water was like brown soup. On a cold winter’s day, the steam from the bath would make the walls drip with condensation. You did not know where to put your clothes. If you had a raincoat, you would place it first on the hook so your clothes did not get wet. But you just accepted it.

But this was the environment in which Alf was now proving himself. By early 1948 he was in the middle of a run of 91 consecutive League games for Southampton, and was winning increasing acclaim from the press. After a match against West Bromwich Albion, in which he twice saved on the goal-line, he was described in the Southern Daily Echo as ‘strong, incisive, resourceful’. The team were pushing for promotion and also enjoyed a strong FA Cup run which carried them through to the quarter-finals before they were beaten 1-0 at home by Spurs on 28 February. The Echo wrote of Alf’s performance in this defeat:

Alf Ramsey is playing so well that he is consistently building up a reputation which should bring some soccer honour to him. He certainly impressed highly in this game and is steadily and intelligently profiting under the experienced guidance of partner and captain Bill Rochford.

Of Alf’s burgeoning influence, Ian Black says:

The spirit of our side was first class and my relationship on the field with Alf was very good. He was such a great reader of the game. He always seemed to know what was going to happen next. He lacked a bit of pace but he made up for it with his wonderful positional sense. He was a first-class tackler because he had such a good sense of timing. He never went diving in recklessly. He was never a dirty player. He hated anything like that. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle him. He was always very smart, conducted himself impeccably. Unlike some players, he was never superstitious. He never caused upsets or became aggressive. He was very confident of his own ability, which is half the battle in football. Alf had a natural authority about him. His approach, his knowledge of the game would influence players. So it was no surprise to me that players responded to him when he was a manager. He was the boss; they would understand that. There was no messing about with him, even when he was a player. I don’t mean that he was difficult, but he was able to impose his views and because they were often so right, he was all the more respected.

At the end of the 1947-48 season, the Football Echo described Alf as Southampton’s ‘most improved player’. Though Southampton had failed to win promotion, as they finished behind Birmingham City and Newcastle, the sterling qualities of Alf attracted the interest of the national selectors. In May, Alf received a letter from Lancaster Gate informing him that the FA were ‘considering’ him for the forthcoming close-season tour of Italy and Switzerland. Then a few days later, as he sat in his digs listening to the six o’clock news on the BBC Home Service, he heard to his joy that his place in the sixteen-strong party had been confirmed. Alf was rightly thrilled at this elevation; ‘I could not believe my good fortune,’ he wrote later, and for the first time in his life he was the focus of intense national media interest, with photographers and reporters turning up at the Dell to cover the story of the delivery boy made good. ‘While his choice as the sixteenth member of the party will occasionally surprise in many quarters, Ramsey nevertheless deserves the honour. He has had only one full season in League soccer and has made such rapid progress that the selectors have watched him several times,’ reported the News Chronicle.

He came down to earth when he reported for duty at the Great Western Hotel in Paddington, prior to England’s departure for the continent. To his surprise, on his arrival at the hotel, he was completely ignored, not just by a succession of England players like Billy Wright, Tommy Lawton and Frank Swift, but also by the England management. ‘For a very long time, in fact, I sat in that lounge waiting for something to happen.’ Eventually he went up to the trainer, Jimmy Trotter, to introduce himself. Even then, Trotter did not recognize Ramsey and it took him a few moments before he grasped who Alf was. The humiliating experience, reflective of the shambolic way England was run before the 1960s, taught Ramsey an invaluable lesson. When he became national manager, he made sure that he personally greeted every new entrant to his team, as Alan Mullery recalls:

My first meeting was with Alf in 1964 when I turned up at the England hotel in London. It was a very nice introduction. He came straight up to me, shook my hand and said, ‘Welcome to the England squad. Make yourself at home.’ He did it extremely well. From the first moment, I found his man-management superb.

The next day, Alf travelled with the England party to Heathrow Airport, which had opened less than two years earlier and was still using a tent for one of its terminal buildings. It was the first time Alf had been near an airfield, never mind an aeroplane, and he was initially an anxious passenger as the 44-seat DC-4 Skymaster took off. But as the plane flew over the Alps on its way to Geneva, Alf forgot his nerves and admired the breathtaking views of the snow-capped mountains. At Geneva, the England party was transferred to a pair of DC-3 Dakotas, before flying on to Milan, whose airport was too small to accommodate the Skymaster. From Milan, the squad was then taken to the lakeside resort of Stresa, prior to their game against Italy at Turin. It was a world away from the austerity of post-war Dagenham and Southampton, and Alf found it a shock to see ‘the apparently well-fed and beautifully clothed people’ of northern Italy. The Italian football manager, Vittorio Pozzo, appeared to understand the severity of food-rationing in Britain, for when he greeted the England team to the Grand Hotel in Stresa, he gave every member a small sack of rice. What today might seem an offensive present was only too eagerly accepted by each player, for, as Alf put it, ‘in those days rice was almost as valuable as gold’. Later in the trip, he was given a trilby hat, an alarm clock and two bottles of Vermouth as gifts, which he handed to his mother on his return to Dagenham.

Given his limited experience, Alf never expected to be in the full England team for the game at Turin. It was, thought Tom Finney, ‘the best England side I played with’. And this was to be one of England’s finest post-war victories, winning 4-0 thanks largely to some superb goal-keeping by Frank Swift and two goals from Finney. What interested Alf most, watching on the sidelines, was that because of the England team’s fitness, their players lasted the pace much better than the Italians. It was something he would remember when it came to 1966.

The England team then travelled to Locarno, where they stayed in another luxurious hotel and enjoyed a full banquet on the evening of their arrival. Again, Alf could not help but be struck by the contrast with the drabness of life in Britain. Amidst all this splendour, Alf had another cause for celebration: he was picked to play his first representative game for his country, turning out for the B side against Switzerland. The result was an easy 5-1 win. Alf himself felt that he had ‘played fairly well’, while the Southern Daily Echo announced that he had ‘pleased all the critics’. When the England squad arrived back in London, most of the players returned to their homes. But Alf Ramsey had another, far more arduous journey ahead of him. For Southampton FC had agreed to undertake a tour of Brazil at the end of the 1947-48 season, the trip having been promoted by the strong links between the City Council and the Brazilian consulate in Southampton.

The rest of the squad travelled out to Rio aboard the cruise liner The Andes, on which they were treated like princes. All the petty restrictions of rationing were abandoned, like the weekly allowances of just 13 ounces of meat, one and half ounces of cheese, two pints of milk and one egg. ‘We had food like you never saw on the mainland. We had five- or six-course meals laid in front of us. And the training on board was pathetic, just running around the deck, so by the time we arrived we were hardly in peak condition,’ says Eric Day. ‘We could eat all we wanted. A lot of us put on half a stone in ten days,’ remembers Ted Ballard.

Alf did not have it nearly so easy. With the Southampton tour well under way in Brazil by the time he returned from England duty, he had to fly out on a circuitous route to Rio via Lisbon, Dakar and Natal in South Africa. When he arrived at Rio, no one had arranged to meet him and, without any local currency or a word of Portuguese, he spent two hours wandering around the airport looking for assistance, before an official from the local Botafogo club – which had helped to arrange the tour – finally arranged to have him flown on to Sao Paulo, where the Southampton team was currently based. It was hardly the smoothest of introductions to Latin America, and subsequently Alf was never to feel at ease in the culture. His presence, however, was badly needed by Southampton, who had been overwhelmed by the Brazilians and had lost all four of their opening games on the tour. ‘The skill of the Brazilian players really opened our eyes. We had never seen anything like that. The way some of them played shook us,’ says Ian Black. The Brazilians’ equipment also appeared to be light years ahead: ‘They laughed at our big boots because they had such lightweight ones, almost like slippers,’ remembers Bill Ellerington.

It is a tribute to Alf’s influence on the team that, almost as soon as he arrived, both the morale and the results began to pick up. ‘When Alf came out there, he made a big difference. We were all down, because getting beaten on tour is no fun. Alf was great on encouragement, at getting us going. He was a terrific motivator, an amazing bloke,’ argues Ted Ballard. Alf’s influence lay not just on the motivational side; he also helped to devise a tactical plan to cope with the marauding Brazilian defenders, who, in contrast to the more rigid English formation, played almost like wingers. Alf felt that the spaces that they left behind, as they advanced up the field, could be exploited by playing long diagonal balls from the deep into the path of Eric Day, the outside-right. It was a version of a system he would use with dramatic effect a decade later with Ipswich.

Assisted by Alf’s cool presence, Southampton won their next game 2-1 against the crack side Corinthians in Sao Paulo. But, in the face of victory, the behaviour of the crowd – and one of the Corinthian players – fed Alf’s nascent xenophobia. At one stage, after a black Corinthian player had been sent off for a brutal assault on Eric Day, the crowd erupted. Fireworks were let off. Angry chanting filled the stadium. Then, as Alf later recorded, ‘just when I thought things had quietened down, some wild-eyed negroes climbed over the wire fencing surrounding the pitch and things again looked dangerous’. A minor riot was only avoided by the intervention of the military police. The banquet with the Corinthians was just as awkward for Alf, as he had to sit beside the player who had been sent off. The event, said Alf in 1952, was

among the most embarrassing I have ever attended. I tried to speak to him and in return received only a fixed glare. Even when my colleagues tried to be pleasant with him all they received for their trouble was the same glare. There was something hypnotic in the way this negro stared at us. He certainly ranks as the most unpleasant man I’ve ever met on or off the football field.

