Brilliant article on '66 WC team (1 Viewer)

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Written by Oliver Kay in the Times -

They think it’s all over. In one sense, it soon will be. Their achievement will endure, their legend enhanced with each passing year, but, for many of England’s World Cup-winning heroes of 1966, dinner at Wembley next Saturday will represent a last supper of sorts. After 50 years of Hurst, there is a desire to savour the golden anniversary celebrations, treasure those fading, sepia-tinged memories, toast absent friends, embrace for perhaps one last time and then settle quietly into enjoying the rest of their deeply fulfilled lives.

They are old men now. Sir Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero in the final, is as bright as a button at 74, but others have found the passage of time less easy. At least three of Hurst’s former team-mates — Ray Wilson, Nobby Stiles, Martin Peters — have had Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed, cruelly erasing their memories of an historic triumph and, far more painfully, blighting their day-to-day existence; Jack Charlton admits his memories of the day fade in and out; Sir Bobby Charlton is described by friends as “an old man now”, at 78, and barely speaks publicly these days, his various ambassadorial duties becoming a chore; Gordon Banks, the great goalkeeper, is battling against kidney cancer; Jimmy Greaves is struggling to make any kind of recovery after suffering a stroke last year; George Cohen is still smiling after three fights with cancer but now finds it hard to move around.

With a few understandable exceptions, they will gather at Wembley 50 years to the day after their triumph — in front of almost 1,200 paying guests — in a vast suite named after Bobby Moore, the captain and golden boy, who died of bowel cancer in 1993 at the age of 51. Moore, unthinkably, was the first of the gang to die; the ebullient Alan Ball died after having a heart attack fighting a fire in his garden in 2007 at the age of 61; of the other members of the squad, John Connelly died in 2012 and Gerry Byrne and Ron Springett have passed away in the past 12 months; Sir Alf Ramsey, the manager, died in 1999, and his two assistants, Harold Shepherdson and Les Cocker, passed away years earlier. Yes, “absent friends” will certainly be a popular and poignant toast when Wembley stages the latest and perhaps the last large-scale reunion of England’s World Cup winners.

“We have kept getting together every year, most of us,” Jack Charlton says over breakfast, the morning after a 1966 dinner in Stoke-on-Trent. “We would play golf and the wives would go shopping and then we would all have a dinner at a big hotel in the evening. We went to Blackpool one year, Lytham St Anne’s. One year we were up near us in Newcastle, a couple down south. It’s just that … a lot of the lads are feeling that . . . ”
“There’s a feeling that this year might be the last big reunion they have,” his wife Pat says.

Because 50 years would seem like a perfect cut-off? “It’s not so much that,” she says. “It’s that a lot of the players aren’t really capable now. Most of them are in their late 70s. Jack’s in his 80s. A lot of them can’t do it any more. They’re not in a good way, some of them.”

Are you well, Jack? “He’s well in himself,” Pat says. “But your memory isn’t good, is it, love?”

“It’s bloody awful,” Jack says, still with that fantastic smile. “I’m sitting here trying to think and Pat’s having to keep reminding me.”

On some days, his memories of the World Cup final on July 30 1966 — England 4 West Germany 2 — are vivid, but they are more vague on the day we meet. “I remember [at the final whistle] I went down on my knees and sort of said a little prayer,” he says. “Then I ran up to one [a team-mate] and picked him up, put him down again and then went to somebody else and picked him up. I got to our Bob, my brother, and he hugged me and I hugged him. I remember running about with the lads on the pitch. We went off to the dressing room and then we left and went to a hotel and then we went for a couple of beers. Afterwards I met up with a journalist, James Mossop, who was a friend of mine, and we went out on the town.”

“That’ll be why he can’t remember,” Pat says with a chuckle.

“Aye, that’ll be right,” Jack says, appreciatively. “I just remember . . . I just remember . . . that it felt wonderful.”

It is a pleasant May morning in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire. A clock ticks in the living room of a cottage. Pat Wilson is making tea and coffee. Her husband, Ray, is doodling, breaking off only to burst into song.

