Joy and sadness in ballad of Big Jack
The old man stands in the hallway of a house, gazing at a painting of some footballers celebrating. He looks intrigued but mystified: like someone puzzling over a stone tablet inscribed in a long-dead language. The man is Jack Charlton, it is his home, he is looking at a picture of the 1966 World Cup winners captured in their moment of glory.
Gabriel Clarke’s film, Finding Jack Charlton, is on BBC tonight, having been released on digital download a few months ago. It deserves a large audience. Clarke’s gift, it seems to me, is to paint in the broad brushstrokes that best render sport’s tales of triumph and disaster, but to address his canvas from the less obvious angle.
And here he focuses not on Charlton’s immortal acts for England but on the second act of his life as the manager of the Republic of Ireland. His life’s third and final act, dementia, decline and the question of what is lost and what remains, permeates through the 97 minutes with generosity, sadness, and grace.
The film covers a lot of ground, with the sort of determined, pacy energy Charlton demanded of his teams. The roster of contributors is broad and deep: Paul Mcgrath on the mixture of kindness and firmness that Charlton showed him, David O’leary, whose underuse by Charlton was a criminal disservice to that talent, with a rather more sardonic take on the famous Charlton stubbornness and intractability that could be both a strength and a flaw.
It is argued that while his teams were not beloved by the purists, that pressing approach without the ball and the direct transitions of vertical play have actually come back into vogue at the top level.
Charlton was a prolific notemaker; his tactical jottings of a penalty area and arrows with BIG LADS are a treat. Yet with the long ball, of course, comes heading, and the link between that and dementia is touched on in the context of the brothers Charlton.
I found there to be a little too much raking over of the feud or froideur between the brothers, but that will be of interest to some viewers, although surely fresh to only a few.
Another great sporting figure who came to mind for me was Sachin Tendulkar, who was becoming the greatest batsman of his era at roughly the same time that Jack was leading Ireland to the World Cups. Some have argued that Tendulkar’s, and later Virat Kohli’s, success became a beacon, a symbol of Indian pride and self-confidence as a nation and an economy. And, like Ireland, of getting out from under a certain rainy little former colonial ruler who invented the sport in question.
Interviewees such as U2’s Larry Mullen Jnr, Roddy Doyle and Brendan O’carroll argue that Jack’s team from 1988-1994 unleashed the country from its inferiority complex. These are big claims but then, this is Big Jack.
The relationship between England and Ireland here gives this film context and heft. Clarke notes that “Union Jack” was far from an obvious, or universally popular appointment. But perhaps Charlton, a scrapper, an outdoorsman, an outsider who was never taken to the English establishment bosom like his knighted brother Bobby, was born to manage Ireland, a country with great talent and great dysfunction that needed someone to give it permission to emerge.
Given that the glory days of the Boys in Green are relived here, it is a coincidence of some piquancy, perhaps, that this film comes to our screens a couple of days after the Republic of Ireland’s defeat by Luxembourg, their worst result in… I was going to say “living memory”. But this film and its interviewees raise a more interesting question: what remains after the memories are gone.
In the film’s telling, Jack himself could not recall Ray Houghton’s header or David O’leary’s penalty or the Pope saying, “Ah, this is the boss” to Jack when they gave each other an audience at Italia 90. But perhaps those memories are held for a person by the people whom they touched, cared for, and in the case of Jack Charlton, delighted and inspired.
Some in the film argue that his team from 1988-94 unleashed Ireland from its inferiority complex
“Finding Jack Charlton”, tonight, 9pm, BBC Two