The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

For our first couple of Empire Days we had to march in the infants’ playground and salute the flag. This flew from the pole of the BDH building across the canal, beyond the lock-keepers’ cottages. In my mum’s time at the school, Empire Day was a stirring occasion, with kids dressed in assumed styles of the dependencies. Her girlfriend over the road who had bushy, curly hair went as the ‘Wild Man of Borneo’. Now it was difficult to see the point, or the flag. It hung limp and damp, amid the more potent atmosphere let off by the BDH.

Shortly before the coronation, when my sister was born, my grandad had given my parents his house two doors away as a wedding anniversary present. He could neither handle nor afford the repairs any longer, so told my dad to take it and do it up. Before the war many houses had been occupied by single families but multi-occupancy became common as people bombed out of their homes were relocated. The family of four on the top floor were rehoused by the council, while the two old ladies in the property stayed. My parents had to persuade them to give up their gas mantles for electric light, which they’d refused as too expensive. Houses had been badly shaken in the war years. Even now it was a feature in the street for some people’s front doorsteps to collapse in on them in their basement kitchens or bathrooms. With my grandad’s help, it took my father two years working nights and weekends to get the house ready for us.

We moved into the kitchen and front room in the basement just before Christmas 1955 and my mum put up a tree. The bathroom beneath the front doorstep was very cold and it was easier to wash in the kitchen sink. The ground-floor front parlour where we slept was separated by two shutter doors from the room of one of the old ladies. On Saturday night she put on her hat and pin and went to the York for a drink (one or two, actually), and it was often after midnight before she’d shuffle back home, holding on to the railings where she could. At the end of our backyard and down was the Gerrard Road bombsite where languished the ghosts of six former dwellings. After heavy rain it filled with green slime and water to a depth of several feet. Known as ‘the tank’, it had the semi-official status of a poor-man’s reservoir and the fire brigade would turn up at it every so often to run through manoeuvres with their pumps and hoses. Kids milled around and housewives came to their doorsteps with the excitement. The firemen left the ‘tank’ reduced to a mudflat, with old prams and lengths of cast-iron piping sticking out, until it gradually recovered its general swampiness and sought to infiltrate the backyards nearby.

Number 25, as an abandoned gap of rubble and scrubland, was particularly vulnerable. A brother and sister, Mario Maestri and Elena Salvoni, lived with their families one house along. My dad would be called in occasionally to put down damp courses and otherwise strengthen its flanking walls. One evening I went with him to watch Mario’s new television. We didn’t have one. Apart from my grandad’s, Mario’s was the only television I was aware of in the street. On it was the rare phenomenon of a BBC outside broadcast, and we caught the last quarter of an hour or so of a football game between England and West Germany in Berlin.

The match was in the stadium built by Hitler for the Olympics twenty years earlier, the one where, my dad told me, Jesse Owens won his medals and Hitler stormed out in fury. Hitler and the Germans, of course, had got their further come-uppance when they’d tried it on with us. From the comics I bought on Saturdays at the Polish newsagent in Danbury Street, I guessed this stadium must have been the only part of the German capital not left in ruins. But since the war’s end we had been helping them get back on their feet and this game seemed to be a sign of our new friendship. It was the first post-war match between us in Germany. It was also the first football game I had ever seen. The novelty was impaired by the Germans appearing to be all over us.

One man was doing miraculous things to defy them. His name was Matthews. Not Stanley, forty-one, the wizzened legend of the right-wing. In late May, the season of league fixtures was over by nearly three weeks and he was coaching in South Africa. This was another Matthews, the younger Reg, a goalkeeper. He was tall, beaky-nosed, with a haunted look and hunched shoulders that seemed to stick out of the back of his jersey. A kind of smudgy light grey on the screen, this was the ‘traditional yellow’ jersey worn by England keepers. Its colour was one of the variations on a theme that was part of football folklore. Wolverhampton Wanderers, for instance, said my dad, did not turn out in gold but ‘old gold’. The England goalkeeper’s jersey also came in ‘coveted’ or ‘hallowed’ yellow.

