Review bobby moore mu a cp năm 2024

Yet another World Cup comes and goes but still Bobby Moore remains the only England captain whose hands have reached out to grasp football’s Holy Grail and raise it aloft.

Can this be entirely coincidence?

The descent into mediocrity steepens for the nation which gave birth to this, the greatest game of all.

Brazil 2014 plumbed new depths of ineptitude.

Only once before had England gone to the World Cup Finals and failed to survive the opening group stage. At least in 1958 they drew those three matches and came home undefeated.

In this Brazil debacle they were eliminated after their first two games – drab losses to what turned out to be distinctly ordinary teams by the historic standards of Italy and Uruguay – and were fortunate to salvage one miserable point from the dead rubber against Costa Rica.

Would this degeneration really have befallen England if the Football Association had not turned its back on the inspiring legend, until the shock of his premature death, whose imposing statue now guards the gates to Wembley Stadium?

There is a perfectly dreadful symmetry to this process of decay.

Twelve World Cups have passed since Bobby and his boys of that halcyon summer of ’66 danced on the hallowed turf that sun-dappled afternoon in north-west London.

Six before he passed away, six since.

Twice only have England come home with pride.

The first was Moore’s last.

Mexico 1970 saw him captain England, a team arguably superior to his World Cup winners of four years earlier, in an epic duel in the sun against the greatest of all Brazil teams, then in a quarter-final thriller lost to the Germans in extra time.

The second was the last before Bobby finally succumbed to bowel cancer.

Paul Gascoigne cried as Bobby Robson’s team lost the semi-final of Italia ’90 on penalties. This country wept with him.

The common thread is Germany. The acute comparison is with Franz Beckenbauer.

Bobby, the blond Adonis, and Franz, the Kaiser, were exact contemporaries, the two greatest defenders football has ever seen, their majesty rooted in a deep-reading and profound understanding of the game. They were the epitome of each other.

They pitted wits in ’66 and ’70, becoming close friends, only for England to wantonly rupture the parallel thereafter.

Germany called upon Beckenbauer to go on and become the only man ever to win the World Cup as manager as well as player and captain, then to lead the bid which took football home to the Fatherland for the finals of 2006. England discarded all Moore’s comparable wisdom and experience, condemning themselves to these long years in the wilderness.

Of the fifteen managers – for one match or more since the time Sir Alf Ramsey called Moore an extension of himself on the pitch – five have fallen at the World Cup Finals hurdle, as did Ramsey himself in 1970. These were: Ron Greenwood, albeit undefeated at Spain ’82; Bobby Robson at Mexico ’86 and Italia ’90; Glenn Hoddle, who started losing the plot at France ’98; Sven Goran Eriksson, who took the money and ran after Japan/South Korea 2002 and Germany 2006; Fabio Capello, who did likewise following South Africa 2010; now Roy Hodgson, who is part victim of the mass foreign importation which has drained the pool of English players experienced in the Premier and Champions Leagues.

Is it conceivable that Moore would have done worse than that? Or that England under his guidance would have failed even to reach Germany ’74, Argentina ’78 or USA ’94? The questions swirl through the mists of time.

As I write this, can it really be twenty-one years since Bobby died? It seems like only yesterday that we embraced for the last time, on the steps of the London hotel where he and his team-mates celebrated on the night of England’s only World Cup triumph.

It takes a remarkable statistic to prescribe the time-frame: England have arm-banded more than forty captains since that triumphant afternoon of 30 July 1966. Some, of course, enjoyed that privilege as one-night stand-ins, but none have ever looked like equalling the record of ninety England captaincies which Bobby shares with Billy Wright, the most illustrious of his predecessors.

Of those who have achieved any measure of longevity, Moore had the highest respect for the one who came closest, leading out his country sixty-four times. He once said of Bryan Robson, Manchester United’s Captain Marvel:

He had that phenomenal engine to get from box to box, tackled like a vice, passed to perfection and scored bundles of goal. Just as importantly, whether it was with England or United, Bryan had that will to win, that hatred of defeat, that leadership by example which are the qualities of great captains.

In that last part, he might have been talking about himself.

