George raised one arm in the air and smiled benignly as he walked slowly back towards his rejoicing teammates.
‘Bloody hell, George. You gave me spiral blood,’ I said as he passed me.
‘Ah, you had me going there, Hodgey,’ he replied. A smile as wide as a slice of melon broke across his face. ‘Had a bitta luck.’
Luck didn’t come into it. It was brilliant play on his part. No other player had ever turned me over in a one-on-one with such consummate ease as George did that day. What’s more, no player ever did again.
A couple of months later, I fell into conversation with Banksy after we had played Stoke City at Bramall Lane. During our chat I recalled my experience with George.
‘Did just as you said. To the letter,’ I informed Banksy. ‘Forced him across goal and onto his left foot. Stayed on my feet, forced him further to his left till he gave me a glimpse of the ball. He dumped me on my arse and tapped the ball in the net. Made me look a right Charlie.’
Bansky rubbed his chin with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
‘Yeah, thought he would,’ said Banksy, emitting a sigh, ‘he did exactly the same to me.’
* * *
George Best was a football genius and, sadly, there is no true genius without a tincture of madness. I have nothing but fond memories of George and, as I will also later recall, found him to be a very intelligent, immensely witty, amiable and caring guy who, for all his fame and exploits, was surprisingly shy.
I have now reached an age where I increasingly find myself recalling the great players, great games and even the not-so-great names and games that provided the essence to my sixty-year career in professional football. I am, if nothing else, a very lucky guy indeed. To have enjoyed – and I emphasise the word ‘enjoyed’ – sixty years as a player and coach in professional football, is a journey I could never, in my wildest dreams, have envisaged making when I first signed for Sheffield United back in the days when the only thing that came ready to serve were tennis balls, and it was girls that brought me out in a sweat and not tandoori chicken.
Football has been my life and it has blessed me with a treasure trove of memories. Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth and, as I am now discovering, delights one in the seasoned years. The true art of memory is the art of attention. During the course of their careers many players never take note or commit to memory the characters, games, unguarded asides, humour, friendships, golden moments and angst they experience – quintessentially what makes football so entertaining and the greatest team game on the planet. I had the presence of mind to document my career: I kept and logged every press report of every game I was ever involved in, from my salad days as a teenage amateur with Worksop Town via Sheffield United and England, to my role as a coach with myriad top clubs and both Scotland and England.
I also kept the match programmes of every game I was involved in. These and my personal collection of scrapbooks and notebooks have proved to be invaluable now that I have decided to commit my story to paper. I have never written a book before but, after sixty years of continuous employment in the game, I felt the time was right.
During the course of my career I have seen football change irrevocably, from a working man’s leisure pursuit to the multi-billion-pound industry that it is today. Self-appraisal is no guarantee of merit, I know, but rather than being one of those former players who believe football past was far better than football present, I would like to believe I have not only moved with the times but, in my field of goalkeeping, have always been an innovator. In recent years the ideas I introduced to my UEFA coaching sessions attended by the likes of José Mourinho, Harry Redknapp, Rafael Benitez and Felipe Scolari have, I would like to think, in some small way enhanced their expertise as coaches in the modern game. Football past was great, but so too is football present. That I have continued to contribute in a positive way to the game I love so much is a constant source of joy to me.
Though now in my eighth decade, I do not feel old. On the contrary, the fact I have continued to work in the game has kept me young of mind and heart. A friend once said to me, ‘How old would you put yourself at, if you didn’t know how old you were?’ It’s a good question. Thanks to my long career in football I would put myself at an age far younger than my actual years. That is just one of the great gifts and benefits football has given me and one of the reasons why I am so grateful to the game that has, and always will have, a special place in the best of all possible worlds.
* * *
I was born on 16 August 1936. Little over two weeks later King Edward VIII abdicated, Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland and civil war broke out in Spain. An unfortunate sequence of events, but I have it on good authority that none of these was due to me having entered the world.
I was born into a hard-working and principled working-class family. My dad, Len, was a loving father, though something of a stickler for discipline. He was also an enigma in our home town of Laughton Common, which is equidistant between Sheffield and Rotherham, being as he was a miner at Dinnington Colliery and also an accomplished concert pianist.
When it comes to playing the piano some people can carry a tune but appear to stagger under the load. Not so Dad. Those strong, gnarled hands that hewed coal for eight hours on a daily basis would suddenly be transformed into deftly gliding fingers that lovingly caressed the piano keys. So popular was he as a pianist that Dad often gave recitals at civic halls and theatres throughout South Yorkshire and, in the summer, entertained holidaymakers at Butlin’s holiday camps. I would listen to him play and be totally transfixed. He not only reproduced the piece perfectly but he seemed to capture its very essence and that of its composer.
Given his talent, I have often wondered whether if he had been born into a middle-class family in, say, the leafy suburbs of Betjeman’s London rather than a working-class family in the South Yorkshire coalfields, his musical destiny would have been different. Dad was born at the turn of the twentieth century, when working people accepted their lot. There was little, if any, recognition of a working person’s musical talent by the great and good of classical music. Dad would never have had the wherewithal nor was he offered the opportunity to develop his talent at a musical college or academy. A great pity, not least because a bill poster proclaiming, ‘The Conservatoire Collier plays Chopin’, would have had a wonderful alliterative ring to it.
Dad began working down the pit at the age of fourteen and continued to do so until he retired at the age of sixty-five. He hadn’t missed a day’s work and, what’s more, in fifty-one years as a miner Dad was never once late. On his retirement, the well-meaning folk at the colliery bought him a clock.
My mum was called Ivy. She was a very loving and attentive mother who, in keeping with most mothers of that era, worked impossibly long hours cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning, mending and shopping for her family. Long before the phrase was invented, women were ‘multi-taskers’, quite simply because their role of looking after the home and children and everything to do with domesticity was labour intensive.
I was fortunate in having a mother and father who took an