The tributes paid to Bobby Moore are astounding. Sir Alf Ramsey called him "my captain, my leader, my right-hand man. He was the spirit and the heartbeat of the team. A cool, calculating footballer I could trust with my life. He was the supreme professional, the best I ever worked with. Without him England would never have won the World Cup."
Pelé said he was a friend, an honourable gentleman and the greatest defender he had played against. Franz Beckenbauer went further, calling him the "best defender in the history of the game". Jock Stein said "there should be a law against him. He knows what's happening 20 minutes before everyone else."
When Moore died on 24 February 1993, Hugh McIlvanney, Frank Keating and David Lacey paid their tributes in the Guardian and Observer. Their words were full of praise and wonder. Moore sounds even more remarkable now than he did two decades ago.
Heroic symbol of a golden age
By Hugh McIlvanney
Amid the coarsening of spirit that has been manifest in this country over the past couple of decades, there is a measure of reassurance in finding so much of the nation so deeply affected by the death of Bobby Moore. It is impossible to doubt the spontaneity of grief felt by millions whose intimacy with the man was no greater than could be developed through watching him from the terraces of a football ground or on a television screen. Wherever people gathered on Wednesday, there was a pervasive sense of loss, an unforced emotion that suggested many had been taken unawares by the depth of their feelings.
Their reaction seems to spring from a number of identifiable sources. By being not only the captain but the unmistakable leader of the England team who in 1966 brought the World Cup to the islands that like to be considered the home of football, the incomparable central defender made himself an abiding presence in countless lives. The timing of that achievement helped to give it a lasting resonance. Much of what passed for glamour and creativity in the Sixties was sham, but the decade was a genuinely distinguished period for football in England, with Moore, George Best and Bobby Charlton at the apex of a broadly based pyramid of exceptional talent.
Viewed from the vantage point of the present grey era in the game, that was something of a golden age and the blond, upright, regally composed figure who orchestrated the defeat of West Germany at Wembley on a July afternoon nearly 27 years ago was naturally freeze-framed in the mind's eye as its golden symbol. That he should become the first of the glory boys of that distant summer to die was sure to make the jolt all the more sickening when he was claimed by cancer of the liver and colon at the age of 51.
Yet the impact of his death, and the remarkably widespread ache of deprivation left by it, cannot possibly be explained in terms of accumulated nostalgia. Even the length and sustained distinction of his professional career (his total of 108 international caps remains a record for an English outfield player) do not take us halfway to an explanation. The encouraging truth may be that Moore's place in the hearts of such a large percentage of the population confirms the survival among us of the capacity to recognise and applaud heroic style.
To say the manner of what he did on the field counted for nearly as much as the substance is meaningless, because the manner and the substance were inextricable. His bearing, the aura of imperious authority that almost defied any honest reporter to avoid the word majestic, grew directly out of his profound understanding of the job he had to do and an unshakeable belief that no one anywhere was better at it.
His nerve under siege was awe-inspiring. It was never simply a matter of being unfrightenable, whether confronted by physical risk or mountainous responsibility. The impression was of a nature so comfortable with challenge that it needed crisis to show its true strength. Of the supreme sports performers I have seen in action, perhaps only Muhammad Ali was a more conspicuous example of grace under pressure.
Ron Greenwood who, as an intelligent and principled manager of West Ham, was Moore's mentor during many of the 16 years he spent with that club said of him: "Bobby is not a bread and butter player. He is made for the biggest occasions. The more extreme the challenge, the more commanding he will be. He should play at Wembley every week."
Or at Maracana in Rio or San Siro in Milan or Jalisco Stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico, where in the 1970 World Cup the opposition of a Brazilian team who must rank with the most formidable of the century brought out the incredible best of Bobby Moore. He had flown in behind the rest of the squad after being held in Colombia on a wild charge of having stolen a bracelet in Bogota. It was an accusation that eventually came to nothing (the most convincing theories about its origins concern a younger England player and a prank that went wrong) but the ordeal of arrest and interrogation might have been expected to wreck his ability to concentrate on the World Cup.
Instead, to those of us observing at close quarters, he seemed effortlessly singleminded, still the rock of dependability so treasured by his manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, that the architect of triumph in 1966 described the Bogota episode as "the worst experience I've had in football". And against Brazil, in an unforgettable contest that his side scarcely deserved to lose 1-0, the captain deployed the full, extraordinary arsenal of his gifts.
