Kitabı oku: «The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain», sayfa 2
German attacks were arriving in waves on Matthews’s goal. One shot, suddenly fired out of the mêlée on the edge of the England penalty area by a player the commentator identified as Fritz Walter, went with such force that it gave the impression of blowing Reg off his feet. As the camera jerked wildly left to follow it, he was horizontal, diving backwards and to his right, a yard from the ground, his arms thrust out the same distance. But momentarily suspended in this midair position, and with a snap as it hit his hands, he caught the ball cleanly.
The brilliance of it made me start and catch my breath. I had seen pictures of keepers in various moments of dramatic action, some diving to deflect shots with their fingertips around a goalpost or over the crossbar. In others they might be parrying the ball or, more rarely, seen in the act of punching it; my dad said it was ‘continental’ keepers who tended to be the punchers. But Reg did not tip the ball around or over his goal to give the opposition the minor satisfaction of winning a corner kick. Nor did he parry or punch the ball back into play to leave the German forwards with the chance of following up. His catch ended the danger in virtually the instant it had arisen.
The impact as he landed in the goalmouth might easily have been enough to dislodge the ball from his grasp and the air from his lungs. Having hit the ground it would have been understandable if he had stayed there a while, to gather his breath and thoughts, or take brief stock of any plaudits that might be on offer from his teammates or the crowd. Oh, and a good save by Matthews,’ the commentator was saying.
‘Good save,’ murmured my dad, in appreciation but without getting too excited about it.
There was no time for us to reflect further. Matthews had sprung back on his feet, as if the film of the previous moment had been put into reverse or he’d been attached to a large rubber band. He was racing to the edge of his penalty area, bouncing the ball every fourth step as required by the rules of the game. As he dodged past his and the German players, he looked concerned to rid himself of the ball as quickly as possible and, with it, all evidence of his save. He seemed embarrassed by the whole affair, guilty for having attracted attention to himself. As he released the ball from his hands and punted it upfield, the BBC man was only just concluding his comment, ‘… young Reg Matthews of Coventry City’.
Coventry I had heard of. Just about all children had. Like London it had really suffered the Blitz. Other cities were hardly mentioned: Hull, Plymouth, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, where relatives of my nan were bombed out twice before another direct hit killed them. Coventry was one of the rare nights in nine months of the Blitz, said my mum, that London had had off. She and the family had just arrived in Sandy when the bombers were overhead again, droning backwards and forwards. This time they flew on to the Midlands. Delivering his papers next day to the stand outside Old Street station, my grandad heard the man there complain what a bad night it had been. Next to no one – with the certain exception of Great-aunt Polly – had gone down the tube to take shelter and he’d hardly sold a thing. Coventry hadn’t had much of a time of it either.
While London stood for defiance and heroic endurance, we learnt that Coventry, which had been flattened, embodied the spirit of rising again. It seemed exactly right that Reg Matthews of Coventry should be bouncing up and down against the might of Germany on the television in front of me. He and his city were what the newspapers and my comics called ‘plucky’, whatever that meant. But his club I’d not heard of. Coventry City were not one of the big teams, the Wolverhamptons, either of the Manchesters, the Arsenals, Blackpools, Preston North Ends and Burnleys in the top division of the English league. Nor were they in the Second. Reg’s team were all the way down in the Third Division South, and even towards the tail-end of that. When the Fourth Division was set up three years later from the bottom halves of the Third Divisions North and South, Coventry City were founder members.
A goalkeeper from the humblest rung of the English football league was pitched against the Germans. Furthermore, the Germans were not any old foreign international team. They were holders of the World Cup, which they’d won two years earlier in Switzerland by beating no less than Puskas and the Hungarians. Reg Matthews could one week be up against the might of Gillingham at home, the next facing vengeful Germans away. From a foot-of-the-league battle with Bournemouth, he might suddenly have to face the flowing rhythms of Brazil. He had done, just over a fortnight earlier at Wembley, when England won 4–2 in the first game between the two countries.
