Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
R.I.P. RAY
Football mourns 1966 World Cup hero Ray Wilson
RAY WILSON was once pursued across the pitch by a black dog called Bob during a World Cup quarter-final in Chile.
It was probably the only time in his 20-year career that Wilson was given a chasing, although Brazilian legend Garrincha – who scored twice as England bowed out 3-1 in Vina del Mar that day – proved fiendishly elusive.
Four years later, Wilson was centre stage in English football’s most iconic photograph.
As Bobby Moore triumphantly raises the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966, hattrick hero Geoff
Hurst is holding the captain aloft on one side and a grimacing
Wilson is chairing him on the other.
“I’m not smiling because it’s the weight of him on my shoulders,” said by far the lowest-profile member of Sir Alf Ramsey’s untouchables years later.
Wilson, a railwayman before football turned him into a national treasure, and an undertaker for 25 years after he retreated from celebrity’s intrusive glare, has died at the age of 83 after a long and dignified battle with Alzheimer’s.
Poignantly, his passing was announced as Gareth Southgate revealed his squad for this summer’s World Cup finals in Russia as another 23 young men chase the Holy Grail that Wilson and his team-mates quarantined 52 years ago.
Southgate is the 12th permanent England manager to seek the chalice of eternal benediction since Wilson and those legends in red shirts set the bar impossibly high for those that followed in the Three Lions shirt.
Ramon Wilson – his real name, after his mother’s favourite Hollywood heart-throb Ramon Novarro – was so revered at Huddersfield Town, where he spent most of his career, that a pair of his old boots are kept on display in the boardroom.
Half a century after he chaired Moore around the dog track at Wembley, the Terriers released an away strip with their revered left-back’s signature embroidered beneath the club badge on the away kit.
Wilson was signed and converted into a
defender by then Huddersfield boss Bill Shankly and his England debut in 1960 proved to be the first of 63 caps spanning eight years.
By the time Ramsey’s Boys of ’66 had conquered the world, Wilson patrolled the left flank at Wembley as if he owned the place.
Two months earlier, he was a member of the Everton side who came back from 2-0 down against Sheffield Wednesday to win the FA Cup Final 3-2 after moving to Goodison Park in 1964. Inexcusably, Wilson and three other England team-mates from 1966 who had not been decorated with honours for their feats – Alan Ball, George Cohen and Nobby Stiles – had to wait until 2000 before they were recognised with MBES.
Although Wilson had long since retreated from public life, he remained among the 11 names in English football’s most-recited team – even if few of us knew the truth about that first name. “There I was, growing up in a Derbyshire pit village full of hairya***d miners with a name like that,” he said in a rare interview 12 years ago.
“The registrar refused to accept it, so my mother went to Mansfield instead.
“I changed very quickly to Ray, but I think calling me that name made me a bit fiercer.”
To his England team-mates, however, Wilson was a gentle soul and he only summoned aggression when rare errors, like the mistimed header which presented West Germany’s Helmut Haller with the opening goal in the 1966 World Cup final, required a fightback.
Sir Bobby Charlton led the tributes from the Boys of ’66, saying: “Ray was an excellent team-mate at international level for many years and a close friend.
“We shared some wonderful memories together throughout our careers and I had the pleasure of being his room-mate.
“Ray was a great man and he will be missed by so many people.”