‘We had three guys with machine guns on the coach’
raising of white flags over Port Stanley, but Argentine ill will over the fate of their beloved Malvinas remained raw. The normally genial Bert Millichip, then chairman of the Football Association, warned the England team sternly against creating an “international incident”. On the coach carrying them to the stadium, security was heightened to oppressive extremes. “We had three guys with machine guns travelling on board, and a whole host of military vehicles following behind,” Fenwick says. “We had never come across the like before. It was frightening.”
Just as Argentina’s military regime had fomented nationalistic fervour throughout the 1978 tournament that it hosted – with images of even Gauchito, the child mascot, standing on the foot of a British lion – its football stars largely upheld the same defiant attitude. “All I want,” claimed one fresh-faced 21-year-old, a few months before conflict broke out in the South Atlantic, “is for my country to be the best in the world.” His name? Diego Armando Maradona.
There was a sense, though, under the aegis of Bobby Robson, that England had the collective talent and intensity to vanquish even a side with a genius such as Maradona. “Yes, we had some very gifted players, but with Bryan Robson, Terry Butcher and myself dealing with the other side of the game, we had plenty of grit, too,” Fenwick recalls.
Fenwick was a rugged defender of the old school. He carved his reputation first at Crystal Palace, where he made his debut aged just 16, against Tottenham, then at Queens Park Rangers, where in 1982 he became the first full-back to score from open play in an FA Cup final. As a proud son of the
‘I walked off the field and burst into tears – I still believe that we had the better team’
North-east, Fenwick (right) also harboured the utmost reverence for Robson.
“Somehow, Bobby absorbed all the separate elements – the left-sided centrebacks, the different midfield combinations – into the same team mechanism,” he explains. “He made the difference with his positive vibe.”
Yet when England first dropped anchor in the northeastern city of Monterrey, the great enemy was the heat. More accustomed to the knifing winds of his native Seaham, Fenwick struggled instantly in the furnace of a Latin American summer. Still shuddering at the memory of the opening group game against Portugal, he reflects: “I nearly dropped a stone through loss of fluids. We got back to the dressing room at half-time to towels that had been dipped in an ice bath. We had to wrap them around us to bring our temperatures down.” The ruse might have averted mass heatstroke, but it could not prevent a 1-0 defeat that confounded every expectation. A goalless draw with Morocco suggested pressure had turned to panic, as the mild-mannered Ray Wilkins contrived to be sent off for throwing the ball at the referee – the first red card for any Englishman at the World Cup finals.
Peter Reid, ever the bon viveur, sought to sustain spirits by arranging table-tennis matches and group viewings of Only Fools and Horses. There ensued a dramatic riposte, with a lethal Gary Lineker scoring five times in successive 3-0 wins over Poland and Paraguay to seal England’s heady confrontation with Argentina. On this occasion, Robson’s team-talk was straightforward. “He told us, ‘The rest of the world want to beat the English,’ ” Fenwick says “This was how Bobby galvanised his team.”
In the fateful 51st minute, when time and motion appeared almost to freeze in one picture of devilish treachery, the choice before Ali bin Nasser, the Tunisian referee, looked anything but marginal. There seemed only one interpretation: a brazen Maradona handball. But to mounting horror among Fenwick and his team-mates, no such signal was given.
“The linesman kept his flag down,” Fenwick recalls. “I chased the referee from our penalty box back to the centre circle, demonstrating that it was handball. Only when I worried about a red card did I very abruptly turn away.”
The card was yellow: a chastening enough punishment for Fenwick, then the only England player to be booked three times in a single World Cup, but nothing compared to the shattering effect on team composure. Four minutes later, Maradona, picking up the ball inside his own half, embarked on a bewitching weave, slaloming past Butcher, Reid and Fenwick, then finding a deliciously angled finish. “It is regarded now as the best goal ever scored, but we had lost our shape,” Fenwick explains.
“I’m the only player in the centre of the park, but I’m on a yellow and I can’t bring him down. We were a mess and that, I’m sure, was a consequence of our shock at the ‘Hand of God’.”
Argentina’s triumphalism in the wake of a 2-1 victory was deeply tinged by Falklands enmities. As Maradona put it, less than delicately: “We knew that the English had killed a lot of Argentine boys in the Malvinas, killed them like little boys.”
“I walked off the field that day in bits,” says Fenwick. “I burst into tears. I still believe we had the better team on the day, but Argentina had the world’s best player.”
It would prove to be the final salvo of his England career. But for a few minutes as a substitute against Israel in 1988, he never represented his country again. And yet his connection with the manager endured. When Robson’s Newcastle United arranged a pre-season tour of Trinidad in 2000, he was asked by locals whom he could recommend as a coach and pulled Fenwick’s name out of the hat. Eighteen years later, with a young family and a thriving football academy, Fenwick continues to call the island home.
But, at some level, 1986 remains lodged in his psyche. “It’s not an experience I would want to go over again, because of all the negatives attached,” he says. “I wanted us to go on and win the World Cup.”