The Greatest?

I know that many readers will be put off as soon as they realise that this piece is substantially concerned with football but please bear with me, at least for a while. You might just be surprised and find some of this illuminating.

Of course, the inspiration (if that’s the right word) is that The World Cup is upon us. TV and newspapers will be ‘wall to wall’ football and those who have no interest in the subject will be screaming with anguish within a few days (if they’re not already doing so).

But in this essay, I’m not so much concerned with football as with the qualities that make someone admirable. What is it that makes a person worthy of the high regard of others? Why are some forgotten all too soon whilst others are lauded to the skies, even though their general behaviour and the way they comport themselves in public should make them subject to opprobrium rather than praise.

Over the ensuing weeks we will be assaulted (there’s no other word for it) with the self-satisfied opinions of those who for some obscure reason have been appointed as experts. To misquote C.L.R. James for a moment, “What do they know of football who only football know?” The problem is that these people lack any real perspective, either in relation to the passage of time or to substance. For most of them, it seems as though history began in around 1966 and foul play and cheating are perfectly acceptable so long as one can get away with it. And so our boys are encouraged by the media to aspire to be like modern footballers and our girls are led to believe that it is a worthwhile ambition to marry one in order to share in their money and their ‘celebrity’.

I have already watched and listened, in growing dismay, as groups of barely literate ex-footballers have contributed to puerile discussions about the greatest ever England footballer. Their arguments (more like prejudices) were peppered with comments that were little more than tub-thumping advocacy of their own current, tribal favourite.

So it will continue and we will be bombarded with sophistry and specious justifications for deliberate foul play, fakery and downright cheating; such behaviour will be termed ‘gamesmanship’ or, even more inappropriately, ‘professionalism’. The so-called experts, those who seek to excuse the inexcusable, will be clamouring to extol the virtues of their current favourite and it’ll be Rooney this, and Gerrard that, and Terry the other (pun most certainly intended). There will be little or no criticism of foul language, unnecessary spitting, swinging elbows or child-like tantrums. Probably, David Beckham will be cited as a wonderful ambassador for English football. The commentators will have forgotten (or perhaps don’t even know) that one record that Beckham does hold is as the England player who has most often been sent from the field of play. Some rôle-model, eh?

Possibly a few older heads will quietly mention Charlton (Bobby not Jack) and Moore, or perhaps even Finney and Matthews but they’ll be drowned out by the raucous ill-informed clamour for the current over-hyped darling. “It’s a different game now” will be the cry, the implication being that great players of the past were little better than old men chasing after a ball on Hackney Marshes. Is it only me who finds it disturbing that many of those allowed a platform in our media to give their opinion, have memories little longer than that of the proverbial goldfish? That thought incidentally, applies equally well to other more important subjects than sport.

The problem, as I said, is that all such discussions display a lack of perspective that is frankly alarming and so ill-informed, it beggars belief. When England won the World Cup in 1966, association football had already been established more than 100 hundred years previously; 1863 to be exact, and international football was also approaching its centenary (1871).

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In this article, I wish to sing the praises of a player of whom few of you may have heard. My thesis is that he was the greatest ever England footballer. I will endeavour to convince you of this. If I fail, it will trouble me not at all for I would at least have honoured his memory and shared information with others who may be interested to learn a little about forgotten heroes of the past.

Now I know that it’s impossible satisfactorily to compare a player from one era with one from another. The problem is that the pundits don’t acknowledge that difficulty – they merely ignore everything that happened before they themselves kicked a ball.

However, what one can do is to ascertain the status of a player compared to their contemporaries and determine whether they were considered an admirable person of their generation. Thus anyone who achieved highly in their own time is worthy of proper consideration.

This is where Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton appear to be the main candidates for the accolade ‘greatest ever England footballer’. It is often said, “Moore is the only England player to captain a world championship winning side” or “Charlton has scored most international goals for England.” There the debate often descends into bathos because those facts are seen as unchallengeable.

But here’s the thing – both those statements are incorrect!

Are you surprised? Assuming, of course, that you care one way or another. But, if you do care, and if you are interested in hearing about someone who was both the acknowledged world’s greatest player of his time, and was also a man of such great integrity that his fair-mindedness was a byword, then read on.

First, let us look at the statement regarding Bobby Moore’s claim for uniqueness. The World Cup was inaugurated in 1930. Did you ever wonder why it was decided to hold the tournament only every four years? In essence, it was FIFA’s attempt to establish itself as the world-wide governing body and in order to do that, it had to replace what was hitherto regarded as the elite international competition. Here’s where the four years comes in – it was a measure of time to the ancient Greeks, called by them an ‘Olympiad’. Yes, the Olympic Football champions, up to 1930, must be properly understood as the world’s champions during an Olympiad. This is not an idle statement – it accurately reflects the situation as it was. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that Uruguay won the Olympic titles in 1924 and 1928 with Argentina being runners up at the latter event. At the first World Cup in 1930, that remained the pecking order, Uruguay beat Argentina in the final.