The Southampton team then went on to Rio, where again they won, with Alf captaining the side for the first time when Bill Rochford was rested. They were installed in the Luxor hotel overlooking Copacabana beach, but their stringent training regime prevented them enjoying too much of the local life. ‘Brazil had the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life,’ says Bill Ellerington. ‘They used to parade up and down the beach, though they always had one or two elderly women with them. And by the time we finished playing and training, we were too tired to think about anything like that.’ The last two games of the tour ended in a draw and a defeat, before the players took the plane, rather than the boat, back to Southampton.

The tour had been a revelation for Alf. On one hand it had enhanced his footballing vision, encouraging him to think in a far more original way about tactics and his own role. He now saw, he wrote, that ‘a defender’s job was also to make goals as well as stopping them’. But on the other it had given him a negative opinion of Latin American crowds, administration and the press. He was astounded, for instance, when walking on to the pitch for the match at Sao Paulo that ‘radio commentators, dragging microphones on to the field, rushed up to us and demanded – yes, demanded! – our views’. It was the start of a not very beautiful relationship with the world’s media.




THREE White Hart Lane (#ulink_3f0aab47-ed7a-5c40-ad5f-a4c035fc1a33)


At the start of the 1948-49 season, Alf Ramsey’s progress seemed assured. He was a key member of the Southampton side, sometime captain, and an England B international. His growing confidence was reflected when he was called up for another representative game, on this occasion playing for English Football League XI against an Irish League XI at Anfield in September. His room-mate in that game was another debutant, the Newcastle striker Jackie Milburn – cousin of the Charlton brothers who were to play such a central role in Alf’s managerial career. Milburn was struck by the intensity of his colleague, who wanted to sit up late into the night talking tactics. ‘Alf was never a great one for small talk when he was with England parties,’ said Milburn later. ‘Football was his one subject of conversation. He was always a pepper-and-salt man, working out moves and analysing formations with the cruet table.’

The English League XI, which won 5-1, was captained by none other than Stanley Matthews, the ascetic, dazzling Blackpool winger, who, since 1932, had been captivating spectators with his formidable powers of dribbling, swerving and acceleration. A cold, emotionally taut man, whose rigorous training regime included a weekly fast on Mondays, he was not universally loved by his professionals; many of them felt that his trickery on the wing did more to please the crowds than win games for his side. In an amazingly harsh passage about his team-mate, England captain Billy Wright wrote in 1953 that Matthews ‘made most of us foam at the mouth because he held up the line and allowed opposing defenders to cover up’. He went on to attack Matthews’ brand of ‘slow-motion football’, adding that Matthews, ‘although giving joy to thousands of fans, was sometimes nothing but a pain in the neck to colleagues who waited in vain for the pass that never came.’ Coming from someone who failed dismally as a soccer manager because he was ‘too nice’, those words of Wright’s could hardly be more brutal.

Alf, however, developed a good understanding with Matthews during the English League game. And he soon had the chance to play alongside Matthews again, when in December 1948 he was called up to the full England side, after the long-serving Arsenal right-back Laurie Scott suffered a knee injury. The match took place at Highbury on 2 December and resulted in an easy 6-0 win for England over Switzerland. Alf refused to be overawed on his debut. During the match Alf made a pass to Matthews and then, to the astonishment and amusement of the rest of the English League team, shouted ‘Hold it, Stanley!’ at the great man, who had never been used to taking orders from anyone, least of all a young defender with only one full season behind him. The words from Alf were instinctive, lacking in any self-consciousness and were born of years of practice with the Saints’ right-winger Eric Day. Yet they smacked of youthful arrogance, something compounded when Alf wrote in Talking Football: ‘To my surprise, Stanley Matthews played football as I believed it should be played between winger and full-back. Stanley took up position perfectly to take my clearances.’ To his detractors, that remark was a symbol of Ramsey’s arrogance. ‘It was rather like a new racing driver out for a spin with Jackie Stewart telling him to change gear at the next bend,’ claimed Max Marquis, always on the lookout for anything to drag down Alf. But to Ramsey himself, he was just being realistic; he had found another player who preferred thoughtful, constructive defence rather than the meaty hump into the crowd. ‘I was in a better position than Stanley to see the situation so naturally I advised him,’ Alf explained to England’s captain Billy Wright. Indeed, Matthews soon became an admirer of Ramsey. In an article in 1950, he praised the way Alf relied ‘on positional play, interception and brainwork to beat his winger. I know which type I would rather face. The man who rushes the tackles is easier to slip than the calculating opponent who forces you to make mistakes.’

What was so impressive about Alf on his debut was his calmness, even under severe pressure. ‘Ramsey looked as suave and cool as a city businessman – particularly when he headed from under the bar in the second minute,’ thought the Daily Mail. It was a view shared by Alf’s captain Billy Wright:

I must admit I found it a little disconcerting at first to have a full-back behind me who was always as cool as an ice-soda. Ramsey’s expressed aim was to play constructive football: I soon learned that nothing could disturb this footballer with the perfect balance and poise, no situation, however desperate, could force him into abandoning his immaculate style.

But then, just as Ramsey’s fortunes appeared to be taking off, disaster struck. On 15 January 1949, Southampton visited Home Park to play a friendly against Plymouth, both teams having been knocked out of the FA Cup. ‘One minute before half-time, I slipped on the damp turf when going into a tackle with Paddy Blatchford, the Plymouth Argyle outside left. A terrible searing pain went through my left-knee…the most agonizing I have ever experienced,’ wrote Alf. In fact, as he was carried from the field, Ramsey feared that his professional career was over. Fortunately, an X-ray showed that he only had badly strained ligaments and should be able to play again before the end of the season.

Whether he would return to the Southampton side was another matter. For Alf’s position was immediately filled to great effect by Bill Ellerington, who had waited patiently in the reserves after recovering from his bout of pneumonia, playing just 12 League games in the previous two years. Just as Alf had done in January 1947, so Bill now seized his chance, producing such solid performances at the back that he was to win two England caps before the end of the season. But Ellerington’s success spelt problems for Ramsey, particularly because Southampton were pressing hard for promotion. In March 1949, while Alf was still limping badly, manager Bill Dodgin came up to him at the Dell and warned him that he was ‘going to find it very hard’ to regain his place in the first team. Alf was appalled at this comment, regarding it as a calculated insult. The sensitive side of his nature led him to brood obsessively about it, as he sunk into a period of mental anguish. ‘The world did indeed appear a dark and unfriendly place. For one fleeting moment I seriously contemplated quitting football,’ said Ramsey later.

He certainly wanted to quit Southampton, now that Bill Ellerington appeared to be the favoured son. More ambitious than ever, Alf – unlike Bill – was not content to wait months in the reserves. Despairing of his future at the Dell, Alf wrote to the club’s chairman J.R. Jukes requesting a transfer. Initially Jukes tried to dissuade Alf, but to no avail. As Jukes reported to a special board meeting on 8 March, ‘Ramsey was adamant in his desire to be transferred to some other club, his stated reason being that he felt he was lowering his chances of becoming an international player by being played in the reserve side’. The entire board then called Ramsey into the meeting and told him that ‘it would be far more to his advantage and future reputation if he remained at the club and went up with them, as we all hoped would be the case, into the First Division’. But Ramsey would not budge and told the directors that he was ‘willing to go anywhere’.

Ramsey’s opinion of Bill Dodgin had plummeted during the row. He felt that the Southampton boss should have shown ‘more understanding of my personal feelings’. Even if Ramsey appeared excessively touchy, his criticism of Dodgin was mirrored by a few of his colleagues at the Dell. Known to some as ‘Daddy’, Dodgin was a former lumbering centre-half who spent four years at the Dell as coach and manager, but, despite a strong team, failed to win promotion. He was generally liked by the players, especially for his decency and sense of humour, but some felt he lacked sufficient authority, especially on the tactical side. ‘Technically, he was not a good manager,’ says Eric Day. ‘We did not have much in the way of team talks. I never found him good on motivating. I doubt if Alf ever learnt much from Bill. If anything, it would have been the other way round.’ Ted Ballard largely agrees:

Bill Dodgin was a decent bloke, but he wasn’t perfect. His weak point was his knowledge of the game. He could not really put his views across in those vital moments, like the ten minutes before half-time. I think he suffered a bit from lack of confidence. Players like Bill Rochford were stronger than he was.

But Alf’s view that Dodgin had done him a cruel injustice was not shared in the Southampton dressing-room, where there was strong admiration for Bill Ellerington. Another of the Saints’ full-backs Albie Roles, who appeared briefly in the 1948-49 season, was inclined to think that Bill was the better player in comparison to Alf: ‘He tackled harder. He was more direct, more decisive with his tackling. And he could hit the ball right up along the ground. He didn’t have to lob it. Alf Ramsey may have been the better positional player, but Bill was a good footballer.’ Joe Mallet had this analysis:

Bill Ellerington had things that Alf didn’t have and vice-versa. Bill used to clear his lines whereas Alf used to try and play the ball out of danger – which sometimes wasn’t the right thing to do. Bill’s all-round defensive game was better than Alf’s. Alf Ramsey was always beaten by speed and by players who took the ball up to him – tricky players, quick players. But he was a brilliant user of the ball. That’s how he got his name, on the usage of the ball: good passing, very good passing; but sometimes he used to take chances with short ones, in the danger area around the goal.

