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The funniest episode in Leo McKinstry’s biography of Sir Alf Ramsey (1920-99) finds its subject — the time is 1973 — reaching the end of his tether with the talented but undisciplined Manchester City forward Rodney Marsh. ‘I’ve told you that when you play for England you have to work harder’, Sir Alf harangues his wayward protégé. ‘I’ll be watching you and if you don’t, I’m going to pull you off at half-time.’ ‘Christ!’ Marsh mutters. ‘At Manchester City all we get at half-time is a cup of tea and an orange.’ Here in the twilight of Ramsey’s career, this ‘typical piece of cockney wit’ marked a wider, symbolical divide: the gap that had opened up between an erstwhile national saviour and a new breed of mavericks more interested in soccer’s rewards than some of its obligations.
Forty years after that epochal Wembley victory — one of my first coherent memories is of watching Wolfgang Weber slide in to score West Germany’s equaliser — one forgets quite how embattled Ramsey was for the greater part of his England tenure. The press, three or four trusties excepted, hated him. The paying public was prepared to boo his teams off the field, or even onto it before one fixture against France in 1969. Only the players, amid the countless contending constituencies of English football, offered long-term respect. ‘I would have died for him,’ the hard-tackling Nobby Stiles confessed. Such rapt veneration was not exclusive to the veterans of 1966: a late-period addition to the squad like Malcolm Macdonald ‘loved Alf. I made no bones about him.’
Even Macdonald, on the other hand, occasionally felt like throwing an affectionate arm around his superior’s shoulder, so great did the level of Ramsey’s insularity sometimes seem to become. A working-class lad from what was then semi-rural Dagenham who pursued a pre-sporting career as a Co-op delivery boy, he edged into the professional game on afternoons off from war service, captained Spurs and, as a slow-moving but stylish England full-back was present at the ignominious 3-6 drubbing by Hungary in 1953. The national job came a decade later, after a spectacular few years managing formerly humble Ipswich Town. Dour, reserved and uxurious, he mingled old-world courtesy and charm with some altogether savage prejudices — home internationals against the Scots were a figurative re-enactment of Bannockburn — and was eternally sensitive over his (unproven) Romany origins. Once, on a trip to Romania, the team bus passed by a gypsy encampment. ‘Hey, Alf, there’s some of your relatives’ Bobby Moore quipped from the back seat, causing Ramsey to turn ‘crimson with fury’.
‘Mooro’ — McKinstry is generally sparing with footballers’ nick-names — turns up a lot in Sir Alf, not always in a particularly agreeable light. McKinstry’s great merit, in fact, is his ability to take on and debunk some of the myths that accumulated around the 1966 World Cup squad. Marketed to the impressionable pre-teenager as a modern Corinthian, the England captain is here restyled as an aloof and self-absorbed bar-infester. Jimmy Greaves, who, a certain kind of pundit will always tell you, should have played in the final was rightly left out — barely fit, McKinstry reckons, and liable to have disrupted a settled team with his me-first individualism. The long-running debate as to whether Ramsey’s cautious tactics and dislike of the adventurous free spirit hastened England’s footballing decline seethes on in the background.
Leo McKinstry leads a curious kind of professional double life: at any rate I looked in vain amongst the author details for any mention of his formidably brilliant life of Lord Rosebery. Sir Alf is a much more mainstream performance, and none the worse for that, faltering only in the perfunctoriness of its final chapter, where Ramsey’s year as technical director of the Greek club Panathinaikos rates a solitary sentence. As ever in books about English professional football, the villains of the piece are the senior officers of the Football Association, here represented as patronising, negligent and ill-informed. There is a revealing moment, again from 1973, when one of the ‘blazer brigade’ steps forward to offer a few fatuities to the squad. ‘Bloody silly sod’, Ramsey apostrophises the retreating figure. ‘And there, with the likes of him, gentlemen, hangs my job as England manager.’ Not much has changed.