Reg was typical of the British small guy, ‘plucky’ and plucked from a modest background to face whatever the world had to confront us with. Among the British national teams, England’s goalkeepers weren’t alone in affording their selectors the luxury of being able to reach down the divisions for someone of the highest calibre to defend the last line. Only Jack Kelsey of Arsenal and Wales was a keeper in the First Division. Ireland’s Harry Gregg played for Doncaster Rovers and Scotland’s Tommy Younger for Liverpool, both in the Second. When Gregg made his debut two years earlier, he’d been playing in Doncaster’s third team. It all went to prove that while others claimed fancy titles – the ‘World Cup’ itself was an example – we didn’t need to.
Reg Matthews’s clearance upfield in Berlin found an England forward, who put in a shot on goal. It was not a particularly strong one. With a couple of brisk steps to his left, the German goalkeeper could have picked up the ball. He opted not to move his feet, however, and dived. Actually, it was more like a flop. He stopped the shot easily enough, and there on the ground lingered, hugging the ball to his chest. You could see a white number ‘1’ on the back of his black jersey, facing the presumably grey Berlin sky. He kept glancing up, heightening the drama, soaking the moment for all, and much more than, it was worth. The misguided crowd cheered their appreciation and he even found time to smile in acknowledgement. ‘It’s a wonder he doesn’t wave,’ said my dad, no longer in an approving murmur but waving his own hand at the screen in disgust. ‘There’s the difference between us, you see. We get up and get on with it.’
When the German keeper finally did get on with it, I wished he hadn’t. His forwards resumed their assault on Reg Matthews’s goal, whereupon Walter materialised again to score. ‘And it’s Fritz Walter!’ shouted the commentator. ‘The Germans have scored!’ His voice conveyed what I took to be a distinct state of alarm. He compounded mine by adding there were only five minutes to go.
There was nothing in my cultural heritage to prepare for the likelihood that the Germans might win. None of my comics, nor any film I had seen, had anything but a recurrent collection of Fritzs leering their way towards comfortable victory, till ultimately beaten by their deficiency of character. When down we got up, bounced bombs on water, sent in pilots with tin legs, or chased their battleships to distant Norwegian fjords and harbours in Latin America. We might have a tendency to get in tight situations ourselves – trapped on narrow beaches, for example – but it only needed a chirpy British private to wave a thumbs-up at the encircling Germans and say ‘Not ’arf, for them to rush out with hands aloft yelling, ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’
Only five minutes to go was a time for us to be hitting the net, not them. But just as the unthinkable was having to be thought, the scoreline moved into vision, chalked by hand on what seemed like an old piece of black cardboard at the bottom of the screen: ‘West Germany 1 England 3’.
‘There we are, we’re winning,’ said Mario, who had noticed my concern (and who always supported England, even against Italy). Not having seen a game before, and because seven-year-olds did not instigate conversations in other people’s houses, it had not occurred to me to ask the score.
‘That’s right,’ said my dad, as unruffled by the goal as Mario. ‘The Germans have never beaten us.’ When I read reports of the game, it was true the Germans had dominated much of the play, but Reg Matthews had held things together at the back, while out on the field Duncan Edwards of Manchester United had created the few England attacks there had been. From nearly all of them we scored. The wider facts were that we had indeed, never lost to them. England and Germany had played four times – twice each at home and away – since their first match against each other in 1930. England had won three and drawn the other.
This helped explain the reaction of the German crowd. Far from regarding the goal as a late and meaningless consolation, they could hardly have cheered more when they’d beaten Puskas and the Hungarians those couple of years before in Berne. The TV picked out various areas of the Olympic stadium and the spectators involved in scenes of uproarious celebration. The camera swivelled sharply to catch the German commentator in similar rapture. ‘The Germans are going mad,’ said the BBC man, with more than a hint of a laugh and in tones which suggested that foreigners could be very funny people. The thought had occurred to me.
But their antics were understandable. In their historical rivalry with England, the Germans had adjusted to a low level of expectation. This goal was a goal, after all. It was the first, too, they had scored on home soil against England since the war. They had not won, they were not near achieving even a draw, but here in Berlin a German crowd had witnessed for themselves that they were at least back on the score sheet. The camera zoomed in on the crowd and people beamed, waved and roared straight back into it. They could have been shouting as one: ‘We’ve had your aid and your Marshall Plan, and we’ve even won the World Cup. But now we’ve landed one back on you, you watch us really get going with that post-war revival.’