In fact, Mallet believed that Alf’s incautious approach, allied to his lack of pace, which was a central reason why Dodgin did not fight to keep him. Just a week before Ramsey had incurred his knee injury at Plymouth, Southampton had travelled to Hillsborough for an FA Cup tie against Sheffield Wednesday. As the Saints came under fire in the first half, they reverted to using the offside trap. But according to Mallet, Ramsey wrecked this tactic through his over-reliance on captain Bill Rochford. Over the years, said Mallett, Ramsey had grown so used to the effectiveness of Rochford’s sense of timing, moving forward on the left flank at just the right moment to catch any attack offside, that Alf was inclined to ‘take liberties’. Even when Alf was beaten on his own right flank, he had got into the habit of shouting ‘offside’, because he presumed Rochford would have moved into an advanced position to thwart the opposition. In this particular match at Hillsborough, according to Mallet:

Sheffield Wednesday had an outside left who was a quick small player. Alf went up, ‘Offside!’ They broke away. They scored. And at half-time in the dressing-room there was a row – between Alf and Bill Rochford, who said, ‘You’ve to keep playing the man. You’ve got to run. Even if you think it’s offside, you’ve still got to go with him.’ So this was the reason that Alf Ramsey took umbrage and left the club.

Alf always took offence easily, as his later tetchy relationship with the press testifies, and there can be little doubt that the row at Hillsborough contributed to his desire to go. Several clubs, amongst them Burnley, Luton and Liverpool, expressed an initial interest in buying him but there was now the additional pressure of the looming transfer deadline for the season, which fell on 16 March, just eight days after the board had accepted Ramsey’s demand for a move. By the morning of the 16th, however, only Sheffield Wednesday had come up with a definite offer. Ramsey, as a southerner, did not want to move north, fearing that he ‘might never settle down in the provinces’. Moreover, Wednesday, despite a richer pedigree, were less successful in the 1948-49 season than Southampton, finishing five places lower in the second division table. What Alf did not know was that, by the late afternoon, Tottenham Hotspur had suddenly also come forward with an offer. At half past four, he was sitting in his digs, contemplating his failure to get away from the Dell, when the trainer Sam Warhurst turned up in his car and immediately rushed Alf back to the ground, where he was brought into Bill Dodgin’s office and asked if he wanted to become a Spurs player. Alf instantly wanted to accept.

Sadly for him, it was now too late to beat the transfer deadline. The potential deal fell through. Alf was stuck at the Dell for the remainder of the season, a disastrous period in which the Saints gained only four out of a possible fourteen points and missed out on promotion behind Fulham and West Brom. But once the season was over, the Spurs offer was revived, partly as a result of personnel changes at White Hart Lane. At the beginning of May, Joe Hume, the Spurs manager who had presided over the abortive deal, was sacked by the board on the rather unconvincing grounds of ill-health. His replacement was not some big managerial star from another top-rank club. Instead, the Spurs board chose Arthur Rowe, a former Tottenham player who was then manager of lowly, non-League Chelmsford City. But the Spurs directors had shown more perspicacity than most of their breed. For Arthur Rowe possessed one of the most innovative football minds of his generation. He was about to embark on a footballing revolution at Tottenham, one that would send shockwaves through the First Division. What Rowe immediately needed were thinking players who would be able to help implement his vision. And it was soon obvious to him, after talking to Spurs officials who had tried to sign Ramsey in March, that Alf fitted his ideal type.

So on 15 May 1949, Spurs made another bid for Ramsey. This time there were no difficulties. Alf was only too happy to move to Tottenham, not just because it was an ambitious and famous institution, twice winners of the FA Cup, but, more prosaically, because the club agreed that he could live at home with his parents in nearby Dagenham. For a hard-pressed family and a frugal son, this was a real financial benefit.

At the very moment Alf left Southampton, so too did the manager he had come to so dislike, Bill Dodgin, who, much to the surprise of the Saints players, had agreed to take up the manager’s job at newly promoted Fulham. It has often been claimed that Dodgin’s departure was prompted by his annoyance at Alf’s transfer. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Rowe was about to sign Alf, Dodgin was on another tour of Brazil, this time as the guest of Arsenal. As David Bull recorded in his excellent book Dell Diamond, the biography of Ted Bates, Bill Dodgin was in the reception of his hotel in Rio when he was handed a telegram from the Southampton directors informing him of Arthur Rowe’s offer for Ramsey. He immediately cabled back, ‘go ahead – dodgin.’ In truth, Dodgin had fallen out badly with Ramsey and had no wish to keep him at the Dell. It was other issues that led to Dodgin’s decision, such as his urge to return to his native London and manage a First Division side.

Two other myths were circulated about Ramsey at the time of his move. The first was that the transfer cost Spurs £21,000, making Alf by far the most expensive full-back in soccer history; the Southern Daily Echo was moved to describe it as a ‘spectacular deal’. The reality was less exciting. The actual cash sum Spurs paid was only £4,500, the £16,500 balance made up by swapping Ernie Jones, their Welsh international winger, for Ramsey. The second was that Ramsey, as widely reported in the press, was only 27 at the time of the move. In fact he was 29, an age when many footballers are starting to contemplate retirement. For Alf, the best was still to come.

In addition to moving to Tottenham, Alf’s private life was about to undergo an enormous change. The request to live with parents may have implied that he was planning to live a life of strict celibacy, in keeping with his reserved character, but that was far from the case. During his time at Southampton, he had met and fallen in love with a slim elegant brunette, Rita Norris, who worked as a hairdresser in the city. With a degree of embarrassment, Alf later described how their romance began:

We were introduced by a friend at a club, nothing whatever to do with football. Immediately we had what one must call a special relationship. I don’t know why I had this particular feeling only for her. I don’t think anyone can describe such a thing. It is impossible to put into words.

Alf emerges as touchingly human in his awkward confession as to how love was awakened within his reticent soul.

It was Alf’s first serious affair, as his fellow Southampton lodger Alf Freeman recalls. ‘Alf was very shy, and I don’t think he had any girlfriends before her.’ During the late forties Alf and Rita started courting regularly, going to the cinema, the theatre, even the speedway and dog tracks. These venues in Southampton were owned by Charlie Knott, a big local fishmonger and a friend of Rita’s. ‘I lived in Portsmouth then,’ says Stan Clements, ‘and I used to get them tickets for the Theatre Royal. He would take her there once a week, usually on a Thursday. They did not have a car, so they came down by train. They were a very nice couple. She was like him, quiet and polite’. Here Clements highlights one of the reasons why Alf was so immediately drawn to Rita Norris. As well as being darkly attractive, she had the same serious temperament as Alf. Like him, she was determined to better herself, having been born in humble circumstances: her father, William Welch, was a ship’s steward who later became a lift attendant. Rita had higher ambitions. She was keen on the ballet, had good taste in clothes and was well-spoken. ‘She was a very good ballet dancer. Just as Alf was a gentleman, she was a lady, with nice manners, though some of the Southampton players thought she was a bit strait-laced,’ says Pat Millward.

Given the depth of their romance, it was inevitable that the subject of marriage arose. ‘We were engaged for some time before we were married. I don’t recall how long. It is not important,’ said Alf in 1966. Alf, as occasionally before, was being somewhat economical with the truth, for the tenure of his engagement turned out to be extremely important. The fact is that Alf was unable to marry Rita Norris when he wanted in the late forties – because she was already married to another man. Alf, the most loyal and upright of football figures, was – in the eyes of the law at least – helping his girlfriend to commit adultery for years. On Christmas Day 1941, Rita Phyllis Welch, aged 21, had married Arthur Norris in a Church of England ceremony at the Nelson chapel in Southampton, the more impressive nearby St Mary’s Church, the usual venue for such occasions, having been bombed by the Luftwaffe. By trade, Arthur Norris was a fitter, like his father, and he was soon employed working as an aircraft engineer in the Fleet Air Arm. Within less than two years of their marriage, in February 1943, Arthur and Rita had produced a daughter, to which they gave the rather unusual artistic name of Tanaya, though she was generally called Tanya.

But as with a huge number of wartime marriages, the union between Arthur and Rita broke down and in 1947 they separated. Under the more strict law of the period, Rita could not officially gain a divorce until a period of at least three years had elapsed. And even after her divorce, she would not be able to re-marry for another year. So she and Alf, even though they were deeply in love, were trapped. Pat Millward recalls:

Alf told me privately he was waiting, waiting all the time for her to get her divorce. He was a little nervous that people in Southampton might throw it at him that he was involved with a married woman. But I never heard anyone say anything about it. Mind you, Alf was always very secretive about her. He never talked much about the relationship. The first moment I think I was aware of it was that time when my department store was giving out the wallets and handbags to the Southampton players. Alf was very uptight about getting the right handbag for her, so I chose it for him.

