Bobby Charlton: the miner’s son who became a gifted, global icon

The body leaning forward, the hank of blond hair flopping to one side of an already thinning pate, the white-shirted figure seems to glide – the hips not moving an inch from the horizontal plane – as the acceleration carries him over the pristine turf, arrowing down the pitch’s central axis as he crosses the halfway line, moving the ball forward with brisk touches of his left boot.

It’s 36 minutes into England’s second match of the 1966 World Cup finals. Alf Ramsey’s team have yet to score a goal. A drab performance in the opening match five days earlier has savagely undermined the nation’s expectation of glory. Now, on their return to Wembley, an opponent senses the menace and comes out of defence, moving across and towards the approaching figure.

Gustavo Peña, Mexico’s captain, is expecting the danger to come from Bobby Charlton’s lethal left foot. But the English No 9, in full surge, feints one way, moves the other, and hammers the ball with his right foot from 25 yards out, making a perfect connection that sends his shot across the hopeless dive of Ignacio Calderón and inside the goalkeeper’s right post. And suddenly everything changes.

In eight seconds of movement that could have been cast in bronze by a Futurist in thrall to streamlined movement and imperious glory, Charlton has single-handedly cleared the path towards England’s greatest sporting triumph. Of all the indelible moments that will define his career for club and country, this is the first among equals.

Two years later there will be more such moments as he shepherds Manchester United to their European Cup victory in the final against Benfica. There he is at Wembley again, breaking the stalemate with a rare headed goal early in the second half and completing the 4-1 victory by clipping in Brian Kidd’s low cross at the near post late in extra time.

Not all of the goals Charlton scored – 249 for United in all competitions, 49 for England – had the flamboyance of that effort against Mexico in 1966, but almost all had drama and relevance. And anyone who was present for even one of them will still remember it, half a century or more later, because those goals were the signature of the man who, more than any other single individual, came to symbolise the best elements of the character of English football.

Funnily enough, he never saw it as his main function. “I never thought of myself as a goal scorer,” he once told a Guardian colleague. “I was a midfield player or a winger.” And in the biggest match of his life he influenced the outcome precisely by not trying to score but by following Ramsey’s unexpected instruction to concentrate on stifling the influence of Franz Beckenbauer, the key element of the West Germany team. His opponent was trying to do the same thing to him. “England beat us because Bobby Charlton was just a little bit better than me,” Beckenbauer would say.

It’s more than a little poignant that one of the very few performances in which he was not required to accentuate the positive should have turned out to be so crucial. In the collective memory Charlton exists as a force for good, made of light and speed, as much an artist and symbol of the beautiful game as Pelé (in one of the compilations of his greatest moments there’s a brief clip of Charlton turning easily away from the great Brazilian, momentarily leaving him standing).

Apart from an ankle injury that delayed his first-team debut with United in 1956, five days before his 19th birthday, he was never injured throughout his career. Nor did he make problems for referees. It probably helped that regaining possession in the tackle was something he happily left to a Nobby Stiles or a Pat Crerand.

So a writer such as the great Arthur Hopcraft could bring lyricism to bear as he strove to capture the player’s unsullied essence. “The flowing line of Charlton’s football has no disfiguring barbs in it,” he wrote in The Football Man in 1968, “but there is a heavy and razor-sharp arrowhead at its end.” For Hopcraft, Charlton was “what football looks like when we enjoy it most”.

Bobby Charlton takes the ball past Franz Beckenbauer during the 1966 World Cup Final at Wembley. Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images

His story also seemed to reach down into the very roots of English football, in the place where they grow deepest: the north-east. His father was a coalminer in Ashington, Northumberland. Young Bobby sometimes accompanied his dad to the pit head on a Friday, when he picked up his wages. The boy saw men coming up from the mine shafts covered in coal dust and looking happy to be out. The men waiting to replace them at the face looked miserable. That would not be his destiny, nor that of his elder brother, Jack, who was to share his greatest day. They were, after all, second cousins on their mother’s side to the great Jackie Milburn of Newcastle United and England. Four of Cissie Charlton’s brothers were also professionals. It was in the blood.

For Bobby, football overshadowed birds-nesting, fishing and every other recreation of a childhood in a mining town surrounded by countryside. At his school, the football team played in crimson shirts with laces at the neck and shorts made from black-out curtains. He was marked out early and signed up to United’s ground staff at 15. You can only imagine Matt Busby pinching himself to ensure he was not dreaming as he watched Charlton join Duncan Edwards, another divinely anointed prodigy, in the first team.

Munich changed him. There are those who say he never really smiled again after surviving the crash that took eight of his teammates, including Edwards. He acquired a reputation for being strait-laced: there were uneasy relationships with Jack, a much more open and relaxed character, and with George Best, on whose destructively hedonistic habits he looked askance (although in 2007 he had no hesitation in including the Irishman in his own all-time United XI, up front alongside Denis Law). In later years, as a United director, he was said to be one of those who resisted the idea of bringing in José Mourinho as Alex Ferguson’s replacement in 2013, disapproving of the Portuguese coach’s provocative ways.

“People did and still do consider him dour,” Pat Crerand wrote in his autobiography. “He could be, but the public image of Bobby is not the real him. He’s not an outgoing man, but he’s a nice fellow. Bobby is only comfortable with certain people. When you saw him with his mates like Shay [Brennan] and Nobby [Stiles], he was a totally different person: funny and happy-go-lucky.”

Charlton would describe his relationship with the game of football as not a vocation but a compulsion. Crerard, who played with him when they were both grown men, had an insight into that, too: “When he got the ball in the pre-match warm-up he was like a kid with a new toy. He was a great player, but he never got over the thrill of having the ball at his feet.”

That’s the impression all the great ones convey, forging an unspoken link between their inner child and that of the spectator. It was what won Charlton his place at his era’s highest table, alongside Puskas and Di Stéfano, Pelé and Eusébio, Best and Cruyff. But there was something more about him, a presence in a match that radiated a seriousness of purpose and a sense of distance – never aloof, but somehow apart – that surely came out of the great tragedy he had experienced at the age of 20, from the cost of his survival and from our awareness of that deeper impact.

He came from a life that was real, and that was where he stayed. The day he scored both England’s goals as they beat Portugal to reach the 1966 final, his father was 800ft underground, working at the coal face, having decided that asking for another day off might be pushing it.

His emotions, it turned out, were buried not far beneath that modest, stoical surface. During his appearance on This Is Your Life in 1969, he wept twice: once when the narrative reached the disaster, but also earlier, when Milburn appeared on the screen, addressing him – and the television audience – from the Ashington recreation ground where he had gone on Sundays to observe and encourage the young relative.

From that muddy pitch, Bobby Charlton grew to become a world figure. There was a night in June 1968 when the old Direct-Orient Express, pulled by a pair of steam locomotives, crossed the border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria on its way to Istanbul. Two guards entered the third-class compartment wearing stern expressions, waking the dozing passengers and wanting to check documents. Reaching a young couple, they were handed two passports with dark blue covers. They looked at the passports, and then at each other.

“Eeeng-lish!” one observed. “Boh-bby Charrrl-ton!” the other exclaimed. Both were smiling. Enough said.