They had also not merely scored a goal against England. For almost ninety minutes the Germans had bombarded us, only to be kept out by a characteristic last line. Their solitary success was futile as far as the result was concerned but, at last, they had managed to get something past a typically great British goalkeeper. For a German or any foreign crowd, this was worth celebrating.
Chapter 2
More Flash than Harry
My dad had played in goal when he was at school: ‘Always good with my own company,’ he said. From a country family of seven brothers, his two nearest in age died very young and he was used to getting on with things on his own. At the age of eight he suffered paralysis and nearly died from what people came to believe was polio. Over a period of weeks he fought a lone and fevered battle with the question of whether he was to drop off this mortal coil. The family and the town doctor didn’t expect him to survive. When he did, by their and his own reckoning, he had been those few yards beyond normal experience.
He liked goalkeeping for its occasional spectacular moments. At such times you went through the air knowing you were going to save what, to teammates and opposition alike, was an unstoppable shot bound for the corner of your net. The coordination of mind and body was enough to make you smile, even laugh, as you experienced it. But, overall, it was best not to flaunt things. They had to be done properly; in other words, not overdone. The best keepers were ‘spectacular but safe’.
In British goalkeeping, the first half of the 1930s was the era of Harry Hibbs of Birmingham City. Over five years Harry won twenty-five caps for England, seeing off all challengers for the position. He presided over a period which consolidated the British tradition of goalkeeping, and one which built on foundations laid by two keepers whose heyday just preceded his own. The weighty Encyclopaedia of Sport I received one Christmas, published by Messrs Sampson Low, Marston and Co. for the children of the kingdom, dominions and empire, cast its magisterial gaze back some forty years to pronounce that ‘among the greatest of all time’ was Sam Hardy of Liverpool and Aston Villa. Hardy had been England’s goalkeeper before and after the First World War and had a gift of calm judgement. As the opposition bore down on his goalmouth he was ‘invariably in position when the shot was made’.
When Hardy was transferred to Aston Villa in 1912, he was succeeded at Liverpool by Elisha Scott, from the north of Ireland. Scott ‘was strangely like him’ and ‘positioned well’. Over seventeen seasons to 1936 he played in thirty-one internationals, a number restricted because united Irish and (after partition) Northern Irish teams played games only within the British Isles. But Scott’s appearances remained a record till the Spurs captain and half-back Danny Blanchflower outnumbered them in 1958, when Northern Ireland teams were travelling the continent and playing in World Cups. In Scott’s time there was no need to travel for his skills to be put to the sternest test. ‘At times he defied the might of England single-handed’, said my encyclopaedia. There were few greater laurels it could have tossed at the man. British keepers were expected to be a match for the world; to defy England took something really special.
Both Hardy and Scott had another factor in common which qualified them for the ranks of the greatest. This was that they made no obvious claim for the title. They carried out their goalkeeping in a serious manner, motivated by the ideal of avoiding anything remotely extroverted. Much of Hardy’s brilliance lay in the fact that he was ‘hardly noticed on the field’. He was ‘as unspectacular in goal as he was quiet and modest off it’. Scott, too, was ‘modest and quiet’ with ‘nothing of the showman about him’.
Their way was in contrast to the keeper at the top of the profession in the period before them. At the turn of the century, the confidence of Victorian empire-building had swollen out of control in the shape of Billy ‘Fatty’ Foulke. Tall for his time at 6 feet or so, Foulke weighed in across a scale of 20–24 stone. In his career for Sheffield United, Chelsea and England, Foulke threw and otherwise put himself about, intimidating opponents and authorities alike. He stormed after referees to hammer on their dressing-room doors, if decisions had not gone his way. An increasingly bloated figure, his retirement was blessedly timed for Britain’s approach to the First World War. Hardy and Scott provided the mould of those going to fight it. Millions filed into the trenches of France and Belgium to stand and wait, and to be ‘invariably in position when the shot was made’. Sam and Elisha dutifully served the cause of being the first of the type: the British keeper as the goalmouth’s humble ‘custodian’.