German attacks were arriving in waves on Matthews’s goal. One shot, suddenly fired out of the mêlée on the edge of the England penalty area by a player the commentator identified as Fritz Walter, went with such force that it gave the impression of blowing Reg off his feet. As the camera jerked wildly left to follow it, he was horizontal, diving backwards and to his right, a yard from the ground, his arms thrust out the same distance. But momentarily suspended in this midair position, and with a snap as it hit his hands, he caught the ball cleanly.

The brilliance of it made me start and catch my breath. I had seen pictures of keepers in various moments of dramatic action, some diving to deflect shots with their fingertips around a goalpost or over the crossbar. In others they might be parrying the ball or, more rarely, seen in the act of punching it; my dad said it was ‘continental’ keepers who tended to be the punchers. But Reg did not tip the ball around or over his goal to give the opposition the minor satisfaction of winning a corner kick. Nor did he parry or punch the ball back into play to leave the German forwards with the chance of following up. His catch ended the danger in virtually the instant it had arisen.

The impact as he landed in the goalmouth might easily have been enough to dislodge the ball from his grasp and the air from his lungs. Having hit the ground it would have been understandable if he had stayed there a while, to gather his breath and thoughts, or take brief stock of any plaudits that might be on offer from his teammates or the crowd. Oh, and a good save by Matthews,’ the commentator was saying.

‘Good save,’ murmured my dad, in appreciation but without getting too excited about it.

There was no time for us to reflect further. Matthews had sprung back on his feet, as if the film of the previous moment had been put into reverse or he’d been attached to a large rubber band. He was racing to the edge of his penalty area, bouncing the ball every fourth step as required by the rules of the game. As he dodged past his and the German players, he looked concerned to rid himself of the ball as quickly as possible and, with it, all evidence of his save. He seemed embarrassed by the whole affair, guilty for having attracted attention to himself. As he released the ball from his hands and punted it upfield, the BBC man was only just concluding his comment, ‘… young Reg Matthews of Coventry City’.

Coventry I had heard of. Just about all children had. Like London it had really suffered the Blitz. Other cities were hardly mentioned: Hull, Plymouth, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, where relatives of my nan were bombed out twice before another direct hit killed them. Coventry was one of the rare nights in nine months of the Blitz, said my mum, that London had had off. She and the family had just arrived in Sandy when the bombers were overhead again, droning backwards and forwards. This time they flew on to the Midlands. Delivering his papers next day to the stand outside Old Street station, my grandad heard the man there complain what a bad night it had been. Next to no one – with the certain exception of Great-aunt Polly – had gone down the tube to take shelter and he’d hardly sold a thing. Coventry hadn’t had much of a time of it either.

While London stood for defiance and heroic endurance, we learnt that Coventry, which had been flattened, embodied the spirit of rising again. It seemed exactly right that Reg Matthews of Coventry should be bouncing up and down against the might of Germany on the television in front of me. He and his city were what the newspapers and my comics called ‘plucky’, whatever that meant. But his club I’d not heard of. Coventry City were not one of the big teams, the Wolverhamptons, either of the Manchesters, the Arsenals, Blackpools, Preston North Ends and Burnleys in the top division of the English league. Nor were they in the Second. Reg’s team were all the way down in the Third Division South, and even towards the tail-end of that. When the Fourth Division was set up three years later from the bottom halves of the Third Divisions North and South, Coventry City were founder members.

A goalkeeper from the humblest rung of the English football league was pitched against the Germans. Furthermore, the Germans were not any old foreign international team. They were holders of the World Cup, which they’d won two years earlier in Switzerland by beating no less than Puskas and the Hungarians. Reg Matthews could one week be up against the might of Gillingham at home, the next facing vengeful Germans away. From a foot-of-the-league battle with Bournemouth, he might suddenly have to face the flowing rhythms of Brazil. He had done, just over a fortnight earlier at Wembley, when England won 4–2 in the first game between the two countries.