So what of the Olympiads before that? There were semi-official tournaments in 1900 and 1904 but the first proper Olympic competition was held in 1908. An England amateur XI (representing Great Britain) won that and another England amateur team repeated the feat in 1912. Here’s the point – the captain of those two England XIs was the same man.

Then came the Great War. It had such a devastating effect on the young men of Britain that no team was entered at the next Olympics in Antwerp in 1920. England were never again serious contenders for the title of World Champions until 1966. It is a nice point however, that England did make a significant contribution to the 1920 Olympic tournament. The man who designed the main stand at Antwerp was an English architect called Vivian John Woodward …, and he it was who’d been the England captain in 1908 and 1912.

So, 1966 was not the only occasion that England became World Champions and there are in truth, two players who have led England in such a triumph. Woodward got there first and moreover, did it twice, thus out-achieving even the great Bobby Moore.

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The point of football, to put it simply, is to score more goals than the opposition. Therefore, those players who score the goals are the ones accorded the greater glory. There can really be little dispute with that and I accept it, sine qua non, or as a basic premise. Arguably, the greatest ever player from any country is Edsun Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé). During his long career he scored over 1,300 goals, including 77 in 92 Internationals.

For England, Bobby Charlton (who scored 49 goals in 106 games) deserves his place among the greats. You’ll hear no quarrel from me gainsaying his achievements. If you read any sports book published in Britain, you’ll be informed that Charlton holds the record for most goals scored for England. This is according to the Football Association. I’ll come back to that point later but for now, I’ll content myself with pointing out that eighth on the list appears Vivian Woodward. The fact that he scored his 29 goals in only 23 games is testament to how prolific he was. It works out as 1.26 goals per game as opposed to Charlton’s 0.46.

Also, it’s well known that Charlton has held the record for a long time; in fact, for 42 years, since he overtook Jimmy Greaves in 1968. However, once Woodward had passed Steve Bloomer, he held that particular record for longer; for 47 years, from 1911 till he was, in his turn, overtaken by Tom Finney in 1958.

If this were the extent of it, I would have already made a cogent argument that Woodward bears comparison with any other great England goalscorer. But …, the official figures, according to the FA, obscure the true situation and are a good deal less than half the story.

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In the same way that it is improper to judge a political figure from the past, purely from a twenty first century viewpoint, this is true also of any other type of endeavour, including sport. A person has to be placed within their historical perspective and seen as a child of their times.

Following that, let us look at Woodward through the eyes of an Edwardian. The ‘home nations’ dominated the game and football played outside the bounds of these islands was considered by the Football Association to be a decidedly inferior affair. Indeed, the FA clung onto that fallacy well into the 1950s until the delusion was shattered first by the loss to the USA in the 1950 World Cup and then the subsequent demolitions of England’s ‘finest’ by Hungary in 1953 and 1954.

In the early years of the twentieth century then, the FA refused to play against ‘foreign’ teams. This was despite the fact that by 1910, 20 countries across Europe and South America were playing full international games. They relented just far enough, so that they did not actively oppose amateur England teams ‘flying the flag’ and occasionally, playing against ‘Johnny Foreigner’. At this time, a few members of the England team were amateurs anyway. In any event, England amateur teams played a total of 47 international games between 1906 and 1914.

All of those games were recognised by the opposing country as full internationals and are duly included in their national records. FIFA also, accords full international status to these games. It’s only the FA, basking in its attitude of ‘splendid isolation’ which refuses to allow them the eminence they clearly warrant. After all, it means that every game that England played in those days was against a country which was, in effect, ranked in the top twenty teams in the world. Can the same be said when England recently played in the qualifying round against Kazakhstan, Andorra and Belarus?

Anyway, back to Vivian Woodward. He played in 30 of those England Internationals, which added to the 23 that the FA do recognise, means he represented his country in 53 games. So here’s the crunch. Look up the top international goal scorers of all time according to FIFA, and Bobby Charlton slots into 33rd place on the list. Well above him in 5th place, with 73 goals from 53 internationals (1.38 goals per game) appears the name Vivian John Woodward.

So now we see that not only did Woodward twice captain England to become World Champions, he also leads the England goal scoring list by a country mile.

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If all of this material fails to convince, I’ve another argument, one that may speak louder than just dry statistical fact. Vivian Woodward was a truly splendid person and the kind of rôle-model to which a sensible person would wish to aspire. Allow me first to place the matter in context, before citing just a few anecdotes to demonstrate what I mean.

Cheating, avarice and corruption are not solely the province of modern football, there have been many notorious transgressions in the past that permeated the game from top to bottom. Several famous British footballers have been found guilty of accepting bribes and banned from the game and at least one FA Cup Final is considered to have been deliberately ‘thrown’ in order to win money from gambling. Trophies have been stolen, clubs disbanded for corruption, promotions won through bribery and even founding fathers and administrators imprisoned for embezzlement.

So football’s glorious history is a somewhat tarnished affair to say the least. All the more so, therefore, should we applaud when someone emerges from the noxious swamp to become the epitome of graciousness, fair play, selflessness and generosity of spirit. Such a man was Vivian Woodward.

