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Pitch Publishing - Ian Ridley

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54 pages

English

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Jimmy Armfield was one of the great figures of English football - captain of the national team before Bobby Moore, member of the 1966 World Cup-winning squad, one-club man with Blackpool. Gentleman Jim went on to enjoy a wonderfully rich life and career as a manager with Leeds United, before becoming a broadcaster of warmth and insight, then consultant with the Football Association and the Professional Footballers' Association. In Pantomime Hero, award-winning football writer and author Ian Ridley tells the remarkable tale of when Armfield took over at Leeds after Brian Clough's ill-fated 44 days and came up with a novel and unique idea to restore the morale of a club in turmoil. Around that amazing tale, Ridley also describes a friendship forged through the bonds of cancer with a giant of a man who was already long established as a national footballing treasure at the time of his death in January 2018. This is the first book in the innovative Football Shorts series.

Informations

Publié par	Pitch Publishing
Date de parution	23 janvier 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801504867
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Ian Ridley, 2022
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801504836
eBook ISBN 9781801504867
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His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that nature might stand up
And say to all the world: This was a man.
Julius Caesar, Act V Scene V
Contents
Notes and acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
About the author
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WELCOME TO this first book in the Football Shorts series, an exciting partnership between Pitch Publishing and my own Floodlit Dreams company.
During the various lockdowns of recent years, I sometimes felt like just a short sporting read, rather than a long, weighty one, but found such books hard to come by. It got me thinking and fortunately Jane Camillin at Pitch Publishing thought it was a good idea too when I went to her with it. Thus am I hugely grateful to them for backing this idea, entering into a partnership and putting Pitch s deep practical knowledge of producing a wide range of great sports books at the disposal of this project.
The aim is to publish three books a year by fine writers telling engaging personal tales of the football world, to entertain and inform. They are reads to fit into pockets and bags - and to fit into busy schedules too. However, when it comes to some of the writers we have lined up, I suspect you ll be tempted to read them avidly in one go.
After Pantomime Hero , the spring of 2023 will see Jane Purdon, former chief executive of Women in Football, share her remarkable story of a life in the (predominantly women s) game, in which she worked for both the Premier League and her home-city club Sunderland. She will detail the joyful and long-overdue re-emergence of women s football encapsulated by the Lionesses European Championship win of 2022, and examine the progress ahead of the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
Then in the autumn, Andy Hamilton, the celebrated comedy writer and performer, will tell his charming but incisive tale of growing up supporting Chelsea. Set in the wider context of how the game and his club have changed along with his feelings and attitudes, it will be full of his trademark wit, but also contain some very astute observations and judgements on life and football.
On a personal note, I am delighted to be kicking off and then curating the series. Later in 2023 we will be announcing another three great writers books for the following year.
My thanks for the production of this book go to those who have helped me with it, especially Duncan and John Armfield, Jimmy s sons, who have generously offered deeply intimate insights of their father and their relationship with him. I am also grateful to Don Warters and Paul Reaney for their recollections of Jimmy s time at Leeds United. Further gratitude too, goes to Duncan Olner for the cover design, to Alex Ridley for establishing our website, www.football-shorts.co.uk, to my partner in Floodlit Dreams Seth Burkett and to Charlotte Atyeo, editor extraordinaire.
Huge gratitude, too, to two great men, Bill W and Bruce Lloyd, who have been saving my life one day at a time for more than 30 years. Above all, my deepest thanks go to another great man: Jimmy Armfield himself. You will read conversations between us at points in this book. This is because when they were over, I always made notes - partly since he usually had pearls of wisdom to impart that I wanted to retain and partly since I knew that one day I d want to write a book about him.
This one is about memories of, and a friendship with, one of the most humble and remarkable men ever to grace English football. It is built around an astonishing episode in the history of the game, which reveals the essence of Jimmy as a human being and how he treated and inspired people following his taking over as manager of Leeds United from Brian Clough after 44 fabled, acrimonious days in 1974. I hope you enjoy the book, and indeed this series.