One day in May, I’ll come and say
Happy the bride that the sun shines on today

“He has always sung,” Pat says of her husband, the man who was regarded as the best left back in the world 50 years ago. “He used to wake up singing and it would drive me mad, but I like it now. I’ll put him his CDs on — mostly Frank Sinatra, although he’s taken to Sammy Davis Jr now and Ella Fitzgerald — and he sings. He loves the old ones. Frank Sinatra is his favourite. He’s happy. It’s all I can ask for, that he’s happy.”

It is a sweet, uplifting, yet humbling experience, spending a morning with the Wilsons. “Bittersweet” would probably seem more appropriate, given the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s, but this brief snapshot into their lives was, genuinely, heartwarming.

You would not know you were in the living room of a World Cup winner. There is no football memorabilia on show save for a row of mannequins on a shelf, among them three painted in the colours of Huddersfield Town, Everton and England. Instead, in pride of place, on the wall, is a collection of Ray’s drawings — “strange things,” Pat calls them. They are drawn in biro, looking like aliens on a totem pole. One of them has the caption: “I am a happy man.”

“The thing is, he had never even doodled before,” Pat says. “It has all come out since his Alzheimer’s. Our daughter-in-law, our son’s partner, is a chiropodist and she said that some of her older patients had these adult colouring books, so she sent for one for Ray. He started off doing the colouring and then he started the drawing. He’s been doing it for about two years. I wouldn’t say non-stop, but it has been more or less non-stop. We have hundreds of them.”

“I bought them,” Ray pipes up, out of nowhere.

Pat shakes her head in fond amusement, laughing along with her husband’s joke. He is full of them, little quips that tell you he is still sharp in certain ways, certainly still full of mischief. “Oh dear, dear, dear,” Pat says. “Don’t put that in the newspaper.” Ray is asked if he can explain what he is drawing. “I’ve got no idea,” he says. “I just start off and then I think, ‘Oh that’s a good idea. I’ll put that in.’ ”

It is clearly very therapeutic. “Oh yes,” Pat says. “And the thing is, if he wasn’t doing this, what would he be doing? He would be sat here watching that thing [the television] all day. We’ll watch sport — tennis, cricket, football — but put a drama on and he can’t keep track of what is going on. But he can watch the football and he’ll know exactly what’s going on — ‘That was offside. That was never offside’ — but he doesn’t bother that much about it now anyway because he’s more interested in his drawing.”

The gala dinner at Wembley is, sadly, a non-starter for the Wilsons — just as it is for Nobby Stiles, his fellow Alzheimer’s sufferer. “We kept going to the reunions until the last few years, not now,” Pat says. “Ray doesn’t like going out of his comfort zone really. We don’t go out much these days. He goes to daycare twice a week, absolutely loves it, but that’s about it.

“He’s happy, though. He always had a temper from when I first met him, but that has disappeared now. Sometimes he’ll bring me a big bunch of daffodils or bluebells from out by the reservoir; if anyone caught him he’d be in blooming jail because you’re not supposed to do that! Or he might bring me a bunch of weeds instead . . .

“Ray has been very good. He has never been in denial. It was 2004 when we realised — or I realised — that he was doing things that . . . well, he was starting to repeat himself, one thing and the other. He took himself off to the doctor’s about it. He went to a private clinic in Bradford and he was diagnosed and it has been very gradually downhill with it really. My dad had Alzheimer’s. He died after five years or something, but there was no medication in those days, so whatever Ray is taking, it’s obviously helping him. He’s not getting better and he’s probably slowly getting worse, but it is slow and he hasn’t lost his sense of humour. He’ll never lose his sense of humour. He’s daft. He’s bonkers — his words, not mine. He’s happy and that’s all I can ask for.”
 

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Even now, nine years on, Jimmy Ball can hardly believe he is talking about his father in the past tense. His father, Alan, was always so full of life until that tragic accident in the garden of his Hampshire home in 2007. At 21, he was the youngest member of the squad. He was also one of the undoubted heroes on the day. “Ask any of the players who was their man of the match in the final and they would all say Bally,” none other than Sir Geoff Hurst said.

