Sir Alf - Leo McKinstry

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is one of the most astonishing feats in the annals of British football management, unlikely ever to be surpassed.

      Yet even now, as nostalgia for the golden summer of 1966 becomes more potent, the memory of Sir Alf Ramsey is not one treasured by the public. He is nothing like as famous as David Beckham, or George Best or Paul Gascoigne, three footballers who achieved far less than him on the international stage. In his birthplace of Dagenham, he seems to have been airbrushed from history. There is no statue to him, no blue plaque in the street where he was born or the ground where he first played. No road or club or school bears his name. The same indifference is demonstrated beyond east London. When the BBC recently organized a competition to decide what the main bridge at the new Wembley stadium should be called, Sir Alf Ramsey’s name was on the shortlist. Yet the British public voted for the title of the ‘White Horse Bridge’, after the celebrated police animal who restored order at the first Wembley FA Cup Final of 1923 when unprecedented crowds of around 200,000 were spilling onto the pitch. With all due respect to this creature, it is something of an absurdity that the winning manager of the World Cup should have to trail in behind a horse. As one of Ramsey’s players, Mike Summerbee, puts it: ‘Alf Ramsey’s contribution to international football was phenomenal. Yet the way he was treated was a disgrace. We never look after our heroes and in time we try to pull them down. I tell you something, they should have a bronze statue of Alf at the new Wembley. And they should call it the Alf Ramsey stadium.’

      Part of the failure to appreciate the greatness of Alf Ramsey has been the result of his severe public image. He was a man who elevated reticence to an art form. With his players he could be amiable, sometimes even humorous, but he presented a much stonier face to the press and wider world. The personification of the traditional English stiff upper lip, he never courted popularity, never showed any emotion in public. His epic self-restraint was beautifully captured at the end of the World Cup Final of 1966, when he sat impassively staring ahead, while all around him were scenes of joyous mayhem at England’s victory. The only words he uttered after Geoff Hurst’s third goal were a headmasterly rebuke to his trainer, Harold Shepherdson, who had leapt to his feet in ecstasy. ‘Sit down, Harold,’ he growled. Again, as the players gathered for their lap of honour, they tried to push Alf to the front to greet the cheers of the crowd. But, with typical modesty, he refused. This outward calm, he later explained, was not due to any lack of inner passion but to his shyness. ‘I’m a very emotional person but my feelings are always tied up inside. Maybe it is a mistake to be like this but I cannot govern it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with showing emotion in public, but it is something I can never do.’

      Nowhere was Ramsey’s awkwardness more apparent than in his notoriously difficult relationship with the media. Believing all that mattered were performances on the field, he made little effort to cultivate journalists. ‘I can live without them because I am judged by the results that the England team gets. I doubt very much whether they can live without me,’ he once said. Hiding behind a mask of inscrutability, he usually would provide only the blandest of answers at press conferences or indeed none at all. He trusted a select few, like Ken Jones and Brian James, because he respected their knowledge of football, but most of the rest of the press were given the cold shoulder. He also had a gift for humiliating reporters with little more than a withering look. As Peter Batt, once of the Sun, recalls: ‘There was a general, utter contempt from him. I don’t think anyone could make you feel more like a turd under his boot than Ramsey. It is amazing how he did it.’ This hostile attitude led to a string of incidents throughout his career. Shortly after England had won the World Cup, for instance, Ramsey was standing in the reception of Hendon Hall, the team’s hotel in north-west London. A representative of the Press Association came up to him and said:

      ‘Mr Ramsey, on behalf of the press, may I thank you for your co-operation throughout the tournament?’

      ‘Are you taking the piss?’ was Alf’s reply.

      On another occasion in 1967, he was with an FA team in Canada for a tournament at the World Expo show. As he stood by the bus which would take his team from Montreal airport to its hotel, he was suddenly accosted by a leading TV correspondent from one of Canada’s news channels. The clean-cut broadcaster put his arm around England’s manager, and then launched into his spiel.

      ‘Sir Ramsey, it’s just a thrill to have you and the world soccer champions here in Canada. Now I’m from one of our biggest national stations, going out live coast to coast, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And, Coach Ramsey, you’re not going to believe this but I’m going to give you seven whole minutes all to yourself on the show. So if you’re ready, Sir Ramsey, I am going to start the interview now.’

      ‘Oh no you fuckin’ ain’t.’ And with that, a fuming Coach Ramsey climbed onto the bus.

      Such dismissiveness might provoke smiles from those present, but it ultimately led to the creation of a host of enemies in the press. When times grew rough in the seventies, Alf was left with few allies to put his case. The same was true of his relations with football’s administrators, whom he regarded as no more than irritants; to him they were like most journalists: tiresome amateurs who knew nothing about the tough realities of professional football. ‘Those people’ was his disdainful term for the councillors of the FA. He despised them so much that he would deliberately avoid sitting next to them on trips or at matches, while he described the autocratic Professor Harold Thompson, one of the FA’s bosses, as ‘that bloody man Thompson’. But again, when results went against Sir Alf, the knives came out and the FA were able to exact their revenge.

      The roots of Sir Alf’s antagonism towards the media and the FA lay in his deep sense of social insecurity. He was a strange mixture of tremendous self-confidence within the narrow world of football, and tortured, tongue-tied diffidence outside it. He had been a classy footballer himself in the immediate post-war era, one of the most intelligent full-backs England has ever produced, and was never afraid to set out his opinions in the dressing-rooms of Southampton and Spurs, his two League clubs. Performing his role as England or Ipswich manager, he was the master of his domain. No one could match him for his understanding of the technicalities of football, where he allied a brilliant judgement of talent to a shrewd tactical awareness and a photographic memory of any passage of play. ‘Without doubt, he was the greatest manager I ever knew, a fantastic guy,’ says Ray Crawford of Ipswich and England. ‘He had a natural authority about him. You never argued with him. He was always brilliant in his talks because he read the game so well. He would come into the dressing-room at half-time and explain what we should be doing, and most of the time it came off. He was inspirational that way.’ Peter Shilton, England’s most capped player, is just as fulsome: ‘From the moment I met Sir Alf I knew he was someone special. He was that sort of person. He was a man who inspired total respect. Any decision he made, you knew he made it for the right reason. He had real strength of character. I have been with other managers who were not as strong in the big, big games. But Alf could rise above the pressure and dismiss irrelevancies.’

      Yet Sir Alf never felt comfortable when taken out of the reassuring environment of running his teams. All his ease and self-assurance evaporated when he was not dealing with professional players and trusted football correspondents. He could cope with a World Cup Final but not with a cocktail reception. ‘Dinners, speeches,’ he used to say of the FA committee men, ‘that’s their job.’ Amongst the Oxbridge degrees of the sporting, political or diplomatic establishments, he felt all too aware of his humble origins and lack of education. Born into a poor, rural Essex family, he left school at fourteen and took his first job as a delivery boy for the Dagenham Co-op. To cope with this insecurity, Sir Alf devised a number of strategies. One was to erect a social barrier against the world, avoiding all forms of intimacy. That is why he could so often appear aloof, even downright rude. From his earliest days as a professional, he was reluctant to open up to anyone. This distance might have been invaluable in retaining his authority as a manager, but it also prohibited the formation of close friendships.

      Pat Godbold, his secretary throughout his spell as Ipswich manager from 1955 to 1963, says: ‘I was twenty when Alf came here. My first impression was that he was a shy man. I think that right up to his death he was a very shy man. You could not get to know him. He was a good man to work for, but I can honestly say that I never got to know him.’ Sir

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