Jack had Irish charmed
SOME years after he’d helped England win the 1966 World Cup, Jack Charlton wrote a letter to the Football Association, offering them his services as the national side’s next manager. They never wrote back.
FINDING JACK CHARLTON (BBC2, 9pm) recalls the alternative national managerial role the former Leeds United defender was destined to take, spending 10 extraordinary years in charge of the Republic of Ireland national team.
It’s the story of a man who worked minor miracles, and who defied the odds – what with him being an Englishman and that – to acquire hero status. Jack took his adopted nation to Euro 1988, then to its very first World Cup, then to its very second. In 1996 he was awarded honorary Irish citizenship.
But Finding Jack Charlton is also desperately poignant. Filmed at the family’s Northumberland home during the last 18 months of Jack’s life, it finds this once ebullient, larger-than-life character living with advanced dementia, stripped of the memories in which he should have been able to bask in his twilight years, unable to recall the wonderful moments he’d enjoyed, and which he’d enabled so many others to enjoy.
“They think a lot of you, don’t they, in Ireland?” his wife Pat remarks at one point in the programme, hoping to spark at least a fleeting recollection.
There’s a pause as Jack gazes back at her. “I’ve no idea,” is all Jack can eventually offer by way of a reply.
There could easily have been different versions of Jack Charlton’s story, one perhaps focusing on his role in that 1966 World Cup win, another on his years with Leeds United, where his combative style pretty much personified the us-against-theworld mentality instilled by boss Don Revie.
Neither of those, however, gets more than a brief nod here. Instead, the documentary devotes almost its entire 90 minutes to Jack’s time with the Republic of Ireland side, mostly because his success in that job had an impact far beyond mere football.
As underlined here by many of the non-sporting contributors, including former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, writer Roddy Doyle and musician Larry Mullen, the achievements of Charlton’s team were a huge morale booster for the Irish nation at a transitionary point in its history.
And it’s clear that Jack and the Irish job were the perfect fit. He and the English job would never have been – just as he was the Charlton brother who was never going to be made a Sir.
“The reason I think he’s not been given a knighthood,” wife Pat remarks, “is because he’s never been a ‘yes’ man.
“And if he’s upset anybody, well, tough!”