“I watched the final loads of times as a kid,” Jimmy, a youth academy coach at Stoke City, says, “but there was only one time I remember my dad watching it with me. It certainly wasn’t ‘Come here, son, and watch this match I played in.’ If anything, it was the opposite with my dad. He idolised Bobby Moore, Jimmy Greaves and he never regarded himself as any kind of star. Because of that, because of the way he was, I don’t think I ever really appreciated the enormity of what he had done in ’66. But they were all like that. That’s just a testament to the people they all were. They were just normal, humble working-class men. There was no kind of hullabaloo or big-headedness whatsoever.

“The recognition and admiration after he passed away was totally breathtaking for my sisters and me. I got a phone call from the police commissioner for Hampshire who said there had been something like 12,000 enquiries about the funeral and he wanted to recommend Winchester Cathedral because it was the only place big enough. This was our dad who went to the football and had a pint afterwards. It was surreal, totally incredible. We couldn’t ever have imagined that outpouring of affection that there was at grounds all over the country. Goodison Park was incredible. Consolation isn’t the right word, but it was very warming to know he was adored and appreciated like that.

“And there’s one other thing that sticks in my mind from that time. Someone said to me at the time, which I didn’t really appreciate, that Alan Ball will never grow old. He was right. My vision and memory of him will always be of him, happily smiling, full of mischief. My girls remember him as ‘Smiley Face.’ I was with some of the other lads at the PFA dinner [in April], where the 1966 team were recognised. They’re all growing old now. Some of them are still as sharp as ever and some of them are blissfully happy. Jack Charlton was hilarious, stoically getting on with it. That’s who they are. They never had any airs or graces. The fact that their memories are fading, some of them, doesn’t really affect them. There’s still a twinkle in their eye.”

There is no easy way to present the statistics relating to the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in footballers of the 1950s and 1960s. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, the number of British men suffering from dementia between the ages of 65 and 69 is around one in 75, which rises to one in ten between the ages of 80 and 84. Of the nine surviving members of England’s starting XI in 1966, three – Wilson, Stiles, Peters – have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

An inquest in 2002 ruled that Jeff Astle, who played for England at the 1970 World Cup, suffered “death by industrial disease”, suffering trauma to the brain, most likely as a result of sustained exposure to heading a leather ball which, particularly when wet, was far heavier than the lightweight synthetic ball used nowadays. A long-promised FA and PFA joint study into the historical links between football and brain damage is still to be published and, in the meantime, calls for action grow in volume and intensity.

Pat Wilson is not one of those who is pointing fingers. She just wants to be able to enjoy her life with Ray as much as she can. “You can’t say that,” she says. “How many women have Alzheimer’s, people who have never even seen a leather football,” she says. “Funnily enough, that’s what one of the first doctors said to us the first time we spoke to him. It’s amazing how many players do have it — there’s Ray, there’s Nobby and there’s Martin — and then you read about footballers from Huddersfield Town. It might have contributed in some way, but I can’t see that it caused it.”

The percentages of dementia sufferers are notably higher among footballers of that era. “It could be, could be,” Pat says. “Ray used to say that in training, they used to run, jump and head, run jump and head, run jump and head — and when the balls were wet, can you imagine? So it could be, I suppose, but I’m not going to say that.”

That is the 1966 generation all over. They have never kicked up a fuss, never caused a stir. They never quibbled at their treatment by the football industry or by the establishment, even if considerable anger has at times been felt on their behalf.

There are only three World Cup winners’ medals left among the 11 players who represented England on that July day 50 years ago. Only Jack Charlton, Bobby Charlton and Roger Hunt are in possession of their medals. Others have made the difficult decision to sell their medals and instead to treasure their memories, which makes the subsequent struggles with Alzheimer’s and dementia, in some cases, all the more tragic.