Reg was typical of the British small guy, ‘plucky’ and plucked from a modest background to face whatever the world had to confront us with. Among the British national teams, England’s goalkeepers weren’t alone in affording their selectors the luxury of being able to reach down the divisions for someone of the highest calibre to defend the last line. Only Jack Kelsey of Arsenal and Wales was a keeper in the First Division. Ireland’s Harry Gregg played for Doncaster Rovers and Scotland’s Tommy Younger for Liverpool, both in the Second. When Gregg made his debut two years earlier, he’d been playing in Doncaster’s third team. It all went to prove that while others claimed fancy titles – the ‘World Cup’ itself was an example – we didn’t need to.

Reg Matthews’s clearance upfield in Berlin found an England forward, who put in a shot on goal. It was not a particularly strong one. With a couple of brisk steps to his left, the German goalkeeper could have picked up the ball. He opted not to move his feet, however, and dived. Actually, it was more like a flop. He stopped the shot easily enough, and there on the ground lingered, hugging the ball to his chest. You could see a white number ‘1’ on the back of his black jersey, facing the presumably grey Berlin sky. He kept glancing up, heightening the drama, soaking the moment for all, and much more than, it was worth. The misguided crowd cheered their appreciation and he even found time to smile in acknowledgement. ‘It’s a wonder he doesn’t wave,’ said my dad, no longer in an approving murmur but waving his own hand at the screen in disgust. ‘There’s the difference between us, you see. We get up and get on with it.’

When the German keeper finally did get on with it, I wished he hadn’t. His forwards resumed their assault on Reg Matthews’s goal, whereupon Walter materialised again to score. ‘And it’s Fritz Walter!’ shouted the commentator. ‘The Germans have scored!’ His voice conveyed what I took to be a distinct state of alarm. He compounded mine by adding there were only five minutes to go.

There was nothing in my cultural heritage to prepare for the likelihood that the Germans might win. None of my comics, nor any film I had seen, had anything but a recurrent collection of Fritzs leering their way towards comfortable victory, till ultimately beaten by their deficiency of character. When down we got up, bounced bombs on water, sent in pilots with tin legs, or chased their battleships to distant Norwegian fjords and harbours in Latin America. We might have a tendency to get in tight situations ourselves – trapped on narrow beaches, for example – but it only needed a chirpy British private to wave a thumbs-up at the encircling Germans and say ‘Not ’arf, for them to rush out with hands aloft yelling, ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’

Only five minutes to go was a time for us to be hitting the net, not them. But just as the unthinkable was having to be thought, the scoreline moved into vision, chalked by hand on what seemed like an old piece of black cardboard at the bottom of the screen: ‘West Germany 1 England 3’.

‘There we are, we’re winning,’ said Mario, who had noticed my concern (and who always supported England, even against Italy). Not having seen a game before, and because seven-year-olds did not instigate conversations in other people’s houses, it had not occurred to me to ask the score.

‘That’s right,’ said my dad, as unruffled by the goal as Mario. ‘The Germans have never beaten us.’ When I read reports of the game, it was true the Germans had dominated much of the play, but Reg Matthews had held things together at the back, while out on the field Duncan Edwards of Manchester United had created the few England attacks there had been. From nearly all of them we scored. The wider facts were that we had indeed, never lost to them. England and Germany had played four times – twice each at home and away – since their first match against each other in 1930. England had won three and drawn the other.

This helped explain the reaction of the German crowd. Far from regarding the goal as a late and meaningless consolation, they could hardly have cheered more when they’d beaten Puskas and the Hungarians those couple of years before in Berne. The TV picked out various areas of the Olympic stadium and the spectators involved in scenes of uproarious celebration. The camera swivelled sharply to catch the German commentator in similar rapture. ‘The Germans are going mad,’ said the BBC man, with more than a hint of a laugh and in tones which suggested that foreigners could be very funny people. The thought had occurred to me.

But their antics were understandable. In their historical rivalry with England, the Germans had adjusted to a low level of expectation. This goal was a goal, after all. It was the first, too, they had scored on home soil against England since the war. They had not won, they were not near achieving even a draw, but here in Berlin a German crowd had witnessed for themselves that they were at least back on the score sheet. The camera zoomed in on the crowd and people beamed, waved and roared straight back into it. They could have been shouting as one: ‘We’ve had your aid and your Marshall Plan, and we’ve even won the World Cup. But now we’ve landed one back on you, you watch us really get going with that post-war revival.’

