Another lesson from Jimmy was that bad players hide away in a match, exerting no influence while just waiting for the ball to bounce favourably, hoping to exploit any talent they have been given – but this, he said, wasn’t enough if you wanted to be a real professional. ‘If you want to be on the field but you don’t want to play, really play, you stand next to the man who is marking you. Better still, you go behind him. You will never get a kick. If you do want a kick, if you want to truly influence a game and show people you’re a serious professional and not someone just playing at it, you’ve got to find yourself space. You’ve got to work your balls off.’
His greatest challenge – and it was one which eventually he had to accept was a lost cause – was to get me to tackle. Jimmy carefully explained the technique which had always been a huge factor in his own fine playing career. I understood the theory well enough, but out on the practice field, even with him yelling in my ear, I couldn’t get it to work.
Yes, I knew it was right to put all your weight into the tackle, that it was the best way to avoid injury – and that the opposite was true when you went in half-heartedly and, most dangerous of all, hung your leg out. But then a match would start, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that my main job was to avoid players rather than collide with them. No matter how many times Jimmy pointed out how strong I was, and even when his argument was supported by Busby, I couldn’t budge the idea that my purpose was not to charge into tackles but await their outcome, then receive the ball and use it in the most creative way.
It wasn’t that I ever refused to make a tackle – I never consciously ducked out of that responsibility – it was just that whenever I did it I was almost invariably pathetic. Each time I failed, I thought to myself, ‘There must be easier ways of getting the ball.’ This happened to be true when you played a bad team. They would give it to you as a matter of course, but, as Jimmy kept saying with some force, my job was to learn how to compete at the highest level.
Jimmy was nearing the end of his football career when finally, if very briefly, I got it right, and quite perfectly so, while playing for England in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. It happened in a group game against Romania. We were leading 1–0 and they were coming at us with some considerable force right at the end of the game. A Romanian was carrying the ball towards our goal area and you could sniff the danger as he moved into shooting range. I knew it was a menacing situation, and on this occasion I was also aware that there was no question of shelving the responsibility. It was me who had to make the tackle – or it was nobody. I put my foot in hard – and then something astonishing happened. The Romanian fell over and I carried the ball away.
Later I was told that as I came out of the tackle with the ball Emlyn Hughes, a squad member who was sitting in the stand, jumped to his feet and shouted, ‘Fantastic … Bobby Charlton’s won a tackle … it’s got to be England.’ It was a memorable moment for me, and a long-delayed achievement for Wales.
Jimmy did, however, see more immediate results in other aspects of my game. He made me a professional, opening up all the many hidden areas of the game for someone who had once thought he knew it all.
Week by week, Jimmy smoothed away the rough edges of my game as I moved through the Altrincham Junior League – where, with a team of new boys and trialists, we could win by as many as twenty-odd goals – and then in the Manchester Amateur League, which had teams of older men. They came from the factories, sometimes shedding boiler suits before they played, determined to shake up these fancy kids and didn’t worry about being overheard saying things like, ‘They’re only fucking Manchester United, let’s get stuck into the little bastards.’ I was given a quick passage through that kind of warfare, and also the Manchester League, where the A team performed.
One strong memory is of an Amateur League match in North Manchester. Les Olive, who I’d seen in goal for United at Newcastle when I was a boy, was playing as a centre half now. He was on the secretarial staff at the club, and after Munich he would rise to become club secretary. He was a good and versatile player, but this day he was taking some terrible abuse from the touchline. I wasn’t playing because I was needed for an FA Youth tie the following day, but in this league both teams were expected to provide a linesman, so that was my job, for the only time in my life.
I thought, very briefly, of defending Les against his critics, but then I also thought it would probably be a reckless thing to do. So, to my shame, I kept quiet and, even more disgracefully, I put the flag down quickly after signalling an offside. I did this because a very large man in a flat hat boomed in my ear, ‘You’re bloody wrong there, son.’
After
