Bobby Mitchell, Newcastle’s left winger, was another of our favourites. There was never any question about how much he cared as he tore his way to the corner flag before putting in immaculate crosses, but in Mitchell there was an example of that separation between the good and the great – the players who could make a big impact on their day, but who might not stand the test of evolving tactics and changing priorities, and those who could survive any new day, any new circumstances. Mitchell belonged, I came to suspect, in the first category and Matthews in the other.
My fear for a Bobby Mitchell of today is that he just wouldn’t get a kick. His problem would be that his opposing full back would not be alone in countering his pace and trickiness. There would be plenty of help for the embattled defender, as there is in today’s game when someone is obliged to face a Lionel Messi or a Cristiano Ronaldo. Indeed, in my own time, when George Best first became rampant, even a full back as fine and as quick as Bob McNab said the job of marking Best would have been impossible without the help of his Arsenal team-mate Peter Simpson. It was said of McNab that no one contained George better, and indeed I heard that the Arsenal backroom staff felt his effort in one game was worthy of a video defining classic defence, but he was the first to admit it was not a job for one man alone. In Bobby Mitchell’s prime no one helped the full back. It was eleven against eleven, number two marked number eleven, number three took on seven, and the best man survived.
Matthews would undoubtedly have received the treatment meted out to Best, but he, too, would have survived. He would have done so because of his awareness of space and where everyone was. Also, he would have the choice of going one of two ways. Each Saturday you would read the same story from the lips of the full back who happened to be marking Matthews that day. The proposed antidotes to genius became so familiar Jack and I could have recited them to each other as the bus wound its way to Newcastle … ‘I’m going to keep my eye on the ball’ … ‘I’m going to push him on to his left foot, he’s not so good with that one’ … ‘I’m going to catch him hard with an early tackle, and we’ll see how he likes that.’ You would read all that, you would shrug, and then you would see Matthews imposing a quite different reality.
Another reality, the one of economics which touched almost every aspect of our lives, meant that we could go to Newcastle or Sunderland only three or four times a season – but each time was a feast, something you could store against the bleakest of days, and sometimes, too, there was a cut-priced thrill to be had at home in Ashington. Down the years our local team had slipped into the North Eastern League, but from time to time they still drew a good crowd, especially for a cup game, and they could get decent players in an area so filled with aspiring professionals, including our Uncle Stan who played for them before moving to Chesterfield.
One game I remember vividly was after Ashington fought their way into the second round of the FA Cup and were at home to Rochdale. In those pre-floodlit days, games in mid-winter were played in the early afternoon, which meant that two-thirds of the miners were above the surface. So 12,000 fans packed the ground, some of them sitting on the roof of the stand, to see Ashington go down passionately and by just one goal.
However, nothing that I remember lifted the town quite so much as Jackie Milburn’s first selection for England, against Northern Ireland at Windsor Park, Belfast. Jack and I were disconsolate because in that time before live television we couldn’t see the greatest day of our famous relative. But then, as it turned out, our despair was only temporary. Our consolation came with a sign outside the cinema which announced that before the big picture – Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, a film which in normal circumstances would not have attracted either Jack or me – the Pathé newsreel would show highlights of Wor Jackie’s debut for England.
A visitor to Ashington might have assumed that he had arrived in the one mining town in the world obsessed with ballet. The queue was so long that by the time Jack and I claimed our seats The Red Shoes had been pirouetting along for at least a quarter of an hour and we’d missed the first showing of the news. When the film ended and the lights went up, an usherette told us we had to leave. We said we had come to see Wor Jackie, but she was unmoved. ‘You’ve seen the main film, now you have to go,’ she insisted – but then someone in the crowd said, ‘You know, these boys are related to Jackie Milburn,’ and we were left in peace as the newsreel began again for the second showing and we could enjoy the great achievement of the man we revered so much, together with all those proud people in the cinema who cheered, along with us, one of their own when the cameras caught him trotting on to the field.
It was, though, the last I would see of Jackie Milburn’s first game for England. The rest of the filmed report was dominated by the amazing Stanley Matthews. He sent the Irish full back, maybe the most harassed soul ever seen on a football field, every way but the one which might have given him contact with the ball. Matthews feinted and dummied his
