Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
JIMMYARMFIELD He’s what I like to call a gentleman and a wonderful football legend
STRICTLY ballroom dress code was the order of the day as a handful of patrons glided across the dance floor.
Yet those enjoying the dinner-dance were unaware the man playing Blackpool Tower’s famous Wurlitzer was a former England captain and proud owner of a World Cup winner’s medal.
Approaching his 80th birthday, Jimmy Armfield – the organist every Sunday at St Peter’s church on the Lytham Road – was fulfilling a lifetime ambition to provide the soundtrack in Britain’s most celebrated ballroom.
No one knew their musical maestro was a football legend.
And Armfield, who never shouted from the rooftops where humility was an option, simply put on his jacket and returned home, grateful for the chance to exercise his fingers on a venerated keyboard.
Gentleman Jim only piped up like a Wurlitzer when under-fire managers dared to hector an assembly of scribes, scowling: “What do you lot know about football, anyway?”
At least one boss was startled when a voice from the back of the room replied: “We’ve 43 England caps between us, how about you?” It was Armfield, covering the game for a Sunday newspaper.
Jimmy Armfield, who has died from cancer aged 82, was a national treasure as a fullback. He later became a voice of reason in the Press box and on the BBC Radio airwaves.
It is a scandal politicians who shaft a generation of students to grasp at power in a feckless coalition should be knighted while the likes of Armfield – who made the country proud and was royalty in Blackpool, making a clubrecord 627 appearances – never got a tap on the shoulder with a ceremonial sword.
He was the England captain before Bobby Moore, leading the Three Lions to the 1962 World Cup finals in Chile until injury, and the emergence of George Cohen, denied him a starting place four years later.
By the time FIFA agreed to award winner’s medals to nonplaying members of the squad from the Boys of ’66, Armfield had been waiting 43 years for decency to prevail and he had already fought off one pernicious strain of throat cancer.
Many of us are too young to remember seeing him play, but this correspondent has hazy recollections of his final game for Blackpool in May 1971, against Manchester United in a 1-1 draw at Bloomfield Road.
He was thrilled Sir Bobby Charlton, a lifelong friend, was playing for United that day and shared the stage with him.
Armfield was battling cancer and too ill to be at Wembley in 2007 when Blackpool began their fairytale climb towards the penthouse under Simon Grayson with a League One play-off final win against Yeovil. But he was there on the day Ian Holloway’s side beat Cardiff to reach the Premier League three years later, the fulfilment of his Tangerine dreams.
Two months earlier, when he opened the stand bearing his name at Bloomfield Road, Blackpool dining at the top table with Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal had looked as likely as the famous tower being sold for scrap.
Saddened as he was by the club’s swift return to the Football League’s backwaters, amid the shenanigans of owners alienating the fans, Gentleman Jim never stopped loving Blackpool – and the public never stopped loving him.
As a co-commentator on Five Live he never resorted to snide criticism, was never caustic, never wilfully dismantled reputations with careless affront.
Overlapping full-backs are two-a-penny today, but Armfield was arguably the first to explore inviting spaces as an auxiliary winger in his prime.
He was, quite simply, Mr Blackpool.
As a manager, he was never given enough credit for picking up the pieces of Brian Clough’s catastrophic 44-day reign at Leeds United and leading them to the European Cup final, where dark forces conspired to deny them against Bayern Munich.
Yet more than anything Armfield is remembered, without exception, by those who shared dressing rooms, column inches and airtime with him as an extremely nice man.
And amid football’s smoke and mirrors, surely that is an invincible accolade.