Sir Alf. Leo McKinstry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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