At the end of the match, we were given a moment as pure and moving as sport can offer when Pelé, the most accomplished player in the history of football, and Moore, the adversary the Brazilian admired more than any other, exchanged shirts and smiles and affectionate slaps on the cheek. Even now, few of us who were there can look at photographs taken at the time without being warmed by the obvious sincerity of their mutual respect by that and the sheer happiness they found in recognising that, for them at least, the clichés about brotherhood in sport had meaning.
They were linked by a quality of spirit as much as by talent, for at the centre of their greatness as footballers pride and humility coexisted without strain. Both cherished the virtues of simplicity, refusing to do anything complicated if something apparently ordinary would have more effect. They left the swaggering to lesser men.
When connoisseurs of Moore's game are listing his assets, they are obliged to start with his almost supernatural aptitude for divining the intentions of opponents, his capacity to identify a threat before even its perpetrators were fully aware of what they were doing. "There should be a law against him," Jock Stein, a giant among managers, once told me with mock bitterness. "He knows what's happening 20 minutes before anybody else."
That inspired reading of play and the crucial interventions it produced were testimony to more than heightened alertness, sharp intelligence and an instantly rational interpretation of danger signals. The extra dimension of effectiveness is best attributed to a kind of intuition, the mysterious "feel" for the ebb and flow of action that only a tiny elite of team-game players possess. In Moore's case, its value was multiplied by the diamond nerve, which allowed him to act on his judgments with utter decisiveness, however intimidating the implications.
As he patrolled his extensive area of influence, straight-backed, handsome, head up and eyes sweeping the field like a radar scanner, he was everybody's ideal of the thinking footballer. But if attackers decided they were outgunned tactically, it was inadvisable for them to seek a physical duel. Moore was six feet tall, with a playing weight of slightly under 13 stone, and in his prime he went out as fit and hard as a prizefighter. He was (as Pelé stressed) a clean player by nature, and contemptuous of provocation, but if real liberties were taken he had no taste for turning the other cheek.
Being raised as an only child, by loving parents who "gave me everything they could", never threatened to be a softening experience for him, perhaps because the raising was done in Barking, a borough that lies a few miles beyond London's East End and is inevitably pollinated by it. From the start, strength of will was crucial to his success in football. As a schoolboy he was outstanding but not a prodigy. Rising through district school teams at the primary and secondary stages (he passed the 11-plus and attended Tom Hood Technical School, Leyton, until he was 16), he played for London but never internationally at that level.
What impressed knowledgeable judges as he went straight from school to join West Ham as a groundstaff boy, and moved quickly into the England youth team, was the authority of his presence. If he was in a team it tended to revolve around him and he nourished the confidence of the other players as if by a kind of solar energy. But he had basic deficiencies. His rather stiff-legged action would never generate more than modest pace and he betrayed further inadequacy in jumping and heading the ball. Then there were the limitations of his left foot, which throughout his career he was inclined to use only under duress, often preferring to simulate its effect by playing the ball off the outside of his right foot.
Instead of being weighed down by such shortcomings, Moore made his determined response to them a launching pad from which he would reach the ultimate heights of his sport. He was one of the great trainers and practisers of all time, never too proud to work hour after repetitive hour on honing the most simple techniques. "The greatest satisfaction I take from football is the sense of doing something well," he told me back in 1975, when the spell with Fulham that was the last phase of his playing career took him to the FA Cup final.
"When some players are told in training to kick the ball from one point to another they think the whole thing is so ridiculously easy that they can't concentrate and they kick it all over the place. That really annoys me. If I've got to play the ball from here to there 10 times, then I want to do it right 10 times." One result was the excellence of his passing.
Operating through most of his senior years as free man in defence, charged with scenting trouble and smothering it at birth, his comparative frailty in the air was seldom damaging (the frequency with which he positioned himself perfectly to collect the ball on his chest was freakish). His tackling was precisely timed and uncompromising and his brilliantly early and economical distribution constantly transferred pressure from his own to the opponents' goal area. His extremely rare blunders could be theatrically explicit but that merely emphasised the outrageously high standards he encouraged us to take for granted.
