Guest Post by Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail, author of the newly updated biography of Bobby Moore
Yet another World Cup comes and goes but still Bobby Moore remains the only England captain whose hands have reached out to grasp football’s Holy Grail and raise it aloft.
Thus begins the updated and significantly expanded publication of my biographical labour of love about the most iconic figure of all in the rich anthology of English football. What more fitting way to celebrate the 50th anniversary, in 2016, of England’s only World Cup glory than to rectify the shameful failure to elevate the winning captain to football’s company of knights?
This is the question, still vexed all these 21 years after Moore’s premature death, which is put, with considerable vehemence, at the end of the book.
There can be any number of justifications for rushing into print and the two identified above are prominent in the reasoning for this revised work. One begets the other. The descent into mediocrity of the nation which gave birth to the greatest game steepened at Brazil 2014, from which a craven England were eliminated in record time: Two games and out.
That stirred the memory of how it all began to go wrong after that dizzying afternoon at the old Wembley in the summer of ‘66 when Moore wiped his muddied palms on the velvet-covered rail of the Royal Box before receiving the Jules Rimet Trophy from the white-gloved hands of the Queen. It also provoked the thought that this worsening humiliation might have been averted had the Football Association, instead of freezing Moore out, employed the wisdom and experience of their most inspirational captain…….the way Germany did with his great friend, exact contemporary and like personality Franz Beckenbauer, to such unprecedented success.
Over here, in this bastion of Middle English values, decency and common sense, we do not only print the Mail. We get mail. Yester-year’s grand old-fashioned flood of readers’ letters, many so beautifully crafted, has subsided before the advance of communications technology. But that tradition is exceeded now by the millions of e-mails, texts, tweets and comments posted at our on-line website.
Of course it can be a mixed bag and a few of my correspondents are prone to asking: ‘Can you ever go a week without mentioning your mate Bobby Moore?’ A majority, however, share an understanding as to why it his larger-than-life-size statue which stands guard at the approach to the new Wembley Stadium, not unlike Horatio at the bridge.
Some are old enough to relive through Bobby’s printed reminiscence the thrill of that solitary World Cup triumph: ‘Bursting inside and trembling. Elated but trying not to get carried away. Typically English. Don’t show too much. But even seeing the film years later still gives me the shivers. It is the be-all and end-all of football.’
Those words came echoing down the years to swirl around the multi-coloured promenades of Rio de Janeiro this summer. This World Cup was the be-all for Germany’s Phillip Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Thomas Muller and Joachim Low. It was the end-all for Lionel Messi, David Luiz, Robin Van Persie and Big Phil Scolari. And it was another death, this one not so small, for the English game. That is the relevance of Bobby Moore today.
Learned professors warn us that we forget our history at our peril. Our most cherished game has paid the price for ignoring a national hero, until he died. Another rummage through the notes and recordings of our conversations down the years unearthed this prophecy of sporting catastrophe, uttered before Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello came, failed, took the money and ran:
The England job is for an Englishman, not someone from abroad. Every country has its football culture and it takes one of our own to understand how the English player works. Anyway, a national team should be all about people from that country – from the manager through the players, all the way down to the tea lady. And by the way, no country has ever won the World Cup with a foreign manager. And by the way, that remains true to this day.
Moore passed away before Terry Venables was appointed England head coach in 1994. So what he had to say comes as a rebuke from the beyond grave for the FA’s failure to secure Venables for the 1998 World Cup following his thrilling run to the semi-final of Euro ’96:
Terry is one of the most intelligent coaches and inspiring man managers I have ever known or worked with.
It would be hard for the blazered football establishment of the time to deny having turned u[ their pompous noses at the Cockney footballer, even more than they did at other great men who they tended to look down upon as muddied oafs. So I am certain Bobby would have shared my gratification at including in his biography, now, the public apology from a more recent FA chairman, David Bernstein, for that organisation’s neglect of its World Cup-winning captain.
There was a belief that higher honours had been denied Moore because of the accusation levelled against him of stealing a bracelet from a jewellery shop in Bogota en route to the 1970 World Cup Finals in Mexico. Those charges were false and subsequently withdrawn but they famously consigned him to house arrest, delaying his arrival in Mexico, and he sensed that the stigma had stuck in some quarters.
So I am obliged to reaffirm him telling me that ‘one of the younger lads in the squad did something foolish, a prank with unfortunate consequences.’ Whoduunit? Years later, at the mellow end of one of our very long evenings, Bobby entrusted me with the name of the suspect on the sworn pledge never to reveal it, at least not before both he and the culprit died. That, I will continue to honour for so long as I live.
Moore lives on. In that imposing statue at Wembley, for which I had the privilege of writing the inscription. In the annals of his countless command performances. Through the sadness which engulfed his first wife Tina, daughter Roberta and his grandchildren at the tragic and even more premature loss of the only other male member of the family, his son Dean.
His legacy includes the fund for fighting the bowel cancer which killed him, for which the devoted efforts of his widow Stephanie have raised more than £20 million, thus far.
Since his death – can it really be 21 years ago? – the accolades have kept coming: Elected to FIFA’s All-Time World Cup X1, voted into the World Team of the Century, inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame, named as England’s Golden Player in UEFA’s pantheon of the 50 greatest European footballers on the occasion of their 50th anniversary.
But still no knighthood.
Still no place in the pantheon of Sir Walter Winterbottom, Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney, Sir Alf Ramsey, Sir Matt Busby, Sir Bobby Charlton, Sir Geoff Hurst, Sir Bobby Robson, Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Trevor Brooking.
The Honours Committee, which reacted too slowly when the terminal nature of Moore’s illness became public, hides behind the rules and regulations prohibiting knighthoods after death – but they include this country’s law-makers in their number.
One segment of the biography contains these sentiments:
In all honesty, in all decency, in all sanity an exception should be made to the protocol which refuses posthumous knighthoods. Come on, this is a national hero. It cannot be beyond the resources of Parliament to enact a specific statute of exemption in this case.
In the shocked aftermath of Bobby Moore’s death, thousands upon thousands added their signatures to the petitions for him to be knighted. Now that 50th World Cup anniversary is fast approaching. Let the campaign re-commence.
This time, let it win.
*Our thanks to the Daily Mail and MailOnline for allowing us to republish this article by their Chief Sports Feature Writer, Jeff Powell.
You can buy Jeff Powell’s Biography of Bobby Moore from a number of sources
Biteback Publishing for £6.98
Amazon in paperback for £6.99
Amazon eBook for Kindle at £4.18