His debut was in his home city, at Villa Park, and a comfortable 2–0 win against Northern Ireland. It was an uncomplicated game in the manner of the home international championship, where football was played in the right way. Nippy wingers jinked down their right and left touchlines and inside-forwards were artful schemers. Respectively, they were marked by the full-backs – unsung, decent men with neatly greased and parted hair – and the half-backs who matched their opponents by being muscular and wily. In the vanguard of each attack was the centre-forward, a physical, thrusting player, much of whose game was reduced to single combat with a strong and unyielding centre-half. The goalkeeper stood detached and beyond, awaiting the outcome of the set-piece battles in front of him. This was how things were and were meant to be.
My dad, instinctively a Williams man, was a rapid convert. The Belgium game ended as a comfortable 5–0 win but the Belgians had put a few good shots in on goal. The day was November damp, the ball becoming heavier with each revolution across the Wembley surface and with each yard travelled through the afternoon murk. But every Belgian effort Merrick handled with absolute ease. He caught the ball ‘like he didn’t have a care, just picked it out of the air,’ my father said. ‘That wasn’t easy with those leather balls, they’d weigh pounds on a day like that.’ Actually, in the second half a white ball was used. It looked like the new plastic continental type that didn’t absorb water. Merrick later wrote that he didn’t like them because they swung around unpredictably, though this one proved to be the only one he came across that didn’t. Maybe it was a normal leather one which somebody had slapped a bit of white paint over.
In any event, Merrick’s handling was impeccable. Someone in the newspapers called him ‘the Clutch’ and the terraces picked up on it. From Bert Williams, ‘the Cat’, with its overtones of continental panache, England goalkeeping passed into the clutch of Merrick. It spoke again of the industrial Midlands, with its car factories and things. Very solid, reliable and British.
Just as well, because his first game in London, two weeks after his debut, brought home the nature of the outside threat. My father went again. In our role as founders of football, ‘everyone wanted to beat us’, he said. The latest to try were the Austrians, who came armed with the concept of ‘tactics’. These weren’t entirely new. Austria’s pre-war ‘Wunderteam’ had employed ‘tactics’ when they beat England 2–1 in Vienna. This was in 1936 shortly before Hitler had annexed Austria. The war had come and we’d largely forgotten about ‘tactics’, trusting the world might have the sense to do the same.
The Austrians were held in such high regard they were invited to play at Wembley. By contrast, France had never been afforded this full international honour, inferior footballers and poor ally in war that they were. Austria had flourished as a playing nation till overrun by the Nazis. Though on the wrong side in the war, this could largely be attributed in people’s minds to German belligerence. Austrians had about them underdog qualities. They might even rate as plucky. They still had the unwelcome occupying force of the Russians on their soil and it was touch and go in these grave times whether they’d leave. We instinctively liked the Austrians. They showed their gratitude by turning up at the headquarters of world football with a devious plan to overthrow us.
Against all natural law, they played with an attacking centre-half: Ernst Ocwirk, ernst in German meaning ‘serious’. He performed in a manner that made the conventions of the centre-half position a joke. He took the field with a number 5 on his back, as he should, but then showed this was a deliberate attempt to deceive. Instead of holding back to await the thrusts of the England centre-forward, he advanced to occupy something more like his own team’s central attacking position. Had he any decency, he’d have worn number 9 on his back. Then, just when the English team had noted where he was, he’d be gone, and back in his own team’s defence. Up and down the field in flowing fashion he and the Austrians played. The terraces, according to Fleet Street, nicknamed him ‘Clockwork’ Ocwirk. The Austrians ran into open spaces where they weren’t expected to run. They passed the ball to each other there and held it, while thinking next what to do. They kept it from the England players for lengthy periods of the game.
England couldn’t get a handle on them. The Austrians wouldn’t attack in conventional, civilised combat form. Nor would they stand up to be attacked. Characters you’d least expect would pop up and attack you. As suddenly they’d be gone. From the dark heart of the European continent, they were like those gorillas in the Malayan and Kenyan jungle. They, too, got together to concoct plans and tactics. They also probably sat in the dressing room swearing oaths. But everyone agreed they were damned tricky. (A few years later when one of my comics started giving away small photos of foreign players, Ocwirk’s was the first I collected.) With a minimum of effort they scored two goals. England did most of the running, often fruitlessly chasing the ball. But we had more muscle. Through physical endeavour, England scrambled a draw.
The menace of tactics was obvious but it was difficult to know what to do about it. In the absence of clear thinking, it was decided to ignore it. Resolve and character would have to do. An empire had been built on them. Britain lost ‘every battle but the last’. There were no defeats, merely setbacks ‘on the road to eventual victory’. Actually, it was Karl Marx who said something like that, the fellow who had claimed that by bringing the railways to India, Britain had only laid down the iron path of Indian revolution. Off the rails though he was, he’d done his best work in Bloomsbury, in the British Museum, a few streets from where my nan had been born off Theobald’s Road. Lenin had lived in Finsbury for a while, just north past the end of Exmouth Market. He’d have walked along it, as my grandad and great-grandma served up carved roasts to the poor and workers of the area, and around the streets of Clerkenwell en route to his own eventual victory. Marx and he would have picked up some of the grit and mood in the air.
It wasn’t that foreigners like them, or any other, were not clever people. Tactics, whatever you felt about the morality of them, showed they could be. But could their keepers calmly catch a ball? Would they take a cross, with the pressure really on? They were form rather than content, capable of something thrillingly dangerous or elaborate but impossible to sustain. Foreigners couldn’t ‘hold the line’; they couldn’t see things through.
Churchill saw through the Labour Party as soon as he was back in Downing Street. Our position slipping, they’d tried to stop anything that might be construed as our retreat from greatness by quietly taking us down the nuclear path. Churchill didn’t mind, he just wished he’d been told. He soon visited the USA to push his arguments for the alliance of English-speaking peoples, our special relationship. It was the alternative to dealing with the chaotic Europeans. The USA had always liked the cut of the old boy’s jib more than that Attlee fellow, with his pink ideas. In return for aid, Churchill said they could use our military bases for the two countries’ ‘common defence’. That’d hold the line.
On the customary end-of-season tour, in May 1952, England went to Italy. In the goalmouths of Florence stadium where my father had played before him, Merrick did his bit maintaining the score at 1–1. They travelled on to meet the Austrians again, in occupied Vienna. The game was played at the Prater Stadium in the Russian zone, but British troops packed the crowd. The forward line was led by Nat Lofthouse of Bolton Wanderers, a centre-forward in the old physical mould. Ocwirk’s mechanism failed to tick for the occasion, while Lofthouse so intimidated the Austrian keeper, Walter Zeman, that he scored two of England’s goals in a 3–2 victory.
Unintimidatable, Merrick had his best England game. He made the winning goal, rising to pluck a swirling corner kick from the angle of bar and post and clearing, via Tom Finney, to Lofthouse on the chase. Zeman came at him boots first – as Merrick noted, this was ‘the wrong way of going down at a man’s feet’. We went down with head and hands, bravely, either to smother the shot or pluck the