Just about everything he did, important or trivial, was characterised by efficiency and neatness. The staff at West Ham used to marvel at how the kit he handed in did not arrive in a dishevelled bundle, as it did from most other players, but folded as meticulously as anything on a shop counter. "I find it strange that people should be surprised by efficiency," he told me. "We all know footballers who couldn't check through an airport on their own. They've got to have their tickets and passports handled for them and be shepherded through when it's time to go. I find that incredible."
His most influential attributes as a player were firmly related to the confident rationalism that underpinned all his attitudes. It did not take long to assert itself when we talked about his play. "OK, if speed is only a matter of taking yourself physically from A to B, then I'm not fast. But isn't it important to know earlier than the next man that it's necessary to go from A to B? Isn't speed of thought as vital as how fast you can move your legs? Of course, pace is a good thing to have, especially when it helps you to recover after you've been skinned. But I like to think I compensate for my slowness by seeing situations quickly, by anticipating and reacting before others realise what is happening."
As understatements go, that one should have been auctioned as a collectors' item. Somehow the drive, leadership and perceptiveness that made him such a potent force on the field did not translate into a worthwhile career in football coaching or management and his business ventures were equally disappointing. Undoubtedly greater effort should have been made to give him a more prominent role in English football than the radio commentating he had done for some years and which, with typical courage and lack of fuss, he insisted on continuing to within a week of his death. But maybe management was always going to be a less obvious metier than performing had been for someone whose inspiring effect was rooted in example and whose personality had a core of carefully guarded privacy.
"Ask me about Bobby Moore the footballer and I'll talk to you for a week but ask me about the private side of Bobby's nature and I'm liable to dry up after a minute," Ron Greenwood admitted to me. "That's not because he's uninteresting, cold or unfriendly, but because the inner part of his personality remains a mystery to me and, I'm sure, to the great majority of those who come in contact with him."
Of course, the reserve inherent in a player-manager relationship can leave its residue. However, even as someone who had the privilege (one of the most valued to come out of my professional life) of being on relaxed and friendly terms with Bobby Moore over nearly three decades of savouring, many times in many places, the quiet strength of his individuality, the dry, mildly mischievous humour, his gracious, unaffected courtesy I can testify to a feeling that no matter how much of himself he opened up there might still be an inner door or two left closed.
In recent years, having stayed close to the children of his first marriage while finding happiness with his second wife, Stephanie, he was wonderfully engaging company, especially when good wine was flowing. But, if anyone with interrogative tendencies joined in, he was always liable to rediscover his old habit of answering questions with questions of his own. Once, when I taxed him about the device, his blue eyes flickered with mischief for a moment, the eyelids drooped and the composed, lightly freckled face yielded slowly to a smile. "Well," he said, "you've got to try to learn something as you go through life."
Bobby Moore's life was tragically short but he learned quite a lot in the time he had, like how to be so much of a man that he turned into a hero.
Bobby, the charming chevalier
By Frank Keating
It was a day with a golden gleam about its edges still. For those of a certain generation it remains a watershed. Daft, I know, but two compartments in your life are "before" it and "after" it. You remember how old you were (I was 28), and who you were walking out with, and even what you wore on the walk up Wembley Way.
England 4, West Germany 2 (aet), on a midsummer's day of rich green grass and a gilded sunlight (and one shower around half-time, no?) in 1966. And England wore red – not the scarlet red, the garish huntin' pink of Llanelli or Wales, but the deeper, more satisfying red of expensive strawberry jam. The "aet" bit, didn't it, tied up the dramatic unities with a voluptuous curtain-call? If there had not been extra time, it would have been memorable and pretty good alright, but not that memorable, not that pretty resplendently, memorably good.
Down there, on what the still trilbied sportscribe-stars of the day would describe as Wembley's "Lincoln-green velvet", there was not an advertisement to be seen. Let alone on the shirts of our ten in the strawberry jam. Just the three rampant Lions.
The 11th was in lemon-curd yellow – our Gordon in goal, both eyes, both hands, the very best in the world. And just in front of Banks stood sentinels, honest Ray and good ol' George. Who else? Naughty Nobby, nice and nasty Nobby-four-eyes, bless him. Then the giraffe, our Jack – not forgetting Jack's very own "our kid", with the already barmily organised balding hairdo.