Harry Hibbs followed in their stead, unflappably pursuing a one-club league and Cup career of over 400 games. His first international came in 1930, the year after some shocks to the system. As if the Wall Street Crash was not enough, England’s first defeat abroad deepened the depression. It was one thing to be beaten by the Scots – twenty-four times between 1872 (when the first match between the two countries was staged) and 1929 made this reasonably common; it was quite novel to be humbled by the ‘continentals’. In the game we had invented, Spain did the dirty, 4–3 in Madrid. This was equivalent to bullfighting’s finest rolling up at Wembley from the estancias of Castille, to be humiliated by a squad of upstart toreros from the backstreets of Huddersfield. Previous English excursions abroad had been mainly confined to taking the steamer across the Channel to France or Belgium. We took our own matchballs to counter the likelihood of foreign jiggery-pokery. How the Spaniards had won the match was a source of national perplexity.
Hibbs was cannily suited to handle the uncertainties of the epoch, a man to lift the spirit by steadying the nerves. My encyclopaedia approved his style as a subtle variation from that commended by my father. Harry was ‘safe rather than spectacular’. At 5 feet 9 inches, ‘on the short side for a goalkeeper’, he compensated by refining the brilliance of Sam Hardy to still higher levels. Hibbs was not just in position for assaults on his goal, but in the only possible position: ‘He gave the impression that forwards were shooting straight at him.’
There was something very British about this knack. It was a natural detachment from the turmoil that enabled ultimate control of it. Britain in the 1930s had withdrawn into itself, in an understated, poor man’s version of the old and sensible glories of ‘Splendid Isolation’. As Harry Hibbs surveyed the scene from his goalmouth, the nation observed gathering continental chaos. Hitler and Mussolini strutted and pranced around. Britain did not have the faintest idea what to do. This could not be easily admitted, least of all to ourselves, so it was important to conjure up the sense of a nation being quietly ‘there’, in the right place should the need arise. Hibbs personified the being there. Like Britain, he was also particularly good whenever required to face the strutters and prancers. Harry’s skills were most marked, said my encyclopaedia, ‘against a continental side which included a showy keeper’.
This was possibly a reference to the Spanish goalkeeper, Ricardo Zamora, whom Hibbs and England came up against at Highbury in 1931. Revenge for the defeat two years earlier was duly extracted to the tune of a resounding 7–1. Zamora, who came with the reputation of being world-class, had a miserable game. What prompted more ridicule was the news that he earned £50 a week, compared with Hibbs’s wage of £ 8 during the season and £6 in the summer break. But the implication that the England keeper was always at his best against a showy continental was stretching the point. His better games were not abroad. He was more comfortable at home, closer to base, something which was reflected in his style of play. In keeping with the times, Harry was not one to advance happily beyond his goalkeeper’s area and into the broader reaches of the penalty box. By and large, he stuck firmly to his line.
In Hibbs’s protective shadow, a new breed was emerging. Its members were obliged to display the classical certainties of the tradition, yet felt able to add a touch of goalkeeping rococo. In Glasgow, Jack Thomson of Celtic made his reputation when Scottish keepers were expected to be no less soberly dignified than those south of the border. ‘There was little time for drama and histrionics,’ said local writer Hugh Taylor. The keeper who tried to invest his game with colour was regarded with deep-rooted suspicion, he added, and had as much chance of a successful career ‘as a bank clerk who went to work in sports jacket and flannels’.
Thomson could twist and change direction in midair. He also applied an extra thrust to his dives, to reach shots which would have been beyond others. This gift was compared to the hitch-kick later used by Jesse Owens, which won him the long-jump gold medal and world record in Berlin. All this, of course, could only be employed when the need for something spectacular arose. Thomson’s talent was not confined to his agility. As Taylor noted, he held rather than punched or parried the hardest of shots and there was no keeper more reliable. He ‘inspired tremendous confidence in the men in front of him, always watching play, combining rare, natural talent with a mathematical precision that took so many risks out of his often hazardous art’. Tragically, not all of them. He was a regular Scottish international by the age of twenty-two, but was killed in 1931 after diving and fracturing his skull at the feet of a Rangers forward at Ibrox Park.