Of the England managers appointed in succession to Sir Alf Ramsey, while Moore was alive, Joe Mercer’s caretaker reign was too brief for Bobby to pass judgement. Thereafter, his high hopes for Don Revie were unfulfilled; he was pleased his old West Ham professor Ron Greenwood was given his chance at world level; he was fondly surprised that Bobby Robson almost brought a second World Cup home; and he shied away from Graham Taylor’s route-one strategy.

Of all those who came after his death, he would have approved of only one. He said of Terry Venables, who would be denied his World Cup after leading England to the Wembley semi-final of Euro ’96 (Germany on penalties, yet again): ‘Terry was one of the most intelligent coaches and inspiring man managers I ever knew or worked with.’

For sure he would have opposed the doomed appointments of Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello. The question of a foreign manager was beginning to be raised after a quarter of century of post-Ramsey disappointment and Moore said:

The England job is for an Englishman, not someone from abroad. Every country has its football culture and it takes one of our own to understand how the English player works. Anyway, a national team should be all about people from that country – from the manager through the players, all the way down to the tea lady.

Then he added: ‘By the way, no country has ever won the World Cup with a foreign manager.’ That remains true to this day.

Such was the beautiful simplicity of Bobby Moore, a clarity distilled from all he had learned, all he knew, all he experienced, all the complexities of his career and his life. Focussing on that now brings with it a pang of nostalgia for those of us who think about Bobby more days than not in our own lives.

24 February 1993 does seem like only yesterday.

Until you remember that it was the day the glory died.

CHAPTER 1

THE IMPACT

It was 6.36 a.m. on the morning of 24 February 1993 and the news which was to have such a profound impact on the people of Britain, provoke such an extraordinary outpouring of human emotion, inspire such an unprecedented sense of national loss and be borne around the globe with such sadness, was to remain a private matter for a little longer.

Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore, the public’s last hero but an essentially private man, still belonged to his family.

The first fingers of dawn were tugging at the curtains of the charming corner residence cloistered behind electronic gates among other homes of taste and substance high on Putney Heath. It was quiet for the moment but what his wife and children knew from experience was that the instant word of his passing filtered to the outside world there would be no peace. And there would be more than a new day tapping at the window.

The revelation that Bobby Moore was seriously ill had been made only ten days earlier. It had been withheld until an accumulation of small changes in his commanding appearance had begun prompting inquiries as to his health. It had been delayed to defer speculation as to his prospects for survival.

Although the family had known for almost two years, since major intestinal surgery in April 1991, that his cancer was terminal, they had helped him maintain for as long as humanly possible – super-humanly in truth – the gallant and convincing facade that, as he put it in one of his familiar phrases, ‘all is well’.

It seemed too soon. There was no reason, yet, for the media at large to be gathered in waiting at Lynden Gate.

Softly, one by one, Stephanie notified his uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. The boyhood loss of his father and the recent burial of his mother had tied the most famous Moore son closely to this thoroughly decent, disarmingly old-fashioned family the like of which used to be the salt of London’s East End community.

Stephanie called her own mother and father, of whom Bobby had grown increasingly fond. She telephoned me to help prepare the formal statement. This would not be released until Roberta and Dean had waited for the sun to rise over the east coast of the United States before waking their mother, Tina, at her new home in Florida. Nor until their father had been removed in continuing peace to the premises of a funeral director who had been sworn to secrecy.

Unofficially, the word was spreading. But the dam held long enough to serve its purpose. When it broke it released a tidal wave of admiration, a flood of tributes, an ocean of nostalgia and a river of tears.

All were of such overwhelming magnitude that our society found itself challenged to accept the real significance of this footballer of humble birth and simple origin but princely integrity and regal aspirations, challenged to realise his importance to a succession of generations, challenged to assess his influence over the English way of life both now and in the future.

It came swelling up, as he would have wished, not from the privileged socialites who had sought briefly to bask in his reflected glory but then turned their backs on him, not from the self-important football institutions which had failed him in later life, but from the vast body of ordinary people.

Suddenly, as if guilty at having failed sufficiently to acknowledge its debt to this heroic defender of forgotten virtues and collapsing standards, England recognised the loss of something pure, something honest, something good, something intangible but something impossible to replace.