Still, though, there are more medals than knighthoods. Bobby Charlton was knighted for services to football in 1994 and Geoff Hurst likewise in 1998. There was a smattering of OBEs (Bobby Moore in 1967, Gordon Banks in 1970, Jack Charlton in 1974) and MBEs, but still it took a concerted media campaign for the “forgotten” members of Sir Alf Ramsey’s starting XI — George Cohen, Ray Wilson, Nobby Stiles, Alan Ball and Roger Hunt — to be awarded the MBE in 2000, by which time the establishment was far more eager to tap into football’s resurgent popularity than it had been in the 1970s and 1980s.

“That was one of the proudest days of my dad’s life,” Jimmy Ball says of his father’s belated recognition by the establishment 34 years after the World Cup win. “Because he was able to soak it all in, in some ways it was prouder and more memorable than winning the World Cup. He was very patriotic. They all were. Playing for their country and winning for their country meant so much to them. Being recognised and honoured by their country meant everything.”

These are humble men who did not crave recognition, let alone pomp and ceremony, but what rankles — far less among them than among others, it must be said — is the feeling that neither English football nor the establishment has ever quite got it right in its attitude towards 1966. On one level it seemed to be taken for granted, as if it were a restoration of the natural order rather than a monumental achievement. On another level, individual contributions (and subsequently individual hardships in some cases) have been overlooked in English football’s eagerness to bask in the glory of what, embarrassingly, remains its only success at a leading tournament.

Like many of his triumphant team-mates, Bobby Moore found there was no real place for him after he retired from football. He dabbled in management (unsuccessfully) and business (even more so) before he was bailed out with gigs at the Sunday Sport (an act of pure benevolence from the tabloid newspaper’s hero-worshipping owner, David Sullivan, now co-chairman of West Ham) and Capital Radio, where he earned £150 plus expenses as a match co-commentator. Whatever the subsequent, welcome attempts to embrace and promote Moore’s memory and his legacy — not just with statues, stands and function rooms but with the cancer charity bearing his name — previous regimes at West Ham and at the FA should be ashamed of the way he was ignored until it was too late. “This doesn’t come from a bitter or resentful place, so please don’t let it sound like that, but I don’t think it has ever been what it could have been or should have been with the players from 1966,” Jimmy Ball says. “It definitely hasn’t been recognised by the establishment as it should have been. The players haven’t been used as they should have been.”
 

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Ray Wilson worked as an undertaker after his football career was over. “It was my dad’s business and we ran it for 20-odd years,” his wife Pat says. “He liked it. He was very good at it, apparently. He likes people. He was quite happy with doing that.”

Others still felt that football remained their natural milieu, but that, unless they succeeded in frontline management (and only Jack Charlton and Alan Ball could claim to have done so), the game found no place for them — not coaching youngsters or going into schools, not doing ambassadorial work with the exception of Hurst and Bobby Charlton. Ball had a decent managerial career with Portsmouth, Southampton and others, but, from the moment a second spell at Portsmouth ended abruptly in 1999, he was, like most of his peers, an outsider looking into the football industry. He was only 54.

“They all had a lot more to offer and they were never really given a chance to do that,” Jimmy Ball says. “I’m not talking about now, as they’re all getting on, but they were never used properly and given the chance to be around and pass on their experience. Graham Taylor got my dad involved with England on an informal basis, and so did Kevin Keegan. I remember Paul Merson and Ian Wright telling me they hung off his every word — and my dad absolutely loved it — but that was only a short-term thing.

“That’s what hurts them most. The FA should have used their knowledge, wisdom and experience. How could you not use the experience of someone like Bobby Moore? If you were looking at business, you would say: ‘Why on earth was that experience not used?’”

As well as bringing a sense of worth and belonging, though, working in football would have brought income, which would in turn have helped in later life. It emerged last autumn that Jimmy Greaves’s family needed to raise £30,000 to pay for his treatment after a stroke. He had already sold his World Cup winner’s medal. George Cohen said it was “sheer madness” that the football industry had not come to Greaves’s aid. The FA responded to coverage of his struggle by making a “discretionary” donation towards his care.