Rita’s divorce finally game through on 30 November 1950, the official grounds given that Arthur Norris had ‘deserted the Petitioner without cause for a period of at least three years immediately preceding the presentation of the petition’. Little more than a year later, on 10 December 1951, Alf Ramsey, aged 31 years – he always gave his true birth date where officialdom was concerned – was married at the Register Office in Southampton, before going on to a brief honeymoon in Bournemouth. The wedding was sandwiched between an away fixture at Blackpool and a home game against Middlesbrough. In line with the reclusive nature of the affair, Alf kept quiet about his marriage and it therefore came as a surprise at Spurs. ‘Secret wedding honeymoon ended today for Alf Ramsey, Spurs right back and first choice for England and his bride who was formerly Rita Welch of Southampton,’ announced the Daily Mirror on 12 December 1951. ‘He kept the wedding so secret that even Spurs’ manager Arthur Rowe did not know of the ceremony at the Southampton Register Office. On the train returning from Blackpool Ramsey asked for “two or three days off” to be married.’

It would be wrong to exaggerate the impropriety of the circumstances surrounding Alf’s marriage. Divorce, though still far less common than it is today, was becoming increasingly prevalent, partly because of the high rate of failure in wartime marriages. In 1920, when Alf and Rita were both born, there were just 3,090 divorces in England. By 1939, the figure had risen to 8,254. By 1950, however, the divorce rate had soared to 30,870 a year. So it is hardly as if Alf and Rita were causing a public scandal. Though the true nature of Alf’s marriage has never before been revealed, there have occasionally been wild rumours in the football world about his relationship with Rita. It was whispered breathlessly, for example, that she was ‘the daughter of an admiral’. Others said that Alf had ‘stolen his bride from his best mate’. Neither is remotely true. Rita was, like Alf, born in the working class and had merely contracted an unfortunate first marriage. ‘There was no sense of Alf stealing her,’ says Pat Millward. ‘When they met, she was already waiting for a divorce.’ Nevertheless, Rita Norris’ past undoubtedly heightened Alf’s sense of wariness about discussing his private life. It was another uncomfortable subject that he would prefer to avoid, like his father’s job or his alleged elocution lessons or his supposed gypsy background. After his marriage, the barriers were put up even higher, as Margaret Fuljames, his secretary at the FA for many years, recalls:

He hated any intrusion into his private life. Like the Daily Mail would ring almost every year on his birthday, looking for a diary piece, a light little comment from him or his wife, and Alf would never have anything to do with that. He felt it was nothing to do with who he was or his job as England manager.

For all its inauspicious beginnings, Ramsey’s marriage proved a successful one. Rita changed her name to Victoria, though Alf always knew her as Vic, and she was happy to concentrate on building their home and supporting Alf. In typically practical terms, Alf once set out the proper role of a player’s spouse:

A footballer’s wife needs to run the home completely so that he has no worries; give him the sort of food he likes and should have; and to work only for his good and the good of his career. She must know that she will rarely see him at weekends – and the better player he is, the less she will see of him. A footballer could be ruined by a wife who let him have all the household responsibilities, fed him the wrong diet and gave him no peace of mind. My wife has been splendid. I have been very lucky.

In her turn, Vickie returned the compliment. ‘I was privileged to have met and married Alfred and I enjoyed a very wonderfully happy life with a kind and generous man,’ she wrote to me.

Alf proved a loyal, honourable husband, giving her not the slightest moment’s suspicion that he might stray. Unlike a lot of successful sportsmen, who revel in the flash of a knowing smile or a whiff of perfume, Alf was too innocent to be at ease with sophisticated femininity. ‘I don’t know much about women and the only women I know are footballers’ wives,’ he said, at a time when the phrase ‘footballers’ wives’ had yet to become the embodiment of predatory lust. His love for Vickie was certainly genuine. ‘He’s the nicest man in the world. Never quarrels or loses his temper. He even listens to my views on football,’ Vickie told the Daily Mail in 1962. They never had any children of their own, but Alf proved a good step-father to Vickie’s daughter Tanaya, who went on to marry an American and settle in the USA.

Pat Millward says: ‘They were a very close couple. Alf was devoted to her.’ Despite his comments about a wife’s duties, Alf was not the stereotyped husband of his generation, treating all housework as the preserve of women. Ken Jones has this recollection of the domesticated Alf:

In 1974 I was doing some magazine pieces with him and Brian James, the Daily Mail’s football writer. So I picked him up at Liverpool Street and took him over to my house. We did some work in the morning, and then sat down to lunch cooked by my wife. All went well and we had a few drinks – Alf liked a drink. Then after lunch, I said, ‘Right, back to work.’

To which Alf immediately said, ‘Hold on, what about the washing up?’

‘The washing up?’ I said in astonishment.

‘Yes, the washing up.’ And he went off into the kitchen to help with my wife. There he was, with his elbows in the sink. From that day on, he was always a hero to my wife.

John Booth, who became a close friend of Alf after his retirement, says: ‘Everything always had to be spotless with Alf. He liked everything clean and tidy. He once came into my kitchen and started cleaning the sink and kettle.’

Whatever his virtues of fidelity and domesticity, it could not be claimed that Alf was the most romantic of men. Even Victoria, in one of her rare comments to the press, expressed her desire for her husband to show more emotion. ‘I wish he would let his hair down occasionally and throw his cap over the moon. It would do him a power of good. There is nothing spectacular ever in his reactions,’ she said in 1965. Early in his marriage, his relentless tunnel vision about football could be hurtful. On one occasion, when she was waiting outside the Spurs dressing-room after a game, he came out, completely ignored her because he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts, and proceeded to walk down the corridor until he was reminded that he had forgotten his wife. Ron Reynolds, the Spurs deputy goalkeeper of the early fifties, recalled meeting Alf and Vickie at a social event:

We had a meal and afterwards there was a dance. Alf came over to me and said, ‘I want you to meet somebody.’ He took me along and introduced me to Vickie. Within a matter of thirty seconds, he said, ‘You won’t mind having a dance with her, will you?’ Alf didn’t want to dance, he wanted to talk about football to the people there and so he lumbered me! She was very nice, but I was just a country lad, twenty-two years old, a bit out of my depth. I was practically speechless:

His innate lack of demonstrativeness stretched into his marriage. He famously explained that if he and his wife ever had a row, he liked to ‘shake hands and make up’. Nigel Clarke says that he ‘never, ever saw he and Vickie touch each other, embrace or be tactile. They would shake hands when they saw each other. I always had the feeling that Alf was not very worldly wise in sexual matters.’ And though he was a loving step-father, he could not always get excited about his daughter’s youthful activities. Tony Garnett, who covered all of Alf’s Ipswich career, told me of this incident:

Alf was a shrewd man but he was very limited in anything bar football. I remember I ran into Tanya on the train at Liverpool Street. She had just been to the ballet. She was keen on that, like her mother. And I said to her, ‘You know your dad is just two compartments ahead.’

‘Oh, I don’t want to go and sit with him. He won’t be interested in what I have been doing.’

For all his carefully cultivated refinement, Alf could occasionally be crudely masculine. Roy McFarland, the Derby and England defender, remembers an incident in December 1971, when England were on tour in Greece. There was the usual banquet after the game, which the players imagined would be followed by the usual boring speeches. Instead, a ravishing, scantily clad belly-dancer appeared before them. McFarland recalls:

All the lads started coming back from the bar for a closer look. Once she had finished her act, some of us went out to get some fresh air, and then we got on the bus. Alf came out of the reception, sat down in his usual seat, then turned to us and said: ‘Lads, what about that belly dancer! Fucking great pair she had, didn’t she?’ It was so unexpected. We could not stop laughing. He said things like that, which made him all the more endearing. It was a warm feeling to be part of that humour.

George Cohen, the Fulham full-back who knew and understood Alf better than any of the 1966 winners, gave this thoughtful analysis of their marriage:

Alf was, no doubt, a product of his times and when they had passed few men would ever have had more difficulty in adapting to a new style – and new values. His marriage to Vickie was a perfect reflection of this. He worshipped her but he also expected everything of her. She served him, as so many women did their husbands in those days and in return he adored her. If ever anyone walked in a man’s goals in the process. Stoke were crushed 6–1, Portsmouth 5–1 and, most remarkably of all, Newcastle United 7–0, witnessed by a crowd of over 70,000 at White Hart Lane. The Daily Telegraph gave a graphic description of how Tottenham operated:

The Spurs principle is to hold the ball a minimum amount of time, keep it on the ground and put it into an open space where a colleague will be a second or two later. The result is their attacks are carried on right through the side with each man taking the ball in his stride at top pace, for all the world like a wave gathering momentum as it races to the far distant shore. It is all worked out in triangles and squares and when the mechanism of it clicks at speed, as it did Saturday, with every pass placed to the last refined inch on a drenched surface, there is simply no defence against it.

Ron Burgess described it as ‘the finest exhibition of football I have ever seen.’ Eddie Baily, who scored a hat-trick in that Newcastle game, later recalled: ‘Our style commanded a lot of respect from others because of its freshness, because of the way it was played and the men who played it. You felt that you were helping to lift the tone of the game and so you got that respect from the crowds as well.’ By December 1950, Spurs were at the top of the First Division table and held on to the lead through January and February, though Manchester United were close behind. Then in March they tore away again with another burst of fine victories, including a 5–0 destruction of West Bromwich Albion.