The national mourning ran – runs yet and maybe always will run – at least as deep as if a member of the Royal Family had died. Perhaps deeper at the time, given the House of Windsor’s fall from grace during the months through which the most gracious of England’s sporting captains rose so nobly above the ravages of cancer.

Bobby Moore was the ’60s icon. His was the decade in which the trapdoor of opportunity opened so that talent irrespective of background could come thrusting into the light. Moore, the representative supreme of the working man’s game, became the symbol of hope to so many. Here was majestic, living proof that we could all make good.

The East End war baby with his fresh-faced universal appeal and his upright bearing in defiance of the class system transcended all the barriers to become the champion not just of the working class but of all the people. He had the style, the charm and the intelligence to walk with kings. He retained his compassion for others and an attachment to his roots to remain one of the common people.

Everyman was born.

The day Everyman died he touched the raw nerve of the ’90s to comparably dramatic and influential effect.

Britain’s descent from a civilised society respected around the world into a primitive underworld of criminal violence, mob savagery, terrifying aggression, unemployed psychopaths and, by the very least of its manifestations, uncouth manners, was accelerating.

In the short time between the making public of Moore’s illness and the morning of his passing the unspoken fears of the silent majority became tragically and intensely focused by the abduction of an innocent two-year-old child from a shopping precinct in Liverpool and his ghastly murder by the side of a railway track.

The brutal termination of this little boy’s life compelled this country to address not merely the burgeoning issue of juvenile crime but also the chronic incidence of child abuse and molestation of the aged, statistics so rampantly high as to shame Britain in the eyes of the world.

When Bobby Moore went soon after it was likened to the dying of the light. It occurred so abruptly to so many anxious citizens that their last hope had died with him. Harnessed to his comparative youth – he was forty-seven days short of his fifty-second birthday – that acute sense of loss then became transformed into a mighty force which swept the length and breadth of the land.

No life, young or old, was left untouched by his passing. He became enshrined as the symbol of how civilised life ought to be lived. He represented hope and good. Donations poured in to his chosen charity as the country simply refused to let his example perish.

Since it seemed there was no one else left to pick up the flag for all that is honest, responsible and worthwhile, Moore’s spirit carried it beyond the grave.

Yes, he was my friend. No, this evaluation is not far-fetched. Newspapers are also the litmus paper of the population. Sometimes they dictate the colour of public thinking but in matters this close to the heart they know the wisdom of taking the nation’s temperature, not trying to raise it.

In all the millions of sentences expended across endless miles of newsprint – as well as spoken on television and radio – there was not one critical word.

Jeffrey Richards, professor of cultural history at Lancaster University, lamented Moore’s passing when he wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘The new Englishman is increasingly being seen as a brutish and leering figure with little or no right to respect. He combines the thuggishness of Vinny Jones with the oafishness of Gazza, the brutishness of Johnny Rotten with the boorishness of Bernard Manning.’

Keith Waterhouse, the people’s playwright, completed the philosophical equation in his complementary column: ‘No wonder Bobby Moore’s death leaves us with such a sense of loss.’

In its way the uncompromising, down-to-earth respect for Moore was manna from heaven for the media. Yet while his memory was milked it did no harm. Not to his family, not to his friends, not to his followers, not to that memory itself.

Those tribute acres were his proper due. Sadly, they came too late for the man himself to see and hear how deeply he was loved in his own country.

Whenever and wherever he travelled abroad Bobby was greeted with a respect and affection verging on awe.

Even America, the land of baseball, to which soccer is an alien game, identified Moore’s social significance. The New York Times devoted more than a full column of its front page to an explanation of how his death was acting as a re-unifying force within an ageing nation threatened by violent division, the breakdown of law and order and the collapse of its moral society.

At home his own genuine modesty and the inbred restraint of his countrymen when it comes to expressing emotion had combined to separate Bobby from England’s latent admiration.

As a nation, we took our hero for granted. Although not quite to the very end. In those few days after his illness became a matter of public sorrow the surge of appreciation began and he remained lucid and able to read the first of what mushroomed into countless triumphant reviews of his own life.