Cohen was the first of the 1966 heroes to sell his precious medal, deeming it necessary in 1998 when he was beset by illness and financial hardship. Nobby Stiles, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, shed tears when he announced he was selling his medals in 2010, saying that “these things are very, very special to me, the memories of growing up as a kid and of my football career”, but that he had “had a bit of a bad time and I want to leave something for my family.” Stiles’s World Cup and European Cup winner’s medals were bought by Manchester United for a combined total of £209,000 and are now housed in the club’s museum — similarly to how West Ham and Fulham bought the medals of Moore (in 2000, after his death) and Cohen respectively.

“Ray sold everything,” Pat Wilson says. “Nearly all the players have. Honest to god, we didn’t sell it for the money. We have two boys and it was a matter of ‘What are they going to do with all this when we’ve gone?’ They wouldn’t have wanted to make that decision, because it was their dad’s, so we decided we would do it for them. They both got their share.”

“My dad sold his medals before he died,” Jimmy Ball says. “There were three of us and only one medal, so what would we do? My dad didn’t want us falling out and he thought, ‘What if you’re in financial trouble? I’m going to sell it so you all have something.’ ”

Apart from the Charlton brothers, Roger Hunt is the only member of England’s victorious starting XI who is still in possession of his winner’s medal. After his football career, he worked for his family’s haulage business in Cheshire. He recently sold many of the medals he earned with Liverpool, but he kept back the most precious of all.

For others, the medals have long been sold and the glorious memories, which they had hoped would sustain them long into retirement, are not necessarily there either. “I don’t think they worry about the medals because none of them were really the sentimental type,” Jimmy Ball says. “My dad never had his on display. He kept it in a sock drawer. He said it was only a lump of metal really. He said the memories were much more important.

“It’s not about the medals or knighthoods or anything like that. For me, there’s just this feeling that more could have been done to keep them involved in the game. Discarded isn’t the word, but it was as if they were put out to pasture. I think that’s the sad thing. These fellas achieved something incredible for English football. Why have these lads been left to grow old with the game way it is? It’s not about the money. They didn’t care about money.”

Kings Hall, Stoke-on-Trent, Friday April 22. The place is packed. It is the latest in a series of 50th anniversary dinners and Gordon Banks, adopted as a local hero, has been joined on the top table by Geoff Hurst, Jack Charlton, George Cohen and Norman Hunter. The atmosphere in the room is something to behold — so respectful, so reverential, so awestruck. It is as if we are in the company of royalty, which, in sporting terms, we most certainly are.

When the national anthem is played before dinner, Charlton moves his hands in time, as if conducting an orchestra. Afterwards, from the top table, the players reel off anecdotes they have told a thousand times, Hurst maintaining that his controversial second goal against West Germany did cross the line — and that Roger Hunt’s reaction proved it — as well as being happy to repeat the self-deprecating claim that his third goal was a fluke, a hit-and-hope that was designed to eat up vital seconds if, as he expected, it flew high or wide of its intended target. They talk about the day, about the genius of Sir Alf Ramsey, about the brilliance of Bobby Charlton and the late Bobby Moore and Alan Ball, about the tenacity of the much-loved Nobby Stiles. Hurst’s repartee is impressively polished, Charlton’s endearingly rough around the edges. For the best part of three hours, until they are exhausted, the audience is entranced.

The night has been organised by a recently-formed group called 66 Winners, which has sought to create commercial opportunities for England’s World Cup heroes, selling signed memorabilia, staging gala dinner events and so on. Hurst is one player who has succeeded in making a living off his and the team’s achievements, but others have never been too sure which way to turn, which public, media and commercial engagements to accept and which to reject. Hurst responds to an interview request by stating he has an exclusive contract with another newspaper. No problem with that; the lament should be not that Hurst has managed to make a living as a World Cup-winning hero but that others have been unable to do so. This is, in part, what Carl Holness was trying to address when he set up 66 Winners.

Holness has spent most of his working life as a social worker, but he got into the promotions business after meeting Banks at a sportsman’s dinner. He helped to organise a 40th anniversary celebration of the World Cup winners in Stoke and he set up 66 Winners because, according to the company’s website, “after making extensive enquiries around the English football community, it seemed that no one else was planning anything at all to mark the golden anniversary of the greatest sporting achievement in English history.”

