The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

Moby Dick kept just the right side of very frightening. Captain Ahab was the brooding, isolated type, fixed in his goal. He suffered a kind of death on the cross. His arms were out, strapped to the side of the whale by the harpoons and ropes. As it smashed in and out of the waves, its eye kept staring at the camera. My father liked the whirlpool the whale made at the end, which sucked everything into it, except the one person who survived to tell the story. It was clever how they achieved that effect, my dad said, with what was actually a large piece of concrete.

When we got back home Manchester City and Bert Trautmann had won 3–1, which was good. Trautmann had been injured quite badly near the end, but had played on, which was even better. There were the photos in the Evening News and in the papers my grandad brought back from Fleet Street next morning. Trautmann was being led from the field at the end, head down, hand clasped to the left side of his face. The front of his jersey was soaked from the water splashed over him by the trainer with his sponge and bucket. Another showed Trautmann diving at the feet of Birmingham inside-left, Peter Murphy. His hands were gripping the ball on the ground but his bare neck was close to Murphy’s outstretched left leg and his right, about to follow through. It must have been that one that had caught him. The clash had happened fifteen minutes from the end and Trautmann spent the rest of the game staggering around his goalmouth in agony. One newspaper was amazed how he came through ‘this alarming situation’. We heard he had been taken for X-rays; later, that he had broken his neck and nearly died.

If Trautmann was well-regarded before the match, there was no measuring his popularity after it. There could be no clearer example of a keeper who ‘took it’, which was precisely what the best British keepers were meant to do. Yet this one was a German and people loved him for it. He hardly seemed foreign at all and was really ‘one of us’. Also, it only added to his attraction that he wasn’t. He could have had a British passport if he’d asked and would have certainly played for England. For some reason obviously not connected with the quality of their keepers, Germany failed to select him. But Trautmann didn’t seek to become a British citizen. As he said, that wasn’t what he was. My dad told me this with approval and it met with national acclaim. Had he applied to become British, he’d have been seen as toadying up. His only reward in terms of international honours was that he was chosen to captain the English Football League in a couple of matches. His lasting achievement was to inspire a national change of mood. In the future we might have to get along with these people and Trautmann showed it was possible. He did more than any other person for post-war reconciliation between Britain and Germany. In passing, he also performed the almost unbelievable trick of remaining an outsider while winning the acceptance of the crowd.

The Brazilians had been in the stadium watching the Cup Final. They were in town for the first game between Brazil and England the following Wednesday. I spent a long time over reports of the match in the papers. They were the first team of top standard England had played that had a number of black players. They came from somewhere that was almost of another world, yet at the same time quite familiar. If you looked at an atlas, Brazil was on the border of British Guiana, one of the outlying pink bits of the British Empire. In a sense, the Brazilians were our next-door neighbours The way we went about things, however, didn’t bear a great deal of resemblance. You couldn’t tell exactly from the pictures in the papers that their team was in yellow shirts and light blue shorts, but their outfits were obviously much trimmer than ours. The shirts had collars. These weren’t limp and floppy but looked like they might have been ironed, as if the shirt could double for use on a summer Sunday School outing. The goalkeeper Gilmar had a collar poking out from under his top and wore an all light-grey outfit that must have been specially tailored for him. His wasn’t a jersey he gave back at the end of games, with a view to it being baggily handed down through the keeping generations. On it was the globe, dotted with stars, of the Brazilian flag. It was all a bit pretty-pretty compared with what we were used to.

The reports said the Brazilians were ‘maestros’, with a ‘special relish for flexibility’ and a ‘lovely patterned approach’. The star of their forward line, Didi, was a ‘black panther’ of a player. This didn’t mean they had what it took. They lacked the ‘depth, teamwork and creativity that shaped great sides’. They were subject to peculiar things like ‘gyrations’. This put them on a level with the whirling dervishes I’d heard my nan refer to, those who had beaten Gordon at Khartoum. Once you overcame the shock of them, and confronted them firmly – preferably on your own turf where you could make them behave – they could be quelled.

There was no doubt they were brought to Wembley for a lesson. Brazil’s ‘sudden spasms’ ran up against the ‘solid oak of England’. Like the resilient plane tree battling the London smog, so we were constructed of other stuff, too, that saw off the threat of flimsier foreigners. Our 4–2 victory was described as a triumph of old over new worlds. Then again, it couldn’t be said they were without their bit of plain, old-fashioned resistance at the back. England would have won much more comfortably but for Gilmar saving two penalties.

In our goal the selectors had felt compelled again to experiment with a younger type. Wood had recently had another game, and Ron Baynham of Luton Town was brought in for three. All were victories but neither keeper was given the job permanently. Next the selectors awarded it to Coventry’s Reg Matthews, and it was he who played against the Brazilians. He was blamed for one of Brazil’s goals, though given another chance. With it, he proceeded to play brilliantly in Berlin a fortnight later.

My family went to Italy again. I didn’t want to go and the Channel was as rough as the first time. After twenty-four hours on the international train, we stayed two days in a hotel near Milan station. We visited the Italian friend who had been a prisoner in Sandy in the war and my aunt Olive’s boyfriend. He was now married to a woman who was pale, quite square and solid-looking and came from Trieste, like he did. His family did not approve because hers was from across the border in Yugoslavia. They’d have preferred him to have married my aunt. We ate red peppers, cooked in the oven. They were like nothing on earth, smelt and tasted like they were going to be sweet but that someone might have mixed in something bitter with them, maybe gunpowder. I ate them and, in the end, thought it was worth it.

For the three- or four-hour journey to Siena, the old train from Milan was very hot, with the sun blazing in on to the wooden-slatted seats. Fortunately we didn’t have to change in the pandemonium of Florence. We stayed with the family again behind the cathedral. At the communal meals I mastered spaghetti and was allowed to drink red wine mixed with water. Italian water was unsafe – hable to give you dysentery, we were told – but was miraculously all right if you put wine with it. I was expansively praised for eating and drinking everything. We had breakfast alone – as my parents explained, Italians didn’t really eat it – but Luciano, the boy of the family who was about my age, joined us. My parents had brought tea. When Luciano finished his cup, he scooped up the leaves with his roll and ate them. My sister and I gasped, though he didn’t notice.

He took part in the marches for the Palio. Horses representing the districts of Siena raced each other round the main square, like Islington might have against Finsbury or Stoke Newington. Members of the family were bornin different areas and were rivals on the day. We had the best seats, wooden tiers put up at the base of the buildings of the square. We sat for three hours as the procession of the Siennese boroughs went around. We didn’t see or hear a British person anywhere. The race was over in a minute, many horses crashing into mattresses on the sharp corners. Jockeys who fell off were immediately suspected by their supporters of having been bribed and, if caught, were kicked and beaten up. The winning horse was from the area of the porcupine, Istrice. The jockey was feted, the horse the guest of honour at a banquet in the victorious part of town. But it didn’t matter if a particular area won the race, just as long as they’d beaten their neighbours. Victors of these tribal battles would walk around their vanquished rivals’ streets shouting and taunting. Everyone did this twice a year.

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