Other young keepers who struck a popular chord followed. In 1932, Manchester City signed Frank Swift, aged seventeen. Goalkeeper for the third team, he was on ten shillings a week, so thought it financially wise to retain his job as coke-keeper at Blackpool gasworks. When City reached the 1933 Cup Final, he and a mate with a motor-cycle drove down to watch. Big for the time at 6 feet 2 inches and 13 stone 7 pounds, Swift squeezed into the sidecar. They left in the middle of the night in order to make the trip and, in the rain, managed to go off the road only once. Manchester City were more easily brushed aside, 3–0 by Everton. Swift soon found himself promoted in City’s pecking order of keepers and, on £1 a week, able to give up the gasworks. He made his debut for the first team on Christmas Day. When he was knocked out early on by the opposition centre-forward, his trainer brought him round by mistakingly spilling half a bottle of smelling salts down his throat. But in the months after, it was injury to the regular first-team keeper that left Swift in line for selection, as City won their way through to the Cup Final again in 1934. As the time approached to face this year’s opponents, Portsmouth, the prospect left him on top of the world one moment, he said, the next in fits of despondency. He told himself he was far too young to be playing at Wembley. With a ‘terrible, sinking feeling’, he saw the team sheet go up, with his name at the top of it.
He aimed to go to bed early the night before the game but shared a room with his team captain, Sam Cowan, who sat bathing a poisoned big toe in a bowl of hot water. Cowan kept him talking till 3 a.m. Swift reckoned later this was to make him sleep late and have less time for pre-match nerves. They got the better of him in the Wembley dressing room. The sight of a jittery senior player having to have his laces tied, he said, turned him green. The trainer hauled Swift off to the washroom, gave him a slap round the face and a tot of whisky. He made it through the parade on to the pitch and presentation to George V. Just after the game started, Matt Busby, Manchester City’s right-half, turned, shouted and passed back to him, to give him an early feel of the ball and calm him down.
Portsmouth scored after half an hour, for which Swift blamed himself. There’d been a brief shower of rain, which normally would have prompted him to put his gloves on. But he’d peered up the other end to see Portsmouth’s keeper had left his in the back of the net. Not trusting his own judgement, Swift did, too, and paid for it when a shot across him from the right slithered through his fingers as he dived. In the dressing room at half-time, the Manchester City centre-forward, Fred Tilson, told Swift to stop looking so miserable about it. Tilson added he’d score twice in the second half, which he did. The second came with only four minutes to go. Suddenly Swift, aged nineteen, realised he might be on the point of winning a Cup Final.
The photographers sitting at the side of his goal began to count down the minutes and seconds for him. Seeing how tense he was, they may have been trying to be helpful. Equally, men of Fleet Street, they might have had their minds on the story. Swift started to lose control of his with about one minute remaining. With fifty seconds left he was thinking of his mother and if the Cup would take much cleaning. At forty seconds he worried whether the king would talk to him. At thirty seconds, Matt Busby smashed the ball into the crowd to waste time and a photographer shouted, ‘It’s your Cup, son’. As the whistle went he stooped to get his cap and gloves from the net, took a couple of steps out of it and ‘everything went black’.
Swift was the favourite of millions of young fans thereafter. Among them was my dad, listening to the game on the wireless. He was to leave school at the end of that term, a month before his fourteenth birthday. For Swift at nineteen to be in a cup-winning team was enough in itself to make him a Kids’ Own hero. His faint in the Wembley goalmouth only heightened this. Though he was a virtual Superboy of the day, he showed himself vulnerable to pressure like anyone else, a big kid after all. Laid out on the turf, he was brought round by cold water poured on his face and dabbed by the trainer’s sponge. He was helped to his feet and limped across the pitch and up the steps to the Royal Box to get his medal from George V. The king spoke to him through what Swift described as a ‘dizzy mist’ and, at greater length than was customary, asked how he was, told him he played well and wished him good luck. The king sent a message the following week, via the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lancashire, inquiring after Swift’s health.
Throughout his career, Swift showed himself to be not only a large person, but also a large personality. He’d turn and wave to the crowd, acknowledge their shouts, even chat if the ball was at the other end. He applied an occasional flourish to his leaps or dives for the crowd’s benefit. These were ‘flash’, though within limits. A dive when you could keep your feet, or a punch when a catch was feasible, was not the thing. Swift’s principle, however, was that as long as it was safe, where was the harm in the bit of extra for effect?
