When I rode the grocery bike I knew that when I had saved enough there would be some great and unforgettable reward. Maybe it would be Trautmann reaching out to make some improbable save from Milburn, or the young Nat Lofthouse showing the strength and the heart which would earn him the title ‘Lion of Vienna’ for his overwhelming performance for England.
Sometimes, beyond the thrill and the spectacle there was the pure force of revelation. Even in the longest football life there are not so many times you see something that changes your view of the game, puts it into another dimension and makes you think about possibilities beyond anything you have seen before. Tottenham had this effect when they brought their championship-winning team to Newcastle. I did not realise a team could be so well organised, so filled with coherence in their passing and smooth in attack. They didn’t have a Matthews or a Finney, but they had something of rare power: a team which had been beautifully dovetailed. I would remember well enough the big goalkeeper Ted Ditchburn, Alf Ramsey, the polished right back with the slicked-back black hair, and Ronnie Burgess, the captain of Wales, but the most pervasive memory of all was the push-and-run rhythm of an entire team that had found a way to play beautifully.
Len Shackleton was another who went beyond what I thought was possible on a football field. I saw his first game for Newcastle, a 13–0 slaughter of Newport County in a Second Division match, and if it wasn’t much of a contest it was still unforgettable. Shackleton scored six times, but more than that he did things which made it impossible to take your eyes off him: flicks and jinks performed in the fine, arrogant belief that he could outplay anyone who faced him. Newcastle had brought in other top players – George Hannah, a clever forward, and Alf McMichael, the Northern Ireland international full back – but they were lost in the crowd. It was Shackleton’s day, his greeting to a new and immediately captive audience. He took over the game, shaped every phase of it.
When I first met ‘Shack’ many years later I was surprised to learn that he came from Bradford in West Yorkshire. I had always thought him a prime property of the North East because of the manner in which the terraces of St James’ Park had embraced him so ferociously as one of their own.
In those days football was played in virtually any conditions. They crushed the snow and drew lines in it for the markings and put down straw to try to thaw out the surface, but usually that only made matters worse. It made the pitch treacherously skiddy. For someone like Shackleton, however, it was simply another challenge to surmount. He operated on the principle that if you brought enough imagination to football you could always get something done and, best of all, you could always entertain the people for whom the game was the climax of a hard and often discouraging week. He seemed to understand the public view of football: it was a show that above all demanded a certainty of effort; imagination and skill were the bonuses that made everything worthwhile. The average spectator worked hard in the pit or the shipyard and there was one thing he would never tolerate: indifference on the part of those who had been paid to play the game professionally. If this attitude was identified, the reaction was as harshly vociferous as the praise for some outstanding piece of work could be unrestrained to the point of splitting the sky.
For Jack and me, Shackleton was most intoxicating on a freezing New Year’s Day after he had moved on to Sunderland. We were in a narrow little paddock at Roker Park, next to the corner flag, for a game against Wolves. Shack came over to take a corner. To emphasise the conditions, if that was necessary with the snow piled up around the pitch, he had rolled up his socks to his thighs, as though he was wearing a pair of nylons, and the crowd roared with laughter. Fooling around he may have been, but his on-field cabaret acts were almost invariably supported by football substance of the highest quality. The corner kick was stupendous. I shouted to Jack in the uproar, ‘Look at that, he’s put back-spin on it.’ I was wrong. What he had done, in fact, was drive the ball to where the force of the wind stopped it and carried it down into the most dangerous possible position for the defence. (Shackleton was indeed also a master of the art of putting spin on the ball, chipping down on it with the outside of his foot, as though he was using a short golf iron.)
In those first visits to St James’ and Roker, Jack and I were getting a degree course in our future trade. It was on several levels. We could understand more easily what the game meant to the people – and what certain players could bring to it according to their talent and their willingness to push themselves to their limits. We could see the