Those columns were no more than a foretaste of the patriotic volumes of praise which were to follow, but he enjoyed them just the same. Just as he would have smiled, on the morning after his funeral, at the final paragraph of one leading article. All the more so since it appeared in one of the brasher tabloids of which he was somewhat wary.

This is how it read:

God can tell Heaven’s Eleven to start getting changed. The captain has arrived.

CHAPTER 2

THE LAP OF HONOUR

Obituaries are never easy.

By a reversal of normal fortunes, so far as what used to be called Fleet Street is concerned, they come even tougher when you have to write one about a subject you know well.

While a little knowledge can lend the appearance of informed objectivity to the black border section of the newspaper, too much intimate detail can lead the author into a literary minefield, booby-trapped with excessive fragments of potential trivia.

There is also the danger of submerging clarity in a wash of sentiment. Which makes it all the harder when you love the person who has died.

And I loved Bobby Moore.

I loved him, if not like the brother neither he nor I never had, then the way one single child can relate to another … finding good companionship, sharing good times, exchanging confidences, being there in a crisis, helping out in times of need, leaning on someone reliable when the problem is on the other shoulder, picking up the phone on a whim, debating sport as well as our life and times and being happy to get together either by chance or design.

Our friendship started slowly, gathered strength through the maturing years of his playing career, then became firmly cemented by a host of shared experiences culminating when we helped each other to the altar. A couple of older – but please never wiser – chaps smitten with two younger – and, thank you, beautiful – women.

Bobby did not come easy, either. It took time and loyalty to win his trust but we came to be as relaxed in each other’s company as only good friends can be … and only when their wives approve.

We could pick up where we left off no matter how long the interval. So when we each returned from separate trips to America this fateful February and the first message was one to call him urgently the alarm bells began ringing even before the telephone.

When he had undergone his major operation at the London Clinic we had been concerned by the implications. Although he rallied impressively, recovered his age-defying physical condition and quickly re-engaged us in life on the golf links and the tennis court, in the bar and the restaurant, at his home or ours, we wondered if all really was as well as he insisted.

With characteristic lack of concern for himself he had been shielding his friends from the tragic reality. For a few hours longer he continued to do so:

‘Hello, Bobby. How are you?’

‘Tremendous holiday.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘How about a drink?’

‘Great.’

‘See you lunchtime tomorrow at the Royal Garden.’

It was light conversation as normal. With Bobby it was hard to tell if something serious lay beneath the easy surface. And at first it did not occur to me that he had chosen this particular hotel not for the convenience of its location in Kensington but because it was the very one in which he and his England colleagues had celebrated the night they won World Cup.

Bobby Moore was setting out on his last lap of honour.

It was Friday 12 February and it was a miracle he was still able to do so. Unbeknown to all outside his family, unconfirmed by superficial observation of the fine figure of a man the world had always known, that insidious, indiscriminate cancer had spread from his colon to his liver and he had been fighting mightily for his life.

When he walked tall into the bar at the Royal Garden it was an imperceptible fraction more slowly than usual. There was a faint discoloration of the features of the kind which attends jaundice and when he ordered no more than a glass of water, a touch unusual for Bobby, I knew there were grounds for concern.

In my heart I knew before he told me:

We’ve got to get a statement out soon. One or two people have started asking questions. I have got cancer. Only Stephanie and the close family know. I am sorry to have to break it to you first. I don’t want a paper chase so let’s keep it correct and as pleasant as possible. No unseemly scramble. My illness is nobody’s exclusive. How shall we do it?

The details were simple. A news agency advisory statement issued early enough on Sunday evening to give all elements of the media a chance to react. An embargo on publication or broadcast – broken only by Sky News – until shortly after 11 p.m. so that Bobby and Stephanie could be in bed, telephone switched to automatic, safe from intrusion at least until morning.

The dismay was the problem. Hand on his arm. Got to ask: ‘What’s the diagnosis? What do the doctors say?’

Bobby always could communicate more with a single gesture than most men with a thousand words. Ask his World Cup teammates. So he smiled. Just slightly.

And he thought for a moment before drawing attention to his coat.

