Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict. Leo McKinstry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ winning an undistinguished match 2–0. Their cynical professionalism was summed up by their second goal, when Nat Lofthouse barged Harry Gregg into the United net. Yet United’s inadequacy had also been exposed, as Bill Foulkes recalled: Our forwards had never been in the game. Bobby, who had played so brilliantly between the disaster and Wembley was jaded on the big day. He had been required to play in too many matches – because there could be no thought of dropping him. He was too good a player to rest, and who could replace him, anyway?’ In public, Bobby said he did not really mind losing to Bolton. He was more relieved that the team had not disgraced itself, that it had achieved something for the battered manager. He wrote later, ‘What mattered was that we maintained our position in the game, the glamour and identity in being a top-class club. Matt, who had only recently come out of hospital, came to give us a pep talk at Old Trafford before the final. He couldn’t. He just cried. Those fellows who died were his family.’ In private, however, Bobby was dispirited after the Final, as Ronnie Cope recalls. ‘There was some mix-up at the ceremony and Bobby, by mistake, got a winner’s medal. Afterwards, he just threw it on the floor in the dressing room. It didn’t mean a thing to him. He had a tremendous love for United and the club was everything to him.’

      Up until the Cup Final, Bobby’s form for United had led to a national clamour for him to be selected for the England team. This mood, as Bobby understood, was tinged with a degree of sympathy for what he had been through. Nevertheless, there was a genuine recognition that here was an outstanding young talent who could be one of the saviours of English football. The early and mid-1950s had been a dire period for the national side, with the successive 6–3 and 7–1 defeats by Hungary in 1953 emblematic of England’s lack of vision and organization. Bobby Charlton represented hope for the future.

      When Kevin Keegan was dropped by England in 1982, he complained bitterly that he had only learned about the decision through the press. ‘Bobby Robson should have had the guts to tell me to my face,’ he wailed. But Keegan’s case is hardly unique. This is the – way so many players have been informed about international selection or exclusion, particularly in the pre-Ramsey days when an FA committee chose the England side. And so it was with Bobby Charlton. On one of his visits to Ashington he had been to the pictures with Jack in the late afternoon. As they came out of the cinema, Jack picked up an evening paper. There was the news, in the stop press column, that his younger brother had been selected for England. True to their natures, Jack was much more demonstrative, letting out, in his words, ‘a whoop of joy’, while Bobby just smiled. Jack says that his elation was completely genuine. ‘There was no jealousy. There couldn’t be. He was the great player of the two of us, and I never in my wildest dreams thought I was good enough to play for England. I was just proud and thrilled for him.’

      Six years later when Jack contradicted his own prediction by winning his first cap for England – coincidentally against Scotland as well – Bobby’s response was very different. In April 1965 Leeds and Manchester United were playing in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough as the news came through to Leeds boss Don Revie that Jack had been picked for the England squad. He told Jack after the game, a typically stormy Cup tie which Leeds won narrowly. Unable to contain his glee at the news, Jack ran along to the United dressing room to see his brother, who recalls: ‘I was sitting slumped when our kid came beaming through the door. “Go away,” I thought, “we don’t need you at this moment.” But Jack just stood there, the smile getting wider and wider. “Hey,” he said, “I’m in the England team with you.’” The announcement was greeted with a resounding silence, only broken for a moment by Bobby’s brief two words of congratulations, ‘That’s terrific,’ Then another United player said, ‘Now fuck off out of here.’ Jack then knew he could not have chosen a worse time to tell his brother, walking into the dressing room of the team he had just helped to knock out of the FA Cup. ‘But that’s the kind of tact I’m famous for,’ he once joked.

      Interviewed in 1959 about his selection for England, Bobby made the predictable noises about achieving his childhood ambition. ‘This is what I have been dreaming about since I was nine. I’ve never wanted to be anything else but an England footballer,’ he told the Daily Mail. As always, Cissie loomed large in his thoughts: ‘I know who will be happiest of all – my mother,’ Interestingly, however, he said later that he was so emotionally focused on United’s Cup run that he felt indifference towards the game. ‘I went up to Scotland completely unworried, with no pre-match nerves at all.’ Now this was very different to the way Bobby Charlton was to feel throughout the rest of his career. Though a master on the field, he would usually be gripped by pre-match nerves off it. Nobby Lawton game me this description of Bobby in the dressing room before a big game: ‘At ten to three, Bobby was like a great performer, waiting in the wings, building himself up as he prepared to go out on stage. “This is me, this is what I’m good at,” you could see him saying to himself. Bobby would be shaking. That was how much he cared about his performance. That’s why he was great – every game mattered. He would often have a cigarette before the game, his hands shaking. Jimmy Murphy would sometimes put a bottle of whisky on the table in the dressing room, and Bobby and a few others would take a swig. It wasn’t like a drink, really just a gulp, Dutch courage before the conflict. He was always the same before every game at Old Trafford, very, very nervous.’

      The selectors thought he would be anxious so they made him share a room with Billy Wright, the Wolves and England captain. Intriguingly, Bobby, who always had such respect for authority throughout his career, was not especially impressed with the leadership of Billy Wright, the ultimate ‘establishment’ man. ‘He was a nice fellow but I didn’t feel he had much influence as captain other than by his example as a player. There was such a turnover in those days in the team that he was reluctant to criticize players in case they thought it was his fault,’ says Bobby.

      Bobby had an excellent first game for England, making the first goal and scoring the last in a 4–0 win at Hampden. His strike came in the 85th minute, when he hit a thunderous volley from a cross by Tom Finney. So impressed was Scottish goalkeeper Tommy Younger at this shot that he actually ran out of his area to congratulate Bobby, something that would be unimaginable today. ‘Well done, son, that was a fantastic goal,’ he said. Players on both sides were amazed at Bobby’s spectacular effort. Tommy Docherty, later to be Charlton’s last manager at United, recalls: ‘It was one of the greatest goals ever seen at Hampden. I was on the receiving end. Bobby left me flat-footed as he met a cross from my Preston teammate Tom Finney. The ball came in at hip height and Bobby caught it on the volley. Our goalkeeper was still diving when the ball hit the net.’ Bryan Douglas, the Blackburn winger, says, ‘I can remember Bobby’s debut as if it were yesterday. That goal of his showed me what he was all about – two wonderful feet and a great temperament. He did not need to be near a goal to score. He could fire them in from anywhere. I once watched him in training, cracking ball after ball into an empty net. I could see that it just gave him a thrill to see the ball rocketing into the goal.’ In praising such shooting, Douglas also exposes the absurdity of the idea that Bobby ever ‘picked his spot’. He continues. ‘Bobby was always modest about his skill, honest as well. I remember once playing against him in a League game. There was a throw-in, he dummied, let the ball run past him, and then he hit it from about 30 yards with his left foot. When I complimented him on this fabulous goal, he said, “Well, I just hit it. I knew the goal was somewhere over there.’” Bobby was just as successful in his second game for England at Wembley against Portugal. Every time he received the ball a roar went around the ground and he scored twice in England’s 2–1 triumph, both his goals from long-range shots. But already critics in the England set-up were privately expressing reservations about his workrate.

      From these dizzy heights, Bobby’s performances went into swift decline. It was as if he had been running on adrenalin after Munich, and now, as the end of the season approached, he was suffering from delayed shock. ‘Jaded’ was the word that Bill Foulkes used about Bobby’s appearances in the Cup Final and the international against Yugoslavia. Albert Scanlon said to me: ‘The press had build up this romantic image of Bobby, the player who had emerged from the debris of Munich to appear in the Cup Final and become an international. It was in a reaction to all this publicity СКАЧАТЬ