Throughout these months, Alf was playing the best football of his life. His captain Ron Burgess wrote that Alf was ‘in grand form that season. He not only scored four goals himself, but his perfectly placed free-kicks led to a number of goals.’ He went on to describe Alf as ‘a brilliant defender under any condition and circumstance’ who was ‘a player for the big occasion’. The quality of Alf’s vision was central to the success of push-and-run in the First Division. Such was his authority on the field that he became known to his colleagues as ‘The General’. He was the master of strategy, the lynchpin of a side that built its attacks from the back, the scheming practitioner who put Rowe’s plans into action. George Robb, who joined Spurs in 1951, told author Dave Bowler:

Tottenham became a great side through push-and-run, which was tailor-made for Alf. There was no long ball from him, and he was one of the crucial members of the side, along with the likes of Burgess. Alf played a tremendous part in setting the pass pattern, which wasn’t typical of the British game. It was a revolutionary side, very well-knit.

Robb recalled The General’s influence off the field as well:

In team talks Alf certainly played an important part – he was full of deep thinking about the game but very quietly spoken. He was appreciated by the rest of us as being a cut above, tactically calm and unruffled. You’d go in the dressing-room for training and you’d have Eddie Baily, a tremendous clown, making a terrific row and Alf would just sit there, taking it all in, occasionally coming in with a shrewd observation, a cooling statement; he was ice-cool, just as his game was. Alf was looked upon as classy, constructive, so he set a new pattern.

Spurs were still top of the table by mid-April 1951 and when they met Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday the 28th they needed only two points to clinch the title. The match kicked off at 3.15 pm, as was traditional in this period, and for most of the first half, Spurs were unable to break down the Wednesday defence. Then, as the clock was about to reach 4 pm, Eddie Baily went past three defenders, then fed Len Duquemin, who hit a rasping shot into the net. ‘I have heard the Hampden Park roar and the Ninian Park roar, and they were mere whispers to the roar that greeted that goal, and that pulsating din of excitement did not diminish from then until the end of the game,’ wrote Spurs captain Ron Burgess. Despite many frantic goalmouth moments at both ends in the second half, the score-line remained the same at the final whistle. Spurs were the champions, the first time they had won the title in their long history. ‘The crowd went crazy, and I don’t think many of the players were too sane at that particular moment,’ said Burgess.

There was one more game left in the season, and Tottenham celebrated in style, beating Liverpool 3–1. After the game, Burgess was presented with the League trophy by Arthur Drewry, the President of the Football League, who said of the champions, ‘I not only congratulate them on having won it but also on the manner in which they did so.’ A couple of days later, all the Spurs players and staff were invited to a ‘Grand Celebration Dance’ at the Royal on the Tottenham Court Road. Supporters had to pay 10 shillings 6 pence for a ticket to the event, where they were promised four hours of Ivor Kirchin and his Ballroom Orchestra.

It was a happy end to Alf’s second season in Spurs colours. But on other fronts, the prospects were darker.




FOUR Belo Horizonte (#ulink_2e69f0c0-a4be-57d3-882d-f502d4d05240)


Within months of transferring from Southampton to Spurs in the summer of 1949, Alf had justified the move by regaining his place in the England team after he had lost it to his Saints full-back rival Bill Ellerington. Languishing in the Saints reserves, his cause would have been hopeless. But his superb form for Tottenham soon attracted the England selectors, and he was picked for the match against Italy at White Hart Lane. England managed to win 2–0, but the result was harsh on the Italians, who had dominated much of the game and had only been prevented from scoring through a memorable display of goalkeeping by Bert Williams. Alf himself had a difficult match, not just in coping with the Italian winger Carapellese, but also in working with right-half Billy Wright. The Daily Sketch commented: ‘Wright could not be satisfied with his performance. There were times in the game when he went too far upfield, leaving Alf Ramsey exposed to the thrusting counter-attacks of the quick and clever Italian forwards.’ But, as always, Alf was learning, and the key lesson he took from the game was the importance of positional play. ‘That November afternoon I realized more than ever before that it is sometimes more important to watch the man rather than the ball, to watch where the man you are marking runs when he has parted with the ball,’ he wrote.

Alf had performed creditably enough, however, and soon became a fixture in the England team, winning 31 caps in succession. One of his fellow players in that Italian game was the revered Preston winger Sir Tom Finney, who was immediately impressed by Alf:

I felt he was a really outstanding full-back, with a good idea of how the game should be played. He was very good at using the ball; unlike some others, he never seemed just to punt it up the field and hope that it got to one of his own side. He always felt that the game should be played on the floor. But he was not particularly fast, and I don’t think he liked playing against people who were clever on the ball and quick.

Like most of the Tottenham players, Sir Tom never found it easy to mix with Alf;

To be honest, he was a bit of a loner. He was not easy-going. He did not suffer fools gladly. He was a theorist who had his own ideas on how the game should be played, but he kept those ideas to himself. He had a very quiet personality, never swore much. I always got on all right with him but I never found that he was a fella who wanted to talk a lot. I would not say that he had many great friends in the England set-up. Unlike some less experienced players who have just broken through into the international team, Alf never felt the need to link up with anyone.

According to Sir Tom, though Alf was generally ‘very serious’ he could display an odd, dry sense of humour. On one occasion, when Spurs had drawn with Preston at Deepdale in the FA Cup, Sir Tom popped his head round the corner of the Spurs dressing-room to say hello to Alf, who was, after all, an England colleague. In his account in his autobiography, Finney wrote:

Alf, who was standing close to the door, seemed quite animated.

‘Not much point you lot coming all the way to London for the reply,’ he barked. ‘There will be nothing for you at Spurs.’

I was taken aback, not so much by what had been said but more by who had said it. I looked Alf in the eyes for a moment but it was impossible to tell whether he was being aggressive, jocular or simply mischievous. He was dead right though – four days later we lost by a single goal at White Hart Lane.

It was always an absurdity that Sir Tom Finney, one of the finest footballers in history, should have to run a business as a plumber in Preston because his earnings from the game throughout the forties and fifties were so meagre. When he and Alf played against Italy in 1949, the maximum wage stood at just £12 a week, while England players received a match fee of just £30, plus £ 1-a-day expenses if the team were playing abroad. It was a semi-feudal system, one where players were tied to their clubs even against their will, since the clubs held their registration and no move was possible without the directors’ permission.

Yet this oppressive relationship was only a reflection of the deeper malaise in football at the time. England was the nation that gave football to the world in the 19th century, but it had failed to progress much since then. Complacently living in the past, the game’s administrators and journalists still told themselves that English football was the finest in the world. The evidence for this global supremacy, it was claimed, lay in the fact that England had never been beaten by a foreign side at home. It was not strictly true even in 1949, when the Republic of Ireland won 2–0 at Goodison Park, but, despite all the years of bitter enmity across the Irish Sea and Ireland having competed in two World Cups as a sovereign state, Eire was transformed into a home nation for the purposes of maintaining the undefeated record. Alf’s trip with Southampton to Brazil in 1948 had shown him the rapid developments that were happening elsewhere in the world, especially in terms of tactics and equipment. But England clung to the reassuring, outdated certainties of W–M formations and ankle-wrapping boots. Training was hopelessly unsuited to a modern, fast-moving game. Indeed, many coaches still clung to the grotesque notion that professionals should be deprived of the ball during the week, so that they would be more hungry for it on Saturday. In place of perfecting their ball skills, they had to carry out endless laps of the track. ‘The dislike of the ball was pretty universal in training. I thought it was crazy,’ says Sir Tom Finney. The physical treatment of players was equally primitive. It was usually carried out by a former club stalwart who knew nothing of dealing with injuries.

The paralysis within English football was perhaps most graphically highlighted in the antique way the FA and the Football League were run. Both were managed more like a somnolent Oxford college than a professional sports body. The Football Association, which was composed largely of representatives from the counties and old universities, had a certain contempt for men who earned their living from the game. Snobbery, poor record keeping and amateurism were rife throughout the organization. When Stanley Rous first became secretary in 1934, there were complaints about his inappropriate dress for matches. ‘I would remind you,’ said one old councillor, ‘that your predecessor would go to matches in a top hat and frock coat.’ This kind of nonsense was still carrying on after the war, with FA members more worried about protocol than performance. The Football League was just as bad. The Yorkshireman Alan Hardaker, who was later to be compared to a cross between Caligula and Jimmy Cagney because of his autocratic methods, arrived at the League’s headquarters in Preston in 1951, as deputy to the secretary Frederick Howarth. Hardaker was shocked at what he found. Housed in an old vicarage, the League kept no proper records and stored files in the attics. Like some Victorian colonialist, Howarth relied on telegrams rather than the telephone. His loathing for the press equalled that for modern technology. ‘Howarth was against change of any sort, particularly if it meant more work for him,’ wrote Hardaker. As a result, ‘The League was like a machine that had been lying in a corner for three quarters of a century.’