I had ribbed him about it on arrival. It was cut full-length from soft leather dyed deep red and it sported a multi-coloured silk lining. It was a hint more obvious than his usual, classic mode of attire and he used it cleverly to convey the truth:

You remember when we were in Sweden last summer at the European Championships and I went shopping with Stephanie? Well, it was in the shop on the corner. It was something different. And it was lovely quality and at £600 I thought it was good value.

I thought if I didn’t buy it then I might never have something like it. But I never wore it. Not until now. If I don’t wear it today…

The sentence tailed into silence. I knew then he was on that farewell tour of his best-remembered places.

We cleared our throats and talked of old times, good days, long nights. We walked slowly to the revolving door and stood for a time on the steps from which he had reached out that summer’s evening long ago to embrace a jubilant multitude.

We held each other’s shoulders and we parted with a hug. We checked that we were both going to Wembley on Wednesday – him to offer his last words of wisdom as a commentator for Capital Radio, me for the Mail.

So we did and that night I stood by him while he chatted and joked with fellow members of the media about the modem England’s World Cup difficulties against San Marino, the kind of team his England would have swamped. And I couldn’t help but chuckle when I heard how he had stepped out of his car later to direct the traffic through Wembley’s post-match congestion and all the drivers had jump-started to his command.

God knows how he even made it to Wembley, but somehow he did and he carried it off in style. He hoped to pay his last respects to West Ham four days later but that proved to be one match too far. We spoke on the telephone that Sunday afternoon and he just said: ‘Bit too tired today, old son. But might see you later in the week. How’s the family?’

Not once had he complained. Not once had he asked, ‘Why me?’

That was our last conversation but we had said our goodbyes on those hotel steps. The statement we agreed that day quoted him as saying he had a battle to fight. That was enough to satisfy a curious world but in truth he had already fought the good fight and brave for almost two years.

Still it was hard to accept. Still I couldn’t bring myself to start putting his life into words until the call came from the woman he loved.

Obituaries are never easy. This one seemed impossible. But I wrote it and I walked away from the office and next day people were generous enough to say it told them about the Bobby Moore they knew and about the Bobby Moore they wanted to know about.

And the family were kind enough to say they would like it to be kept in these pages for anyone someday who might like to read about the footballer who changed our lives and times.

So this, also by way of introduction to the chronicle of the rich, full life which follows, is what the six million readers of the Daily Mail read on the stunned morning of 25 February 1993:

PERFECTIONIST TO THE FINAL WHISTLE

The manner of his leaving was in keeping with the man’s way of living. No commotion, no complaint, no thought for himself and, most typically of all, no loose ends.

Bobby Moore was not only the world’s most imperial defender but also the most immaculate footballer ever to grace the vast theatres of the people’s game.

The meticulous attention to detail, the scrupulous care with appearance, the exact precision of time-keeping, the constant observation of manners which maketh a gentleman out of a hero, all were with him to the premature end.

A perfectionist to the last, right down to the uncanny anticipation and instinctive sense of occasion which were the essence of his sporting genius. With only days to spare, Moore paid his farewell visits to the places where he had savoured the richest vintage of his fame.

The last public appearance was at Wembley, the nostalgic stadium he made his personal domain, and since it followed the announcement of his cancer the great man’s presence at the radio microphone stirred warmer interest than England’s World Cup fumblings against San Marino.

A lot of arms went round those still straight-back shoulders that night, a final, collective embrace from the family of football in all its generations.

No loose ends.

Our last personal reunion took place at the Royal Garden, the Kensington hotel at which England celebrated its only winning of the World Cup. We stood on the steps from which he had reached out to touch hands with the throng which stopped the mighty roar of London’s traffic and replaced it with full-throated acclaim for the captain and his boys of ’66.

Moore smiled as he remembered that heady, midsummer’s evening more than a quarter of a century ago: ‘You know, old son, we had the world at our feet that night.’

No loose ends.

Beneath his feet, as he spoke, lay a time capsule lodged in the foundation stone of the building, crammed with data on the twentieth century, waiting to be opened by some future life form.

The exact contents are a secret, but for sure the story of how a working-class boy came to take delivery from his Queen of the most prized piece of silverware on the planet, has been used to explain how the human species wove so many strands of its very existence into a round-ball game.

Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore – Chelsea after a paternal uncle, not the football club or the fashionable London borough – was born on 12 April 1941 in Barking, a rough-and-tumble border town on the cusp of Essex and east London.