Alongside, Martin Peters, in his early 20s but already "ten years ahead of his time". And who's that pinball blob of indefatigable energy? It must be Blackpool's Ball of the tangerine top. Hurst, young "Hurstie", who had kept out a maestro, Jimmy Greaves, we were none too sure about at the start. At the final whistle it was different. At any rate, a callow Hurst was more of a wow than the perspiring carthorse the formation yoked him to, perspiringly diligent Roger Hunt. They were, after all, Sir Alf Ramsey's "wingless wonders". They weren't after that gold-leafed day in June, I'm telling you. And in charge of them all was Bobby.
Bobby Moore was both adjutant and general. Matinee idol and captain of games. Goody-Twoshoes, and street-fighter if needs be. He was handsome, upright and chivalrous. Blond, balanced, neat, tough, unruffled, strong. Bob had the lot. The chevalier and charming with it. It goes without saying, he made the pass for Hurst's winning goal in that eruptively dramatic last minute. No, not the winning goal, in fact, the clinching goal – the winner had been disputed a quarter of an hour earlier. Bobby felt it necessary to tidy up things: 3-2 and the Germans could argue till the cows came home 4-2 and no argument, thanks very much, okay boys? That was Bobby.
Bobby Moore had about him a serenity on the football field's hurly burly that never, in my slight experience, has been matched. On his stage, which was around and in front of football's 18-yard line for two decades, he put you in mind of a namesake, the grand and totally unboastful Bobby Jones. Alistair Cooke, in these pages, once wrote memorably of Jones (the pro who played like an amateur, or was it vice-versa: the point is made): I change the name and the nation and the name of the game. It holds up for Bob today:
"What we have here to talk about is not the hero as footballer, but that something the English hungered for and found in sport and community the very best performer in the world who was also the hero as human being the gentle, wholly self-sufficient male. Jefferson's lost paragon: the wise innocent."
Perfect, praised panegeric for poor Bobby. He and his sublime football need not be over-praised this morning. Over 20 years ago, the accepted grandest of them all, Pelé of Brazil, said it: "Of all the defenders I have challenged, Bobby Moore was the fairest, the best and the most honourable." No one can say fairer than that. Probably ever.
England's golden boy
By David Lacey
England's football teams have had many captains but fewer leaders. Bobby Moore was the most natural leader the national side has ever had, for he led not only by example but through the practical application of a superior footballing brain.
Moore managed to embody the spirit of an age without abandoning the values of its predecessor. He became England's captain in the early 1960s, a time when Harold Wilson's white heat of technology was challenging the fusty political image of Alec Douglas-Home. But Moore the footballer was a child of the 1950s and he never lost the simple dignity with which the best players of that era were endowed.
Bobby Moore the star was an early consequence of the Football League's belated abandonment of the maximum wage, which restricted even the best players to £20 a week. But his modest demeanour, his quiet authority and above all his dedication to his craft had more in common with the likes of Stan Matthews, Tom Finney, Nat Lofthouse and Billy Wright than the burgeoning Beatlemania of George Best.
Yet Moore had a presence which turned heads whenever he entered a room. He never forgot the first advice he had received on joining West Ham United as a 17-year-old in the summer of 1958. "Stand big," Malcolm Allison told him, and throughout the 1960s and early 1970s no one in the English game stood bigger.
Fame was Bobby's natural companion. He first captained England against Czechoslovakia in Bratislava in May 1963, less than a month after his 22nd birthday. The following year he led West Ham to victory in the FA Cup final and in 1965 he was holding up another trophy at Wembley, the European Cup-Winners' Cup.
The picture of Bobby Moore etched most deeply in the nation's consciousness is the moment he received the Jules Rimet trophy from the Queen after England beat West Germany 4-2 in the 1966 World Cup final. Wembley is in an uproar, Bobby Charlton is crying, Nobby Stiles is all gap-toothed glee, Alf Ramsey has disappeared into his own thoughts.
Moore is the calmest person in the stadium as he leads the England players up to the Royal Box. Completely in control of his emotions, he carefully wipes the sweat of his palms before the presentation is made and the handshaking begins.
This air of inner calm, of a man completely at ease with himself and his achievements, never deserted Moore. It served him admirably at a critical point of his career, but eventually his apparent detachment was to mystify even those closest to him.