The antiquated approach extended to the selection of the national team. What should have been the job of the England manager was instead in the hands of a group of opinionated, often elderly, figures who had absolutely no experience of international football. The eight FA selectors were inordinately proud of their role and enjoyed their trips abroad, but they disastrously lacked judgement or any long-term vision. Riddled with prejudices, often displaying blatant bias towards players from their own clubs, they showed no consistency, no understanding of the needs of modern football. ‘There was always this chopping and changing. Someone would have a tremendous game for England and then be dropped, for no reason,’ says Sir Tom Finney. At their meetings, the selectors would go through each position in turn, seeking nominations and then holding a vote to decide the choice if there were a dispute. On occasions, they could be breathtakingly ignorant. In his first games for England, Bobby Moore was frequently mistaken by one selector for the Wolves midfielder Ron Flowers, purely because they both had blond hair. Similarly, John Connelly, the Burnley winger, recalled talking to a selector during the 1962 World Cup in Chile: ‘All the time it was Alan this, Alan that. He thought I was our reserve goalkeeper, Alan Hodgkinson.’

The man trying to grapple with this system was Walter Winterbottom, who had been appointed England manager and FA Director of Coaching in 1946. The very fact that these two enormous jobs were combined in one individual only demonstrates the indifference that the FA showed towards the management of the national team. In the face of his burden, Winterbottom fought hard to bring some rationality to the chaos. Before the war, he had been an undistinguished player with Manchester United before a back injury ended his career. Having paid his way through Carnegie College of Physical Education, he served as a PT instructor in the Air Ministry during the war, rising to the rank of wing-commander. His military credentials, earnest, academic manner and plummy voice appealed to the socially conscious chiefs of the FA. But Winterbottom was no cypher. As passionate and obsessive about football as Alf Ramsey, he had analysed the game in depth and, through his position as Director of Coaching, he aimed to start a technical revolution in English football by raising skills and tactical awareness. Many of the future generations of top managers were inspired by Winterbottom’s coaching. ‘Walter was a leader, a messiah, he set everyone’s eyes alight,’ said Ron Greenwood. Sir Bobby Robson was moved to call him ‘a prophet. He was my motivator in terms of my staying in football.’ Alf himself wrote of one of Winterbottom’s team talks during his first England tour in 1948: ‘His tactical knowledge of Continental teams, and his outlook on the Italian methods and temperament left a lasting impression on me.’

But, as well as the vicissitudes of the selection process, Winterbottom was faced with two other major problems. The first was the reluctance of some major stars to accept any degree of instruction, especially from someone who had never played international football. With a narrowness typical of the period, certain players believed that fitness and ability were all that mattered, with coaching regarded as alien and demeaning. In an interview with the BBC, the centre-forward Tommy Lawton recalled an early pre-match session with Winterbottom:

He said to us, ‘The first thing we’ll do, chaps, is that we’ll meet in half an hour. I’ve arranged a blackboard and we will discuss tactics.’

I looked at him and said, ‘We’ll discuss WHAT?’

‘Well, how we’re going to play it and do it.’

So I said, ‘Are you telling me that you’ve got a blackboard downstairs, and, God forbid, you’re going to tell Stan Matthews how to play at outside right and me, you’re going to tell me, how to score goals? You’ve got another think coming.’

For all its arrogance, Lawton’s contempt illustrated the deeper, long-term problem with Winterbottom: his failure to command automatic respect from players. Winterbottom was too remote, too theoretical to motivate his teams. His lack of top-class experience told against him. Once, on a coaching course, he asked a group of professionals:

‘Can you give me a reason why British players lack environmental awareness?’

‘Because we didn’t get enough meat during the war,’ came the cynical reply.

Unlike Alf, he did not have that natural, intangible aura which incites devotion. ‘Walter was a likeable fellow,’ says Roger Hunt, one of the 1966 winners, ‘but he didn’t instill the same degree of discipline as Alf did later. Somehow, he came across more like an old-fashioned amateur.’ Alan Peacock, the Middlesbrough and Leeds striker, is even more scathing:

Alf was very different to Walter Winterbottom. I was not impressed with Walter at all. He was like a schoolmaster. That’s how he came across. It was so much better under Alf; he knew how to set teams up. But Walter was more like a cricket coach from the Gentlemen. He had little understanding of the way professionals operate. Walter was too scared to upset anyone. Some players need a kick up the arse, others can be talked to.

Bobby Charlton, who played for four years under Winterbottom, felt that

there was no sense of belonging in the team. Walter had this impeccable accent, whereas football’s a poor man’s game, players expect to be sworn at, a bit of industrial language. Through no fault of his own, Walter used to make it seem an academic language. He used to go through things in discussion that I felt were obvious to people who were supposed to be good players. It was theory all the time.

Jimmy Greaves, who like Charlton began his England career in the late fifties, has this analysis of the difference between Winterbottom and Ramsey:

Walter was a joy, although I never understood a word he said. I used to think, what on earth is he talking about, but I loved him all the same. I had the same respect for Alf, but the fun did go out of it. The thing about Walter was he could smile quite easily in defeat. If I wanted a manager who’d make friends, it would be Walter. If I wanted a winning team, I’d take Alf. He brought atmosphere and spirit. This was something Walter failed to do. Too often during Walter’s era, teams were like strangers, on and off the pitch.

The consequences of Winterbottom’s inadequate leadership, inconsistent selection policies and poor administration were made clear in the most dramatic fashion in 1950, when England entered the World Cup for the first time. Until then, the FA had refused to enter the competition, deeming it too inferior for England. Indeed, between 1927 and 1946, the British associations were not even members of FIFA, having withdrawn after a series of disputes over issues such as separate membership for the Irish Free State. In a signal of FIFA’s welcome for Britain’s return from isolation, it was generously decided that the 1949–50 Home International series could be used as a qualifier for the tournament in Brazil, with the top two teams going forward to the finals. England topped the table easily, having beaten all three of the other nations. But the Scottish FA had previously announced that they would not be going to Brazil unless they won the Home International championship. Travelling as runners-up would not be good enough. Despite pleading from England and FIFA, Scotland stuck with this self-denying, pig-headed decision, and remained at home. It was a move that only fuelled Alf’s growing dislike of what he came to call ‘the strange little men’ north of the border.

Despite never having competed before, England were one of the favourites for the World Cup, largely because of the lustre of their name. But it was obvious, almost as soon as the party had gathered, that the preparations were inadequate. Instead of heading to South America a few weeks early to acclimatize, the England team held some practice sessions on the ground of Dulwich Hamlet FC at Dog Kennel Hill. ‘I would have preferred to have gone to Brazil, got accustomed to the conditions and, of course, had a series of trial matches under the conditions we should have had to face,’ said Alf, adding ruefully that the FA’s finances did not stretch to this. In fact, England flew out barely a week before their first game. The Lockheed Constellation took off from Heathrow early on 19 June at the start of a journey lasting 31 hours, with stops on the way at Paris, Lisbon, Dakar and Recife, before landing in Rio on the 21st. ‘The whole thing was a farce really, a shambles. We had a week’s training in Dulwich, then the journey to Brazil seemed to take for ever. By the time we stepped off the plane, everyone was knackered,’ recalls Alf’s Spurs team-mate Eddie Baily, who was making his first England trip. Baily was also disturbed by the absence of any proper medical support. ‘Can you believe it? All that way across the world and no bleedin’ doctor.’ Exhausted, the players made their way to the Luxor Hotel by the Copacabana beach, where they were shocked by the conditions they found, as Winterbottom later recalled:

Probably it was my fault because we should have gone into things more thoroughly but the Luxor was hopeless for our needs. As soon as we arrived, I knew there would be problems. When I inspected the kitchens, I was almost sick; the smell went up into the bedrooms, the food was swimming in oil and it was practically impossible to arrange suitable meals. Nearly all the players went down with tummy upsets at one time or another.

As Stanley Mortensen, one of the team’s wits, put it, ‘Even the dustbins have ulcers.’

The players encountered further difficulties as they practised in the South American heat, as Alf, who prided himself on his fitness, wrote:

During our training spells two things quickly impressed themselves upon me. The first was that during practice matches, I found it very hard to breathe. Secondly, at the conclusion of even an easy kick-around, I felt infinitely more tired than after a hectic League match at home.

But for all their problems, England did not seem to face a difficult passage to the next round, having been drawn against Chile, the USA and Spain. And progress seemed assured when England defeated Chile 2–0 in their opening game. Next came the apparent formality of beating the unknowns of the United States, a country that had no more interest in soccer than England had in baseball. For this game, the team had to fly 300 miles inland from Rio to Belo Horizonte, a modern city whose layout impressed Alf from the air: ‘such a beautifully planned city with “baby skyscrapers”, much loftier than any buildings we have in this country.’ Alf was not so enamoured by the coach-ride from the airport to the team’s base at the British-owned Morro Velho gold mine 16 miles from Belo Horizonte. According to Alf, this involved ‘the nightmare experience of being driven around the 167 hairpin bends on a road which seemed to cling to the side of the mountain’. Nor was the accommodation, a series of chalets on a miners’ camp, a great improvement on the Luxor Hotel. ‘They stuck us in wooden huts. It was really primitive. We couldn’t sleep at night,’ recalled the goalkeeper Bert Williams. Even so, on the eve of the match, the players were in high spirits, enjoying a sing-along led, inevitably, by Eddie Baily, whom Alf often compared to the cockney comic Max Miller. No one doubted what the outcome would be the following day. One old miner at the camp asked Alf, ‘Tell me, how many do you think you’ll win by?’ Back home, the Daily Express argued that the American team was so hopeless that England should give them a three-goal start. Double figures were possible, thought John Thompson of the Daily Mirror. Arthur Drewry, the Grimsby fishmonger who added to his duties as President of the Football League by serving as the chief selector for the England XI in the World Cup, was so confident that he decided the US game should be treated as little more than a practice match before the real contest against Spain. With barely a word of explanation, he overruled Winterbottom, who had wanted Stanley Matthews picked.