From childhood he was painstakingly neat and clean, scrubbed spotless, school socks pulled up straight, a crease in his short pants, his books on their shelves, toys in their box and never a hair out of place, forget about dandruff on his lapels.

No detail was minute enough to be ignored and it was this unflagging characteristic which was the bedrock of his career. Not the most naturally gifted athlete – slow, weak left foot, less than commanding in the air – he applied remorseless practice and rare intelligence to perfecting his strengths and playing to them.

Ron Greenwood, West Ham’s believer in the beautiful game, was the making of Moore and Alf Ramsey, England’s tactical pragmatist, used him to fulfilment. Between them those two managers charted Moore’s halcyon years.

The ’60s was the decade in which English society lifted the class barriers and patronised lads with more talent than breeding. The Cockney photographer, the Gorbals actor, the Yorkshire painter and, led by Moore, the heart-throb footballer stepped over from the wrong side of the tracks into the most polite drawing rooms. No dinner party was complete without one, not once the World Cup was won.

Moore prepared for football’s ultimate moment by leading West Ham to the 1964 FA Cup and, also at Wembley, the 1965 European Cup Winners’ Cup. Add all the faultless games there for England and he knew the hallowed turf like the carpet in his house on stockbroker row, could find his way up the Royal Box staircase blindfold.

The 1966 tournament was overflowing with supreme footballers – Pelé, Eusébio, a promising young West German called Beckenbauer ranged against the host nation in the Final itself – as well as household English names like Banks and Stiles, Charlton and Ball, Hurst and Peters. But by the time Moore came to climb those steps once more, to espy Her Majesty’s white lace gloves and so wipe his muddied hands on the velvet balustrade before reaching out for the Jules Rimet Trophy, there was only one Player of the Final.

The captain’s overwhelming composure, calculated suppression of emotion and self-possessed resistance to pressure, imbued Moore with an aura of haughty, almost arrogant superiority in the estimation of most of the international media.

Nevertheless, their vote for the ice-man was as near to unanimous as made no difference.

It was sealed in the closing moments of extra time against the Germans. With England leading 3–2 by courtesy of a Russian linesman he laid claim to the ball amid the pandemonium of his own penalty area, ignored Big Jack’s bellowing entreaties to kick it over the Twin Towers, stepped calmly around two lunging opponents and floated out the inch-perfect pass which launched Geoff Hurst towards his historic hat-trick and commentator Ken Wolstenholme into his unforgettable line: ‘They think it’s all over, it is now.’

No loose ends.

Pelé and Beckenbauer, Eusébio and his own teammates are in mourning for him now. They knew the real Bobby Moore behind the chilling professional mask and the tackle like a vice, the lovable, loyal man devoid of ego who could laugh and cry with the best of them. They jousted with him through a golden age when not even the loftiest rivals ever lost respect for each other.

They recall not only Wembley ’66 but Mexico ’70, the World Cup year of Moore’s sternest trial and England’s strongest team but their mutual disappointment.

The ice-man hurried into the Finals from house arrest in Bogotá, where the Colombian authorities had held him on a preposterous charge of stealing an emerald bracelet. He played majestically, as if nothing but football had ever been on his mind. At the conclusion of an epic duel in Brazil’s group, Pelé trotted past all other supplicants among

Is Bobby Moore Academy a good school?

Bobby Moore Academy is a Good provider.

Was Bobby Moore the best defender ever?

He is widely regarded as one of the greatest defenders in the history of football, and was cited by Pelé as the greatest defender that he had ever played against. Furthermore, Moore is sometimes considered to be one of the greatest players of all time.

Is Bobby Moore SBC good?

unfortunately this card isn't gonna be too amazing. The 99 driven is a really cool touch, but the 74 pace just lets this down so much. But let's not judge it too early. Let's have a look.

What happened to Bobby Moore?

Bowel cancer is relentless. But so are we. Bobby Moore was just 51 years old when he died. Shortly after his death in 1993, Bobby's widow Stephanie Moore OBE set up the Bobby Moore Fund as a restricted fund of Cancer Research UK to raise money for pioneering bowel cancer research.