Banksy (12 page)

One of the changes that took place in football at this time concerned the strips. Many teams rejected the thick cotton, collared shirts with their buttoned fronts and cuffs in favour of lightweight V-necked shirts with short sleeves. Stanley Matthews, ever the innovator, and Tom Finney had returned from the 1950 World Cup impressed with the lightweight strips worn by South American teams such as Brazil and Uruguay but their suggestions that English clubs should adopt them fell on deaf ears. Three years later Hungary turned up at Wembley wearing similar lightweight shirts, but it took a few more years before English clubs finally saw the benefits to be had from wearing this new type of strip and adopted the style.

The first team to wear these lightweight V-necked shirts in an FA Cup final were Manchester City in 1955 against Newcastle United. In the following year’s final against Birmingham City the Mancunians repeated the experiment, this time in their change strip to avoid a colour clash, while Birmingham stuck with the traditional collar and cuff shirts that had been de rigueur for teams since the early thirties.

In 1956 the England team adopted the new style of shirt, though many clubs were slow to take to what was not so much a new fashion as a more practical form of kit. At Chesterfield we had worn the old-style thick cotton collared shirts. Leicester City, however, had made the switch a couple of years before my arrival at the club in 1959.

The significance of this innovation in kit design was that it spearheaded a change of attitude across many aspects of the game at the time. Every aspect of a footballer’s kit changed. Shorts became, well, shorter and less restrictive to movement. Not only that, the heavy cotton from which shorts had been made since the Victorian age was superseded by nylon. In keeping with the new style of shirt and shorts, the woollen stockings players had worn for decades were replaced by lightweight cotton designs. Boots also became lighter and lower slung. The reinforced toecap was committed to history as was the steel plate that used to form part of the sole. These changes even affected the way a player laced his boots. The old reinforced boot had a loop at the back of the heel through which the lace was threaded. This was now considered a potential danger to ankles and gradually was dropped by the boot manufacturers. Players now preferred to lace up their boots by wrapping the lace over the upper foot and under the instep rather than bind it around the ankle.

The new lightweight strips were not just symbolic of a game keen to modernize. Nor were they the subject of any commercial or marketing strategy – such things did not exist in football at the time. They were simply more practical athletic solutions, in an era when players were becoming increasingly aware of the need to be more professional and dedicated in every aspect of the game. The fabric of football, quite literally, was changing.

The dawn of the sixties, then, was a time of enormous change in football. Across every aspect of society people’s lives were changing. Material comfort and opportunity was increasing. Yet in the north and midlands that I knew, at least, memories were still fresh of depression, war, rationing and shortages. People saved up for things. For instance, when Ursula and I got married, like many young couples of the day we set up home with what bits of furniture we had been given by relatives. Because Ursula had come over from war-shattered Germany, any furniture and other home comforts we acquired had to come from my family
and, though we were grateful for what we received, there wasn’t a great deal of it.

Today young couples setting up home have considerable aspirations. The vast majority seem to aspire to a middle-class lifestyle from the outset and, if their savings don’t run to furnishing their home as they had planned themselves, they think nothing of buying the rest on store or credit cards. Ursula and I set up home in 1959 and, like many other couples, we were petrified at the thought of immersing ourselves in credit. As part of a working-class family in the forties and fifties, I was brought up to look upon credit with a combination of deep mistrust and abhorrence. It was not so much the stigma of taking out credit, more that people felt they would lose face if they were beholden to more people than was absolutely necessary.

People were beholden to the local steelworks or pit for their livelihood; to a building society or rent man for the roof over their heads; for their spiritual fulfilment, people were beholden to God – or else to Sheffield Wednesday or United. To be beholden also to a ‘tick book’ (a record of hire-purchase payments) to acquire possessions within the home, was considered unbecoming for working folk who saw paying cash as a mark of integrity, honesty and the inbred illusion of financial independence. Tinsley folk would rather make do and mend, rely on hand-me-downs from relatives, or simply go without rather than sign up for what Dad called the ‘never-never’. The phrase ‘never-never’ indicated how we viewed credit: once you succumbed to the temptation of credit, you would never be rid of it. To spend money you didn’t have was a fantasy, contrasting with the reality of the daily toil of work, which everyone knew would eventually lead to retirement and days pottering around an allotment. Life was difficult enough with monthly repayments to be found for the building society; to commit oneself to further borrowing was seen as plain madness.

Of course people’s expectations were nowhere near as high as they are today. The labour-saving devices of the consumer
revolution had yet to sweep Britain and as Mam often said, ‘What you never had, you never miss.’ Likewise, what others didn’t have, you never yearned for. Hence, no credit.

My marriage to Ursula had more or less coincided with my elevation to the Chesterfield first team. We bought a semidetached house in Treeton for £1,100 but my transfer to Leicester came soon after. In fact, so short a time did we spend in that house that when we sold it we actually owed more to the building society than we had actually borrowed.

Money had been tight during my time with Chesterfield, but in the summer of 1959 we had saved enough for our first holiday. A week at Butlin’s in Skegness was hardly the sort of holiday professional footballers opt for these days, but in relative terms, I was lucky. Many of my Chesterfield team mates, like so many other players of the time, were forced to take on a summer job in the close season to supplement their income.

When signing for Leicester City, we moved into a club house formerly occupied by Arthur Rowley, whose career total of 434 league goals remains a record to this day, a record that, I should imagine, will never be beaten.