Ian Ridley
1
MY BOYHOOD footballing hero was Jimmy Greaves of Tottenham Hotspur and England. Dashing, handsome, prolific scorer of goals, he was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. Then when I became a man, or rather a middle-aged man, and finally saw that there was more to life than sheer sporting ability (though I never lost my admiration for Greaves nor awe at his talent), my hero became Jimmy Armfield. Yes, Jimmy A was a footballer who loved the game and its people. Yet, beyond that he was a rounded human being with an astonishing array of interests, one who loved life in all its guises and with all its vagaries, and people in general.
Never meet your heroes, goes the old adage. In Jimmy Armfield s case, I will be eternally grateful that I did. I like to think that in the last quarter of his life he might even have considered me a friend; I certainly did him. I will feel forever blessed to have had his example of humanity at its most generous of spirit. Football isn t always kind to its stalwarts, but its propensity for fostering bitterness due to that treatment rarely, if ever, assailed him. To be at his moving, magnificent funeral in February 2018, as one of the few journalists for whom room was found, was to be reminded through tribute after tribute, listening to friend after friend, of the warmth and admiration people had for him. In all my time around the sport, whenever Jimmy s name came up I never heard a single bad word spoken about him from anyone. Some achievement in a sport of politics and personalities, intrigue and insecurity.
But first, rather than final, things first. As a boy, though obsessed with Jimmy G, I was aware of Jimmy A - except that, in all honesty, as a right-back, he did not especially interest this budding forward. No, what I loved was that tangerine - not orange, tangerine - shirt of Blackpool FC in which he was often pictured, as their marquee player, in the magazines of the 1960s that I bought with my Saturday pocket money: Goal , Charles Buchan s Football Monthly and such. They seemed to abound then, even before a new generation of the likes of Shoot! and Match! arrived. Jimmy would be kneeling, hand on ball, smiling widely at the camera, or essaying a staged volley with the Bloomfield Road terraces in the background. Blackpool were still a big club then, a legacy of the Stanley Matthews era, before the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961 gradually meant that the bigger-city clubs with larger fan bases could more afford the better players. The rule change of 1983 to allow home clubs to keep their own gate revenue favoured the bigger clubs more too than the Blackpools, who no longer saw a 25 per cent share from, say, Manchester United s support, cementing the change in the game s landscape.
In my own seaside home of Weymouth in Dorset as a seven-year-old becoming football daft - mainly through those magazines and the Daily Mirror that my parents took - I was also aware of the 1962 World Cup. I knew that Jimmy was the England captain and even though none of it was live on TV, just some black-and-white highlights that were on too late for a primary school boy, I noted that he was voted the best right-back in the tournament.
A year later, he captained England against the Rest of the World at Wembley, pride on his beaming face as he led out the team alongside his opposite number, the great Argentine, and serial European Cup winner with Real Madrid, Alfredo Di Stefano. The photograph would grace the front cover of Jimmy s 2004 autobiography, Right Back to the Beginning.
Quite probably, Jimmy would have been the England captain at the 1966 World Cup, and won many more than his 43 caps, but for a serious groin tear that kept him out of action for almost two years between tournaments. Bobby Moore, of course - pictured just behind Jimmy in that Rest of the World match line-up - was Alf Ramsey s choice as successor. By the time Jimmy was fit again, George Cohen had been installed at right-back and Jimmy could not win back his place. At that time, as an 11-year-old, I was more concerned - tearfully mortified actually - that Jimmy Greaves could not get back into the side for the final after an injury in a group game.
The reactions of the two men that day of the 1966 final could not have been more different. Looking back at footage and stills, poor Jimmy G is painfully sad and silent, even sulky and sullen, unengaged with it all despite the tense excitement of the endgame as he stands by the England bench. The loneliest man in Wembley Stadium that day, he later said. How huge the pain must have been: the man the country most expected to score the goals that would secure the 12-inch golden trophy missing out on English football s greatest day.
Jimmy A, meanwhile, is a smiling participant, though he hadn t played a minute of the tournament. Dressed in his lucky red V-neck sweater and grey polo neck, despite it being the last day of July, Jimmy raises his arms at the final whistle and looks to the heavens before embracing t