But the mood of optimism was dampened when the players reached the Belo Horizonte stadium, where they found a narrow pitch with coarse grass and a sprinkling of stones; ‘I’d known better playing as a kid on the marshes,’ says Eddie Baily. The dressing-rooms, which had only just been completed and reeked of building materials, were so dingy that Winterbottom took the players off to change at a local athletic club, ten minutes’ bus ride away. On their return, the England team were greeted by a large hostile crowd of 20,000 gathered behind the 12-foot high concrete wall that surrounded the pitch. The atmosphere was intimidating, claustrophic. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever played in a prison,’ said Bert Williams to Alf.

Still, they were only playing the USA. And within minutes of the kick-off, England – wearing blue shirts to avoid a clash with the white of the Americans – were already on the attack, scything through the inexperienced American defence. It seemed only a matter of time before there would be a goal from England’s front line, which included such legends as Tom Finney, Stan Mortensen of Blackpool and Wilf Mannion of Middlesbrough. But, after half an hour of missed opportunities, the scores remained level. Then, in the 37th minute, came the truly unexpected. A long, speculative shot was hit towards England’s penalty box. There seemed little danger, for Bert Williams had it covered. But just as he was moving for it, the American centre-forward Joe Gaetjens – who later died in a prison in Haiti after taking part in the attempted coup against the corrupt regime of Papa Doc Duvalier – burst forward instinctively. As he dived, the ball appeared to hit the back of his head, took a wicked deflection and flew past Williams into the net. The English thought it was a freakish goal; the Americans praised Gaetjens’ heroism.

England went into half-time still 1–0 down. Winterbottom reassured them that the goals were bound to come, but as one of the forwards, Roy Bentley, commented, ‘It had begun to feel as though we could play for a week and not score.’ It was the same sorry story in the second half. England squandered a wealth of easy chances, frequently hitting the woodwork or blasting over the bar. ‘I was sitting alongside Stan Matthews, and he kept saying, “Bless my soul, bless my soul,” remembers Eddie Baily. England captain Billy Wright later recalled how frustrated Alf became: ‘Even Alf Ramsey, who used to be expressionless throughout a game, threw up his arms and looked to the sky when a perfect free-kick was somehow saved by their unorthodox keeper.’ The England players even felt the referee was conspiring against them, especially when, in the dying minutes, another of Ramsey’s free-kicks was met firmly by Stan Mortensen’s header and appeared to cross the line, only for the referee to disallow the goal. There was to be no reprieve. After 90 minutes, England had lost by that single Gaetjens’ strike. ‘I have never felt worse on a football pitch than at that final whistle,’ said Billy Wright. The crowd erupted in disbelief and ecstasy, setting fire to newspapers on the terraces and letting off a barrage of fireworks into the blue sky. When the result was flashed to newsrooms in England across the wires from Reuters, there was incredulity. It was widely thought that a typing error had been made, with the real score being England 10, USA 1.

But the players were all too aware of the catastrophe. ‘The dressing-room was like a morgue. It felt like a disgrace to lose to a team of no-hopers. I think it was the darkest moment of my career,’ says Sir Tom Finney. In attempts to lessen the shame, a number of legends grew up. One was that England had been desperately unlucky, since nothing more than fate had prevented a deserved victory. ‘I think a fair result would have been 12–1,’ says Bert Williams. Alf Ramsey himself summed up this attitude: ‘So far as we were concerned there was a gremlin upon that football and it was not our day, the United States running out winners by that “streaky” goal.’ Another complaint was that the USA had fielded a team of ineligible players from overseas; the florid, faintly ridiculous Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express wrote that the American eleven ‘seemed to have come straight from Ellis Island because there was not an American-born player in the side’. This is nonsense. Eight of them were born in the US, while the other three, whose number included the former Wrexham midfielder Eddie McIlvanney, were cleared by FIFA under the residency rule. It was, in any case, a pitiful charge. Why should England have had anything to fear from a group of journeymen, no matter where they came from?

From an American viewpoint, however, England were far less dominant than was later suggested. An interesting article in the magazine Soccer America highlighted how poorly England played – and not just the forwards. The US full-back Harry Keough, for instance, felt that ‘England took us too lightly and tried to come in too close early in the game before shooting’. Keough went on, in reference to Bert Williams’ argument that England should have won 12–1: ‘He isn’t telling it all. He had to tip over one from our left-winger, Ed Souza, with 15 minutes to go. And with three minutes left our right-winger Frank Wallace took off on a breakaway and only had Williams to beat, which he did, but Alf Ramsey followed the play and saved it.’ But Ramsey, claimed Keough, ‘had otherwise a bad day, with Ed Souza beating him frequently’. And even the Daily Mail admitted that Souza ‘played a victory march against Wright and Ramsey’. In Talking Football, Ramsey described Ed Souza, with a hint of mournful euphemism, as ‘a truly great player who possessed a pair of educated feet in addition to a pair of broad shoulders which he used fairly and often.’

To this day, England’s defeat by the USA remains the greatest upset in the nation’s sporting history. It haunted the players for years, a stain on their reputations. The supposed champions of the world had been turned into an international laughing stock. ‘I hate thinking about it even now,’ Bert Williams said recently. For Alf Ramsey, the defeat rankled deeply. One journalist, who mentioned the match years later, recorded that ‘his face creased and he looked like a man who had been jabbed in an unhealed wound’. Educated in the days when there was still an Empire, Alf was a ferocious English patriot, one who always described his nationality on official forms as ‘English’ rather than ‘British’. His almost visceral attachment to his country was one of the cornerstones of his existence. And when the chance came more than a decade later, he was determined to avenge this humiliation.

Broken and bewildered, England played their last group game against Spain, needing a win to gain a play-off place. Brought into the side alongside Stan Matthews, Eddie Baily did his best to raise morale:

Walter said to me before the kick-off, ‘Just settle in and give Stan the ball.’

‘Is he going to give it back?’ I said.

There was nothing funny about the result. England were beaten 1–0 and crashed out of the World Cup. Again, there were complaints about the refereeing and the conditions. ‘I have never played in a game so hot. The temperature must have been 105 degrees. At half-time, we went down into the dressing-room and had to put on oxygen masks,’ says Eddie Baily. ‘The referee allowed an unbelievable amount of obstruction and shirt-pulling. I remember Alf, who had this thing about fair play, being furious.’ Alf even claimed that the Spaniards must have thought they were playing basketball, such was their propensity to use their hands. With the kind of patronizing insularity that was to become his hallmark, Alf said in 1952 of the referee’s interpretation of the rules, ‘It is going to take a considerable time for the whole world to see football as we do.’

In truth, it was going to take England a long time to catch up with the rest of the world. Convinced that their team had been the victims of nothing more than bad luck, the self-satisfied football establishment learnt little from the Brazilian fiasco. The illusion was maintained that England were still the best in the world. There were to be no changes in policy or structure or playing style. The attitude was captured by the statement of Bob Jackson, manager of Portsmouth, the club which won successive championship titles in the late forties: ‘What suits Continentals and South Americans doesn’t necessarily suit us. We have a way of playing that has stood the test of time. Given more favourable conditions and a fair crack of the whip, we can beat anybody.’

England may have been failing, but for Alf personally the years immediately after the American debacle were the best of his international playing career. Now in his thirties, he was at the peak of his confidence, his understanding of the game enhanced by experience. It is a tribute to his effectiveness that in an era of fluctuating selection policy, Alf was not to lose his place for three seasons. His own captain, Billy Wright, was glowing in his praise of his right-back. He once described Alf as ‘the coolest player I have ever seen in an international match’ and ‘one of the greatest of modern defenders. He brought with him into the game tremendous thought and initiative.’ Playing in front of Ramsey, said Wright, ‘I have come to appreciate the tremendous accuracy of his passes. He strokes the ball along the grass with radar-like accuracy.’ He went on to refer to Alf’s unique understanding of the game:

I could sit for hours and talk football with Alf Ramsey. He has the priceless ability of being able to put over new ideas in a splendid fashion, encourages his colleagues to reveal their own theories and in every way is a remarkable character whose contribution to the game has definitely helped to improve the standard of defensive play.

As an example of Alf’s thinking, Wright cited his tactics playing for Spurs against the Newcastle and Scottish winger Bobby Mitchell, one of those quick players who always worried him. Before the match, Alf examined the pitch at White Hart Lane, looking closely at the two ends where he would operate. He said little, but proceeded to have one of the best League games of his life, continually forcing Mitchell into the dampest areas. ‘Even the world’s greatest ball-players cannot play in mud,’ said Alf afterwards.

