Jack brought smiles to faces on both sides of Irish Sea as a player and manager
JACK Charlton will be remembered not just as a World Cup hero for two nations but also as a larger-than-life character with a treasure trove of stories, writes Stephen Jones. Here are some of the anecdotes about or told by the former defender over a successful playing and management career.
Commentator Clive Tyldesley remembered a tale told by Charlton about Bobby Moore shortly after the World Cupwinning captain’s death.
Recalling the final moments of that day at Wembley in 1966, Tyldesley said: “Jack and Bobby had just repelled another West German attack, and the ball fell to Bobby. Jack recounted he bellowed across to Bobby: ‘Row Z!’.
Instead of hoofing it out of play, Moore looked up and picked out a long, searching pass, to which Charlton shouted: “Nooo!” The pass ended up at the feet of Geoff Hurst and the rest was history. In his speech, Charlton was said to have recalled: “I still wanted to tell him ‘don’t ever do that again. But then I realised: he could do that and I couldn’t. He was different from me, I could never be as good as Bobby Moore.”
John Anderson, who played under Charlton for Newcastle and the Republic of Ireland, said he made the discovery on a visit to his manager’s home in Northumberland.
He told the PA news agency: “I remember myself and Kenny Wharton going up to see him and, remember the World Cup coins that you used to collect with the players’ faces on? He had a gold set of them and they were in a coal bucket, and beside them in the coal bucket was his World Cup winner’s medal.
Charlton was known to call players by their positions rather than their names, and a story recounted by former Ireland midfielder Liam Brady perhaps explains why. The midfielder said of his former boss: “Jack Charlton’s first words to me were, ‘You’re number eight, Ian’. I said, ‘Ian Brady was the Moors murderer, Jack’.”
There were plenty of folk tales from Charlton’s spell as Ireland manager, but one that perhaps topped them all was when he promised the team a visit to the Pope during Italia 90 – and came good on it.
The excitement of the big day was not enough to keep Charlton awake, however, as he recalled in a TV documentary how he drifted off while yards from John Paul II. Telling the story on Jack Charlton - The Irish Years, Charlton said: “We sat through this and I found it very hard to stay awake.”
After that visit, John Paul had picked out Ireland stopper Pat ‘Packie’ Bonner, telling him he would be looking out for him in the quarterfinal as he too had played as a goalkeeper in his youth. But being under the watch of the Holy See did Bonner no favours in the match against Italy. He failed to hold a shot, with the error leading to the only goal of the game and, in turn, victory for the hosts in Rome. After the crushing disappointment, Charlton comforted the keeper and sent him off to the showers, before drawing on a cigarette and remarking: “By the way, the Pope would have saved that!’