Among British keepers, Swift pioneered the skills of throwing the ball, something he’d picked up from watching water polo. Crowds tended to feel short-changed by a keeper doing anything but clearing the ball out of his penalty area with a hefty boot. But Swift had enormous strength and huge hands – the length of the average person’s foot – with which he could pick up or catch a ball single-handed. He’d hurl it over half the length of the pitch, and guide it far more accurately than could be accomplished with a hopeful punt. An extrovert character, it was one of the ways he imposed himself on the game. Swift was generally good at making himself known, not least to referees whose decisions he felt unable to go along with. Against the football hierarchy, he also became a vociferous campaigner for players’ wages and conditions.
After his Cup medal, Swift’s club career reached another peak when Manchester City won the league in 1937. Runners-up were Charlton Athletic, whose goalkeeper, Sam Bartram, had a similar personality and style. Not quite of Swift’s physical dimensions, he was a tall and broad, red-haired character, who indulged in the flamboyant when opportunity arose. Much thanks to him, Charlton had climbed in successive seasons from the Third Division South, through the Second, to challenge for the First Division title itself. Swift and Bartram were identified as future rivals for a place in the England team and at one stage Bartram appeared the most likely contender. The season after Charlton ran Manchester City closely for the championship, he played for the Possibles against the Probables in an England trial.
Swift and Bartram had been born within weeks of each other a little before the start of the First World War. From, respectively, the industrial north-west and north-east, they grew up in regions feeling the worst of the post-war recession. The country’s mood was also steeped in memories of one awful conflict and the strengthening conviction that a worse one was on the way. The Great War had had the wonders of the trenches and ‘going over the top’; everyone knew the next war would bid goodbye to all that with mass aerial bombardment of the cities. Swift and Bartram were products of the widely-held view among ordinary people that there was little sane reaction but to laugh, make the best of it and pretend the worst was not going to happen. If ever the laughter had to be prompted a little, there were always characters around like Swift and Bartram to help its orchestration. Vaudeville keepers in their way, they played in response to popular demand.
In any of their off-duty pictures I later saw – team photos, head-and-shoulders portraits, or shots of them being introduced to one dignitary or another before a big game – they were always at least smiling. In accounts of their matches that I read or was told about, their presence dominated. Each was likely to rush from the keeper’s 6-yard box, to the edge or beyond the penalty area to clear the ball, forsaking their hands and heading it if necessary. This was a way of doing things much more familiar to keepers on the continent. It brought the keeper out of his remote condition and into closer touch with his team. Both Swift and Bartram were students of the style of Harry Hibbs – now nearing the end of his career – and sought advice from him on how it was all meant to be done. But notes taken, they moved far beyond the role of humble ‘custodian’.
Two weeks after my dad’s nineteenth birthday the war was declared, an occasion as stressful at that age as playing in the Cup Final. After listening to Chamberlain’s announcement, he went out in the back garden where his dad grew the vegetables and, as the phrase has it, broke down. His father followed and tried to help: ‘That’s OK, son, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he might have offered. ‘I passed through the Menin Gate and the various battles of Ypres. Nasty explosion at the Somme, of course, and this open hip wound still plays up. But I survived – when most of the Beds and Herts were wiped out, they made me sergeant major for a day till reinforcements arrived.’ But, in that moment, my Bedfordshire grandfather opted to stay quiet.
For two years my father’s bricklaying had him on such essential works as building the Tempsford aerodrome. A Stuka came for a few minutes one afternoon and strafed the hundred or so of them working up the sheer face of the cooling towers at Barford. The bombing of London had prompted my mum’s move to the country and they got married after he was called up into the Royal Signals. In Greenock he and several thousand others were put on ships which sailed west almost as far as Iceland. They weren’t told where they were going, up to the point the boats turned to plunge south. Through the Bay of Biscay the weather was so rough the convoy’s members were rarely in sight of each other. Maybe the conditions were a problem for the German U-boats as well. The next convoy out a fortnight or so later lost a third of its number. My dad’s ‘never saw a seagull’. Straight, more or less, from Sandy, Bedfordshire, he arrived at the Saharan fringes of North Africa, landing with the army in Algiers in 1942.
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