Ramsey had become such a central figure in the English team that when Wright was dropped in the autumn of 1950 because of poor form, Alf was chosen as the England captain for the Home International against Wales, a game which England won easily 4–2. Alf, in the words of Tom Finney, was ‘an ideal captain, very methodical. He studied the game a lot and knew so much about it.’ With Wright still absent, Alf retained the captaincy for the next match, against Yugoslavia. England’s vulnerability was becoming more apparent than ever, as Ramsey’s team were held to a 2–2 draw, the first time that a continental side had achieved a draw on English soil. Making his debut in that game was the brave-hearted Bolton centre-forward and former coalminer Nat Lofthouse. ‘From the start, Alf did all he could to make me, the only new international in the side, feel at home,’ said Lofthouse. ‘His great knowledge of soccer and his ability to discuss the game in an interesting way, made a profound impression on me.’ Talking of his wider qualities, Lofthouse called Alf ‘the greatest driver of an accurate ball I have ever seen. When he makes up his mind to send a clearance to you, the ball invariably finds its target. The tremendous accuracy and faith that Alf has in himself also gives confidence to others.’

After a solid game against Yugoslavia, Alf had a far more painful ordeal: his first major after-dinner speech. To the end of his life, Alf found such appearances difficult. An awkward, stilted speaker, he was unable to enliven his performances with either humorous anecdotes or powerful delivery. ‘I don’t think he took kindly to public speaking. He was not very good at it; he was very clipped,’ says the journalist Ken Jones. Alf confessed that, at that 1950 banquet, ‘I was extremely nervous. I would rather take a penalty at Wembley than again go through such an experience.’ He managed to get through it, however, with ‘a few words of thanks’. Fortunately for Alf, he would give up this ambassadorial role, when Billy Wright returned to the captaincy in early 1951, having recovered his form.

Ramsey showed no signs of any decline in his. He had become so cool that even with England he would retain the Spurs approach, often trapping clearances deep in his own half, inviting a challenge from his opponent before pushing the ball to a colleague. One of his increasingly important gifts was his deadliness at set pieces, as Nat Lofthouse recalled in 1954:

Another of Ramsey’s intelligent moves, developed because of his beautifully controlled kicking, has brought many goals from free kicks. Ramsey and I have practised this move for hours before international matches. He possesses an uncanny knack of being able to place a football almost on a pinhead. Such accuracy is, of course, the outcome of years of hard work, a factor people are inclined to forget when they see the master soccer-man in action. It is, however, only when you have been out on the pitch with Alf Ramsey that you appreciate his greatness.

In 1953, Billy Wright wrote of Alf’s quest for perfection:

For hours Alf Ramsey and Nat Lofthouse practised this move. I have rarely known Ramsey to be completely satisfied with his efforts and although early on he was placing the ball on Lofthouse’s napper eight times out of ten, Alf, we all knew, would never be content until he could do it ten times out of ten.

Alf’s manager, Walter Winterbottom, in a BBC interview in 1970, emphasized his importance as an England player, praising him for being ‘so consistent’. Winterbottom went on:

We always felt confident in him. He was a thinking full-back, one who believed in precision passing. He was good with his drives; he could hit the ball very true. He was also precise in those long, floating lobs, about forty yards up the field. He could put an absolutely precise centre which would allow someone like Nat Lofthouse – who was a bit like Geoff Hurst – to run in at an angle and meet the ball at the right moment to outwit the keeper. Alf was already then forming opinions around this idea of concentrated defensive work, of never losing the ball when you had possession and of this all-round playing and hard working of the team. The things coming through now I could see when he was playing.

A profile in the Daily Mirror in February 1951 called Alf ‘the soccer intellectual’. It stated that

to Ramsey, football appears as a succession of chess problems, an exercise of the intellect. For all that, he can produce a lustiness and strength in the tackle when needed. He passes the ball with supreme accuracy and precise pace. He spends as much time in practice as any inside-forward might. These are the qualities of Ramsey’s game reflected in himself. He dresses quietly, immaculately. In conversation, he is reflective. He said one very significant thing to me: ‘I don’t care too much to be told that I have had a wonderful game. I prefer it when someone points out a fault. Then I can do something about it.’

Alf was particularly impressive in the match against Argentina, when England looked incapable of breaking down the South Americans until his calm assurance pulled them through to win 2–1. Bernard Joy of The Star described Alf’s performance as

the finest full-back display I have seen in many years. Ramsey played as though there were no Argentinos within miles. He refused to be stampeded into helter-skelter methods and particularly in the second half sent forward a stream of precision passes. Ramsey it was who realized that the only way to draw the Argentine defence from goalmouth was to start short passing bouts in midfield. And his brainy free kick with the ball to the far post instead of into the centre of the crowded penalty area won the match.

Alf’s authority was even more crucial in the match against Austria in November 1951, when England’s unbeaten record against continental sides came under its most severe threat yet. Led by their brilliant attacking centre-half Ernst Ocwirk, Austria were one of the most powerful teams in Europe at the time, and with only 25 minutes to go, as they led 1–0, they seemed to be on the verge of a famous victory. But then Eddie Baily won the ball, weaved his way through the Austrian defence and was about to shoot when he was brought down. The referee instantly gave a penalty.

The eyes of the huge Wembley crowd instantly turned to Alf, whose unflappable temperament had made him the chief penalty taker for Spurs and England. As he walked up to the spot, Eddie Baily said to him, ‘I’ve done all the fuckin’ hard work for you, Alf, now make sure you score.’ A silence descended around the stadium, everyone knowing that England’s long cherished record depended on the ‘The General’. Preparing to take the kick, Alf exuded his usual steadiness, behaving as casually ‘as if he were taking a stroll along Bournemouth Front,’ said Billy Wright. But Alf was always good at covering up his feelings. Inwardly, recorded Alf, ‘my heart was beating madly and the goal appeared to have shrunk to about half its normal size’. The tension grew while Alf placed the ball slowly and deliberately on the spot. As in everything else in football, he was a master of detail when it came to penalties. ‘In the course of practice I have noticed that if you kick a football with the lace facing the sky it invariably rises high and, after making some experiments, I discovered that the best way to place the ball for a spot kick is to make the lace face the keeper.’ Finally satisfied with his placement, he took a few steps back and then, on the referee’s signal, moved towards the ball. Just as his right foot was about to make contact, he saw the Austrian keeper move slightly to his right. ‘At once, like a boxer going in for the kill, I side-footed the ball into the other side of the net.’ A vast, echoing roar went round the terraces as the ball sped across the lush Wembley turf into the corner.

Three minutes later England took the lead, again thanks to Alf. All the hours of practice with Nat Lofthouse paid off, as one of his perfectly flighted free-kicks sailed over the Austria defence and straight onto the head of Nat Lofthouse, who knocked it down into the net. But Austria refused to give up and late in the game scored the equalizer through a penalty. To England’s relief, the score-line finished 2–2. The unbeaten home record against Europe remained intact. With little sense of perspective, the Daily Mail praised England for ‘a glorious fighting display that completely rehabilitated the reputation of English international football, threadbare since our World Cup defeat’. This may have been an exaggeration, but Alf certainly deserved the plaudits. He was, according to the Mail, England’s ‘ice-cool hero’. Alf himself described the game as ‘my greatest international’.

One England player making his debut in that historic game was the young Arsenal winger Arthur Milton, who also played cricket for Gloucestershire and England; indeed, he was to be the last ever double international. Today, Milton has interesting memories of playing alongside Alf:

Alf was very quiet in the dressing-room, very quiet. But I was the new boy, so he came and had a chat, telling me to go out and play my game and enjoy it. I found him reassuring, comforting. Walter Winterbottom, the manager, was not all that forthcoming. Billy Wright was the captain, but I found Alf the most reassuring of those three. I could see that he was very in control of himself. He did not make a fuss. To be honest, I got lost a bit in the game, not having had much experience, but I got no ball from Billy Wright. I always felt that Bill Nicholson was a much better wing-half than Billy Wright. Now Alf, he was a real class act. He stood out. Not perhaps such a good defender as a distributor of the ball. He was good in defence but nothing exceptional. But his use of the ball was always fantastic. Lovely mover he was.

Throughout 1952, Alf remained a fixture in the England team, playing in all seven internationals, including the famous 3–2 win against Austria in Vienna, when Nat Lofthouse ran half the length of the field to score the winner. In the crowd at the Prater stadium, there was a large contingent of British soldiers, members of the multi-national Forces of Occupation, and at the final whistle they poured onto the field in celebration. A surprised Alf was hoisted on the shoulders of one khaki-clad Tommy, who told him, ‘We ain’t half pleased mate. The local lads have been telling us for months what they were going to do to you. Well, you well and truly done ’em, mate.’ For all his obvious class, Alf allowed occasional errors to creep into his play. Against Portugal at Goodison in 1951, for instance, he mis-hit a backpass which allowed the Portugese to equalize 2–2, though England eventually ran out winners 5–2. Even worse was his howler against Northern Ireland in Belfast in November 1952. The Celtic forward Charlie Tully, one of the quick mercurial wingers who always troubled Alf, took an inswinging corner. On the near post Alf seemed to have it covered and was preparing to head the ball away, when suddenly he swerved outside its path. The ball sailed into the net, ‘as if pulled by some magnetic force’, to use the phrase of England goalkeeper Gil Merrick. Afterwards, with typical conviction and no word of apology, Alf told Merrick, ‘I let it go because I thought it was going to hit the side netting.’





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