They had also not merely scored a goal against England. For almost ninety minutes the Germans had bombarded us, only to be kept out by a characteristic last line. Their solitary success was futile as far as the result was concerned but, at last, they had managed to get something past a typically great British goalkeeper. For a German or any foreign crowd, this was worth celebrating.

Chapter 2

More Flash than Harry

My dad had played in goal when he was at school: ‘Always good with my own company,’ he said. From a country family of seven brothers, his two nearest in age died very young and he was used to getting on with things on his own. At the age of eight he suffered paralysis and nearly died from what people came to believe was polio. Over a period of weeks he fought a lone and fevered battle with the question of whether he was to drop off this mortal coil. The family and the town doctor didn’t expect him to survive. When he did, by their and his own reckoning, he had been those few yards beyond normal experience.

He liked goalkeeping for its occasional spectacular moments. At such times you went through the air knowing you were going to save what, to teammates and opposition alike, was an unstoppable shot bound for the corner of your net. The coordination of mind and body was enough to make you smile, even laugh, as you experienced it. But, overall, it was best not to flaunt things. They had to be done properly; in other words, not overdone. The best keepers were ‘spectacular but safe’.

In British goalkeeping, the first half of the 1930s was the era of Harry Hibbs of Birmingham City. Over five years Harry won twenty-five caps for England, seeing off all challengers for the position. He presided over a period which consolidated the British tradition of goalkeeping, and one which built on foundations laid by two keepers whose heyday just preceded his own. The weighty Encyclopaedia of Sport I received one Christmas, published by Messrs Sampson Low, Marston and Co. for the children of the kingdom, dominions and empire, cast its magisterial gaze back some forty years to pronounce that ‘among the greatest of all time’ was Sam Hardy of Liverpool and Aston Villa. Hardy had been England’s goalkeeper before and after the First World War and had a gift of calm judgement. As the opposition bore down on his goalmouth he was ‘invariably in position when the shot was made’.

When Hardy was transferred to Aston Villa in 1912, he was succeeded at Liverpool by Elisha Scott, from the north of Ireland. Scott ‘was strangely like him’ and ‘positioned well’. Over seventeen seasons to 1936 he played in thirty-one internationals, a number restricted because united Irish and (after partition) Northern Irish teams played games only within the British Isles. But Scott’s appearances remained a record till the Spurs captain and half-back Danny Blanchflower outnumbered them in 1958, when Northern Ireland teams were travelling the continent and playing in World Cups. In Scott’s time there was no need to travel for his skills to be put to the sternest test. ‘At times he defied the might of England single-handed’, said my encyclopaedia. There were few greater laurels it could have tossed at the man. British keepers were expected to be a match for the world; to defy England took something really special.

Both Hardy and Scott had another factor in common which qualified them for the ranks of the greatest. This was that they made no obvious claim for the title. They carried out their goalkeeping in a serious manner, motivated by the ideal of avoiding anything remotely extroverted. Much of Hardy’s brilliance lay in the fact that he was ‘hardly noticed on the field’. He was ‘as unspectacular in goal as he was quiet and modest off it’. Scott, too, was ‘modest and quiet’ with ‘nothing of the showman about him’.

Their way was in contrast to the keeper at the top of the profession in the period before them. At the turn of the century, the confidence of Victorian empire-building had swollen out of control in the shape of Billy ‘Fatty’ Foulke. Tall for his time at 6 feet or so, Foulke weighed in across a scale of 20–24 stone. In his career for Sheffield United, Chelsea and England, Foulke threw and otherwise put himself about, intimidating opponents and authorities alike. He stormed after referees to hammer on their dressing-room doors, if decisions had not gone his way. An increasingly bloated figure, his retirement was blessedly timed for Britain’s approach to the First World War. Hardy and Scott provided the mould of those going to fight it. Millions filed into the trenches of France and Belgium to stand and wait, and to be ‘invariably in position when the shot was made’. Sam and Elisha dutifully served the cause of being the first of the type: the British keeper as the goalmouth’s humble ‘custodian’.

