Sir Alf. Leo McKinstry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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