The FA would dispute that, saying that they had commemorations planned in any case and were happy to work alongside 66 Winners. (Nobody, after all, could ever accuse the FA of being slow to cash in on 1966.) Holness knows there will be some who pooh-pooh the commemorations, decrying a desire to fete a solitary triumph 50 years ago. He also knows, better than most, that the argument is poppycock. Even if English football does not deserve the chance to pat itself on the back, it is absolutely right to honour the achievement and, particularly, the players who made it possible.

“It’s a celebration,” Holness says. “As a country, we should be celebrating what those players did, celebrating their homecoming to Wembley 50 years on from that special day and taking the opportunity to thank them. To me, it’s a national crime that these players haven’t been knighted. I see knighthoods getting handed out in other walks of life, including in sport, and I look at these lads and what they achieved for their country through blood, sweat and guts, something that will still be talked about for another 50 years from now, and they are true national heroes.

“Some of them are too ill to attend, which is very sad. Of the rest of them, we will probably never see so many of them in one room together again. Some of them will continue to attend events, but this will be their last high-profile public get-together, so it’s an opportunity to thank them and to celebrate what they did. They are national heroes — brilliant, humble men — and they deserve to be celebrated.”
 

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World Cup-winning team

1. Gordon Banks (goalkeeper)
Lost his place at Leicester City to Peter Shilton after the World Cup and was sold to Stoke City. Career was ended when he lost an eye in a car accident in October 1972. Aged 78, he is suffering from kidney cancer.

2. George Cohen (right back)
Won his 37th and final cap in November 1967 but served Fulham, his only club, for another two years. Has had cancer three times and campaigns for cancer charities. Aged 76.

3. Ray Wilson (left back)
Injuries curtailed his career in the late 1960s and he won the last of 63 caps in 1968 before he became an undertaker. He is 81 and has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease since 2004.

4. Nobby Stiles (midfielder)
Alf Ramsey’s midfield enforcer won 28 caps, the last of them in 1970. He managed Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion before working as a youth coach at Manchester United. Suffering from Alzheimer’s. Aged 74.

5. Jack Charlton (centre back)
The only consistently successful manager among Ramsey’s men, he managed Middlesbrough, Sheffield Wednesday, Newcastle United and, with notable success, Ireland. Aged 81.

6. Bobby Moore (centre back)
Won last of his 108 caps in 1973. Ended career in the United States but had no success as a manager and was a low-profile columnist and pundit. Died of bowel cancer in 1993, aged 51.

7. Alan Ball (midfielder)
At 21, the youngest of the winners. He went on to have a distinguished playing career with Everton, Arsenal and Southampton and managed a number of clubs. He died in 2007, aged 61, of a heart attack.

8. Roger Hunt (forward)
The Liverpool striker won 34 caps, the last of them in 1969, scoring 18 goals before going into the family haulage business. Aged 78.

9. Bobby Charlton (midfielder)
Played for England until the 1970 World Cup and for Manchester United until 1973. Managed Preston briefly before concentrating on his business career. Knighted in 1994. Aged 78.

10. Geoff Hurst (forward)
Still the only man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, Hurst, 74, continued his playing career into the 1970s. Was briefly involved in management with Telford United and Chelsea and assisted Ron Greenwood with England. Knighted in 1998.

11. Martin Peters (midfielder)
Described by Sir Alf Ramsey as being “ten years ahead of his time”, Peters won 67 caps. Joined Tottenham Hotspur for £150,000 in 1970 and continued playing until 1981 before going into the insurance business. Aged 72, he is suffering from Alzheimer’s.
 

Gazolba

Well-Known Member
Didn't they even refuse to give medals to the players who played in earlier rounds but were omitted from the final (e.g. Jimmy Greaves), until someone kicked up a big fuss?
 

kdrinkell

Well-Known Member
This sounds terrible but its life isn't it,nobody lives forever.
Bobby Moore could have been looked after by the FA a lot more than he was
 

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