Harry Hibbs followed in their stead, unflappably pursuing a one-club league and Cup career of over 400 games. His first international came in 1930, the year after some shocks to the system. As if the Wall Street Crash was not enough, England’s first defeat abroad deepened the depression. It was one thing to be beaten by the Scots – twenty-four times between 1872 (when the first match between the two countries was staged) and 1929 made this reasonably common; it was quite novel to be humbled by the ‘continentals’. In the game we had invented, Spain did the dirty, 4–3 in Madrid. This was equivalent to bullfighting’s finest rolling up at Wembley from the estancias of Castille, to be humiliated by a squad of upstart toreros from the backstreets of Huddersfield. Previous English excursions abroad had been mainly confined to taking the steamer across the Channel to France or Belgium. We took our own matchballs to counter the likelihood of foreign jiggery-pokery. How the Spaniards had won the match was a source of national perplexity.

Hibbs was cannily suited to handle the uncertainties of the epoch, a man to lift the spirit by steadying the nerves. My encyclopaedia approved his style as a subtle variation from that commended by my father. Harry was ‘safe rather than spectacular’. At 5 feet 9 inches, ‘on the short side for a goalkeeper’, he compensated by refining the brilliance of Sam Hardy to still higher levels. Hibbs was not just in position for assaults on his goal, but in the only possible position: ‘He gave the impression that forwards were shooting straight at him.’

There was something very British about this knack. It was a natural detachment from the turmoil that enabled ultimate control of it. Britain in the 1930s had withdrawn into itself, in an understated, poor man’s version of the old and sensible glories of ‘Splendid Isolation’. As Harry Hibbs surveyed the scene from his goalmouth, the nation observed gathering continental chaos. Hitler and Mussolini strutted and pranced around. Britain did not have the faintest idea what to do. This could not be easily admitted, least of all to ourselves, so it was important to conjure up the sense of a nation being quietly ‘there’, in the right place should the need arise. Hibbs personified the being there. Like Britain, he was also particularly good whenever required to face the strutters and prancers. Harry’s skills were most marked, said my encyclopaedia, ‘against a continental side which included a showy keeper’.

This was possibly a reference to the Spanish goalkeeper, Ricardo Zamora, whom Hibbs and England came up against at Highbury in 1931. Revenge for the defeat two years earlier was duly extracted to the tune of a resounding 7–1. Zamora, who came with the reputation of being world-class, had a miserable game. What prompted more ridicule was the news that he earned £50 a week, compared with Hibbs’s wage of £ 8 during the season and £6 in the summer break. But the implication that the England keeper was always at his best against a showy continental was stretching the point. His better games were not abroad. He was more comfortable at home, closer to base, something which was reflected in his style of play. In keeping with the times, Harry was not one to advance happily beyond his goalkeeper’s area and into the broader reaches of the penalty box. By and large, he stuck firmly to his line.

In Hibbs’s protective shadow, a new breed was emerging. Its members were obliged to display the classical certainties of the tradition, yet felt able to add a touch of goalkeeping rococo. In Glasgow, Jack Thomson of Celtic made his reputation when Scottish keepers were expected to be no less soberly dignified than those south of the border. ‘There was little time for drama and histrionics,’ said local writer Hugh Taylor. The keeper who tried to invest his game with colour was regarded with deep-rooted suspicion, he added, and had as much chance of a successful career ‘as a bank clerk who went to work in sports jacket and flannels’.

Thomson could twist and change direction in midair. He also applied an extra thrust to his dives, to reach shots which would have been beyond others. This gift was compared to the hitch-kick later used by Jesse Owens, which won him the long-jump gold medal and world record in Berlin. All this, of course, could only be employed when the need for something spectacular arose. Thomson’s talent was not confined to his agility. As Taylor noted, he held rather than punched or parried the hardest of shots and there was no keeper more reliable. He ‘inspired tremendous confidence in the men in front of him, always watching play, combining rare, natural talent with a mathematical precision that took so many risks out of his often hazardous art’. Tragically, not all of them. He was a regular Scottish international by the age of twenty-two, but was killed in 1931 after diving and fracturing his skull at the feet of a Rangers forward at Ibrox Park.