Four years later, as England prepared to defend the World Cup in Mexico with warm-up games in South America, he was detained in Colombia following a seedy attempt by a jewellery store situated in the team's Bogota hotel to frame him for the theft of an emerald bracelet.
After the nonsense had been sorted out Moore caught up with the rest of the squad in Guadalajara via Mexico City airport, where chaos reigned as the England captain came through immigration. Mexican officials were simply swept aside by the media rush, but in the midst of it all Moore remained completely unruffled, strolling through the throng with a slight smile playing around his lips, as if the only people pursuing him were autograph hunters.
Arguably Moore's greatest performance for England was achieved not in 1966 but in 1970, when he finished on the losing side against Brazil but swapped shirts with Pele as an equal. Within two years, however, people were beginning to question, not his ability but the amount he had left to give to England.
In 1972 England were knocked out of the European Championship by West Germany, losing 3-1 at Wembley with Moore looking vulnerable against the talents of Gunther Netzer. The following summer Alf Ramsey's team lost a World Cup qualifier 2-0 in Poland with Moore bearing part of the responsibility for each goal. Even Ramsey, who knew his captain better than most, marvelled at Moore's composure in the face of a rare failure. "Had he wept then, we'd have all wept with him," said Alf.
Moore's England career began nine months before Ramsey's appointment and ended six months before his dismissal. He won his first cap against Peru in Lima in May 1962, his last against Italy at Wembley in November 1973. Ramsey's initial instructions to his young captain were typical of his style: "Just remember you are here to play for me, for England, and to do as I say." In reality Moore was never Alf's factotum. He was more an extension of Ramsey the player who had won 32 international caps as a right-back whose mental agility more than compensated for a lack of physical pace.
Moore, originally a wing-half, became the best centre-back of his age through applying the basic principles of time and space to the art of defending. He was not particularly strong in the air and opponents knew they had a chance if they could take him on with the ball. But such was Moore's masterful reading of the game that he rarely allowed himself to be placed in situations which exposed the shortcomings in his make-up.
Allison was Moore's mentor at West Ham, Ron Greenwood his professor. Greenwood has described the young Moore as "a first-class technician and a quick learner, but he was heavy-legged, not a good runner and a poor header of the ball." It was Greenwood who realised that Moore would be a much better player in the back four, having first seen him playing centre-half in a schools game at Stamford Bridge.
According to Ron "there was always something about Moore. He looked good: nice height and strong build, blond hair, determined chin and cool, knowing eyes. He did not have much pace, or even variety in the pace he had. But what few people knew about was his fanatical dedication. Moore made himself into a great player."
Greenwood was always impressed by Moore's ability to raise his play for important occasions. "The bigger the game the better the performance – he would grow to meet the challenge. That is what being a top international player is all about." Alan Ball, a fervent admirer of Moore and his close companion on England trips, never ceased to wonder at his captain's ability to switch from the West Ham scene – "a nice, family club just happy to be in the First Division" – to the world stage.
Moore captained his country in 90 matches, of which England won 57, drew 20 and lost only 13. Soon after retiring from international football he moved from West Ham to Fulham, where he finished on the losing side against his old team in the 1975 FA Cup Final.
He played his last game for Fulham in 1977 and it was widely assumed that he would ease himself into football management. But this never really happened. Moore was briefly manager of non-League Oxford City in 1979 and three years later became chief executive and team manager of Southend United, leaving in 1986. During this period Moore's 21-year-old marriage to Tina ended. In December 1991 he married Stephanie Parlane-Moore, an air stewardess.
After leaving Southend in May 1986 he was, for a time, sports editor of the new Sunday Sport. Concern about his health first arose two years ago but after surgery to remove a growth in April 1991 he appeared to have conquered the problem.
Moore had various business interests which included pubs, clubs and the rag trade. In December 1991 a sports business collapsed with big debts. Up to the time of his last illness Moore was commentating on matches for the London-based Capital Radio and working as a partner in a sports marketing firm aimed at the 1994 World Cup.
He was born in Barking and his playing career spanned 19 years and 1,000 senior games, including 668 League appearances. He won 108 caps for England, became Footballer of the Year in 1964, and was awarded the OBE three years later.
Bobby Moore will always be remembered as the man who encapsulated English football's greatest moment and faced his last challenge with the same dignity and courage. He was a true colossus of the game – but never put himself above it.