In a match against France in 1906, England were awarded a penalty when a French player handled the ball. Woodward, the England captain, saw that it was accidental and considered the judgement harsh. He took the penalty himself and deliberately shot wide. I wonder what Thierry Henri would have made of that!

In a Spurs v Millwall match in 1907, the referee was initially uncertain whether to award a goal because he was unsighted. When asked later why he’d awarded the goal, he said, “I asked Woodward. Everyone knows that he never cheats.” What is remarkable about this incident is that it was not even considered extraordinary to accept Woodward’s assessment. All the players and even the referee were perfectly sanguine about having Woodward as the ultimate arbiter of what was right and proper.

In 1915, Chelsea reached the FA Cup Final. Woodward had occasionally turned out for that club since semi-retirement from Spurs in 1909. He was by then a lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment and the Great War had already settled into its murderous stalemate. It was clear that this would be the last Cup Final for years and Chelsea sought and were granted permission by the Army, to approach Woodward to play, so that the great man would be able to end his career on a high. He declined the offer to play on the grounds that by doing so, he would deny a place to Bob Thompson who had played in the earlier rounds. No Gascoigne-like tears of childish disappointment for a man like Woodward.

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It may seem difficult to believe these days but not all footballers were selfish and avaricious, or untrustworthy ‘muddied oafs’. One of ‘the lost tales’ of those early years of the twentieth century is that upon the outbreak of the Great War, the 17th Service Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment was formed which became known as ‘the Football Battalion’. Many of its members had formerly been players and in the case of Clapton Orient (later Leyton Orient) the entire team signed up for service. Woodward himself rose to the rank of Captain and was injured in action by a hand grenade. After recovering from his wounds, he returned to see further action at the Somme offensive and was there when 14 of his companions were killed by poison gas on 18th September 1916.

Many other forgotten heroes also deserve recognition though I’ll mention only one here. Walter Tull, English-born son of a former slave from Barbados, was possibly the first black person to play first class soccer in England. He never achieved high representative honours but he was a professional with Spurs from 1908 to 1911. No-one will be surprised to learn that he was often subject to racist taunting from rival supporters. But the other reason why Tull should be remembered is that he was the first black man to be commissioned as an officer in the British Army. This happened despite the fact that there was a military regulation which forbade “any negro or person of colour” from becoming an officer. He achieved this remarkable feat following strong representations from unnamed officers in the Football Regiment. Did Woodward have a hand in this? I like to think so. Sadly, Tull was killed when leading his men in an attack on German trenches on the Western Front on 25th March 1918.

Woodward himself survived the war but the Colonel of ‘The Football Battalion’ calculated that by 1930, 500 of the original 600 members were dead, either being killed in action or dying later from wounds received.

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Woodward’s own end was a sad and lonely one. He’d left his architecture practice to become a farmer in Essex and the inter-war years saw a decline in his fortunes as for many others. He spent the second war as an ARP warden but his health deteriorated and by 1949 he’d entered an Ealing nursing home. In 1953, he was visited by a sports journalist, Bruce Harris, who found him “bedridden, paralysed and infirm beyond his years”. He reported Woodward as saying, “No one who used to be with me in football has been to see me in two years. They never come – I wish they would.” This may have been the only time in his life that Woodward ever openly complained about anything. The FA, in its ‘sagacity’, sent Woodward, unable to move and with failing eyesight, a television set!

Of course, no-one still alive can have seen Woodward play but there are a few indications from contemporaries about how he was viewed. He was 5 feet 10 inches tall but very slightly built and weighed less than 11 stone. He was regularly targeted by defenders for rough and illegal treatment and often suffered injuries preventing him from playing. Although he himself never complained, there were several occasions when after another battering, newspapers campaigned to outlaw the type of foul play to which Woodward was subjected. As for his general play, Frederick Wall (FA President) once said that in over 50 years of watching football, only Dixie Dean came close to being as good a header of the ball as Woodward. He was variously described as ‘the human chain of lightning’ and ‘the player with magic in his boots’. The foremost Sports journalist of the time (James Catton), said, “Nothing could arouse Woodward to resentment. He was all art and no violence.”

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Before I end this piece, and with an eye to fairness and balance, I feel I must report that there were at least two people were regularly exasperated by Woodward. For over 14 years, from 1901 to 1915, and no matter how hard they tried, the club treasurers of Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea Football Clubs were utterly unable to get Woodward, the inveterate amateur, to claim even a penny in expenses. His long journeys (over 150 miles there and back for the simple privilege of playing) he considered were his own responsibility. I wonder what the current Chelsea treasurer, who paid out £167 million in wages to players during the 2009/10 season, would have made of him.

Vivian John Woodward, born Kennington, Surrey 3rd June 1879, died Ealing, Middlesex 6th February 1954.
I invite you to agree with me that he was not only the greatest ever England footballer but perhaps more importantly, and borrowing Shakespeare’s phrase, also the noblest of them all.