Our new home was a semi-detached house in Kirkland Road, Braunceston. Ursula and I immediately felt very much at home there, though at times we felt like two peas in a drum. This house was much larger than our first home in Treeton and once we had moved in what furniture we possessed – still the hand-me-downs from my family – we were immediately struck by a feeling of open space. We didn’t have a three-piece suite. All we had were two armchairs, one red, one blue, that we had bought when seeing them advertised in the small ads in the
Sheffield Star
. At night we’d watch the television or listen to the wireless, sitting either side of a small marble-tiled fireplace like two bookends. We were gloriously happy. I had found the love of my life. We were ensconced in our own spacious home. I was doing the only thing I wanted to do in life, play football, and was being paid to do so. Life was great. I couldn’t believe it could get much better than this.

Apart from the considerable thrill of having established myself as Leicester’s first-choice goalkeeper, the events surrounding my first season at Filbert Street had not been remarkable. All was to change, however. In 1960–61 Leicester embarked upon one of the most notable seasons in their history and football was rarely out of the headlines as a result of events both on and off the pitch.

When I reported back for pre-season training, revolution against the maximum wage was in the air. Fuelled by newsletters from the players’ union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, many of us debated the rights and wrongs of resorting to strike action in order to free ourselves from contracts that bound us to a club for life and put a ceiling on what we could earn.

Nationwide, supporters too were grumbling. During the close season the Football League had announced that admission prices for adults were to rise to a minimum of 2s. 6d. (12½p). Following the post-war boom when total annual crowds were in excess of 40 million, attendances had been in gradual decline and many supporters believed the increased admission price would only make matters worse. (They were right: 1960–61 saw attendances fall to 28.6 million from 32.5 million the previous season.)

There was discontent in the media, too. While it was widely agreed that English club football had fallen way behind the standard set by the top European sides, a few journalists launched critical attacks on the England team’s performances on the international scene. Why, supporters argued, should we be expected to pay more for an inferior product? One particularly stinging attack came from the former Bolton and England centre forward turned football writer, David Jack. Discussing the previous summer’s four-game tour during which England managed only a
single win against the USA, Jack called for ‘drastic changes’ at the top if we wish to compete with the great football nations of the world.

Jack was just getting up a head of steam. ‘The game we gave to the world,’ he continued, ‘is no longer played with skill on these islands.’ Apart from Johnny Haynes who had useful games, Jimmy Greaves, who was raw but promising, and Bobby Charlton, who could not excel if played out of position, ‘not one forward justified the great honour paid to him as a representative of his country’.

At the end of the tour FA officials trotted out the usual excuses for the team’s failure, but ignored the most obvious fact: ‘The men at the top chose players who were not the best at England’s disposal. They took poor performers to South America and left good players at home.’ Jack was scathing about having a selection committee to pick the England team, a view soon echoed by other commentators. This lobby of opinion soon led to Walter Winterbottom being placed in sole change of England team affairs. Not before time – Walter had been England’s manager since 1946!

English football, however, had not so much declined as stood still in an era when the football of other nations had developed considerably. When comparing England with Brazil, Italy or Germany, or Arsenal and Wolves with Real Madrid or Barcelona, it was easy to conclude the quality of football in England had declined. It hadn’t. For some years our game had been allowed to stagnate while that of other nations had taken great strides along new paths of exploration. But in 1960–61 English football began the process of catching up. The benefits of the FA’s coaching school began to filter through in the early sixties, and that, combined with the long-overdue introduction of a properly structured youth policy, played no small part in England winning the World Cup just a few years later.

One of that summer’s innovations was an apprenticeship system for young players. Previously, a lad of fifteen signed on as
a member of his club’s office or groundstaff. While he wanted to concentrate on training and playing for his club’s junior teams, the bulk of the apprentice’s time was spent either in clerical work or odd maintenance jobs around the ground. Now, while the new two-year apprenticeships would still involve menial tasks such as sweeping the terraces, cleaning the boots of senior professionals and swilling out the changing rooms, there was a commitment that football was to come first.

At the end of his apprenticeship a young player’s development would be assessed and, ultimately, the manager would decide whether he was to be offered full-time professional terms, or released. There was (and remains today) a high fall-out rate among young players, but it was believed that having had two years’ learning about football in a professional environment, a young player released by a top club could find employment with a club in a lower-division outfit. At worst, he could become a part-time professional or an amateur, but the skills gained in his apprenticeship would benefit football at the grass-roots level.

That summer the Football League announced another innovation to English football, the League Cup. While generally thought to have been the brainchild of Alan Hardaker, the gruff, stoic secretary of the Football League, the original suggestion for a secondary cup competition, for league clubs only, had come from the FA Secretary, later President of FIFA, Sir Stanley Rous. Rous’s original idea was for a pre-season competition in which teams would initially compete in groups. He found few supporters among football’s hierarchy for his idea but it was refined by Alan Hardaker and the League Cup came into being, to a lukewarm reception.

Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Wolves, Sheffield Wednesday and West Bromwich Albion chose not to compete in the inaugural competition. The imbalance in the number of competing teams meant a number of clubs received byes in the first round in order to form a thirty-two tie second round. Another unpopular feature was that there would be no one-off final at Wembley,
but a two-legged final on the finalists’ grounds. The League Cup had been devalued in the eyes of the supporters and media before it even got under way.

Alan Hardaker dubbed it the ‘People’s Cup’, meaning presumably a cup free of the pomp and circumstance and bereft of the dignitaries and establishment freeloaders so much in evidence at the FA Cup Final. But it was missing the charm of football tradition, the ivy-covered venerableness of the FA Cup, the romance and drama of a non-league David laying low a Football League Goliath.

Clubs soon found that League Cup attendances were well below what they normally had for league games. In time, however, the League Cup grew in popularity and those clubs that had stood aloof soon joined up when they realized that there was money to be made and that winning afforded entry to European competition. From the start I was all in favour of the League Cup. In time it would repay my enthusiasm with a treasure chest of golden memories.