Sir Alf. Leo McKinstry

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       FOUR Belo Horizonte

      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.

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