‘Back then I’d have been surprised that it would take another 60 years for us to play at the World Cup’
Jamie Gardner and Ben James examine the issues that have plagued Qatar 2022...
But, while Cliff ’s boundless enthusiasm remains unblemished by his advancing years, it’s obvious the Wales team he played for was lightyears away from the class of 2022.
Back then, squad announcements were done by letter rather than on social media, with a couple of tickets often thrown in to sweeten the deal. Even training facilities were nowhere near the levels of sophistication enjoyed by Bale and co.
“When we went to the World Cup, we stopped in a hotel in London and we actually did some of our training over in Hyde Park. on one particular day we were doing a five-a-side and some ball skills and two park keepers came over and chased us off the park. You weren’t allowed to play ball games there, they pointed to the sign.
“So that was it, we were sent off and had to find somewhere else to train then! i don’t think that’s going to happen with rob Page and the team today.”
Welsh preparations, while already basic, admittedly weren’t helped by what was something of a whirlwind of a qualification process. israel had advanced through the Asian and African qualifying zone without playing a single game after Turkey, indonesia and Sudan all pulled out, so FIFA decided to pair them with a team from Europe for a place in the World Cup.
Belgium were initially chosen but, again, rejected the chance to play the israelis, with Wales the next team out the hat. on January 15, 1958, they flew out to israel’s ramat gan Stadium.
“They were very intense games,” Cliff says. “We were very fortunate to be drawn out against israel. For political reasons, teams had refused to play
Israel. So we were pulled out of the hat and we were very fortunate because we went over to Israel and we beat them 2-0.”
Cliff admits he remembers very little of that game, although he does remember that it was played in pretty sweltering conditions. In any case, what’s for definite was that Wales headed back to Cardiff with a solid advantage heading into the second leg.
It was the first time Wales had won a match outside the United Kingdom and, with the prospect of a World Cup drawing ever closer, they pinned their hopes on one man in particular.
“John Charles was one of the greatest players ever,” Cliff says, clearly still in some level of awe at the forward’s ability. “He took Italy by storm with Juventus.
“They called him the Gentle Giant, but you wouldn’t mess with John Charles. At 6ft 3, he weighed something like 14 and a half stone, but he played like a featherweight. Just so skilful. But if he was ever upset, he could easily become quite an aggressive character. There were one or two players who lived to tell the tale about that!
“I think there was some sort of doubt over whether Juventus would let him come to the World Cup. There was some negotiating behind the scenes between the Welsh FA and Juventus. John did arrive at the hotel the Hyde Park and the Welsh selectors, all lovely people, most of them from north Wales, they all stood up and sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’.
“John was here. That’s something that would never happen now. He was, for me, the best Welsh player of all time. I remember he took a team of players over to play charity games in Italy. One of them, there were 50,000 people there.
“When John came out, they all stood up and started chanting his name. ‘CHAR-LES, CHARLES’. 50,000 people all singing it.
“That was just a charity game, but that’s the effect he had on people and the supporters of Juventus. They just loved him and he was a special player.
“People always used to ask what his best position was. Centre-forward or centre-half. I’ve always said I don’t know what his best position was, but he’s the best centre-forward I’ve ever seen. He’s the best centre-half I’ve ever seen. He was just pure class... but you daren’t upset him.”
Charles might have been the headline act, but boss Jimmy Murphy was also a vital influence inside the dressing room, providing a steady presence throughout the twists and turns that
But, while Murphy’s attention was divided, he clearly had a great knack for motivating a Wales side keen to impress on the world’s biggest stage: “He had his ways of managing teams and believed in a very physical way of doing things,” Cliff explains.
“That’s what he liked to see from the teams he coached. For him, he’d say representing your country is the biggest honour that any player can get. You’ve got it, so you’ve got to go out and prove yourself now. His team talks were very rousing, although some were a bit provocative, but it worked for us.”
When pressed on why exactly they were provocative, Cliff hesitates a little, seemingly glancing over to his wife Joan for approval.
“Well... he would basically tells us to kick the s*** out of them.”
Murphy’s powers of motivation helped guide Wales through the group stages and perhaps helped keep some colourful characters in check. Well, almost.
Colin Webster, who himself would have been on that fateful flight from Munich were he not suffering from flu, was one of the more largerthan-life characters in that dressing room. During their time in Sweden, Webster, along with Cardiff City goalkeeper Jack Kelsey and John Charles, decided to take a stroll down the quayside in Saltsjobaden, where they were based. On a whim, they hired a boat for around 10 kroner an hour.
Long story short, the pair went full throttle out to sea and narrowly missed a yacht by a matter of inches, before the engine cut out. Kelsey was then forced to row the presumably despondent crew ashore.
“Colin Webster was a smashing lad,” Cliff remembers. “I don’t want to say too much about Colin because it doesn’t really show him as the person he was. He did have a very vicious temper. Sometimes that got the better of him.”
Case in point – a fiery group game against Mexico. Webster lunged into an early tackle on Miguel Gutierrez right in front of the Mexican fans, who were reportedly so incensed they tried to invade the field and chase Webster down the touchline.
When order was restored, the story goes that Webster was moved into a more central position in an apparent attempt to minimise any further altercations between him and the opposition crowd.
“He upset all the fans,” Cliff jokes. “He upset the opposition. But off the pitch he was a totally different character. A really nice lad.”
I soon realise that Cliff isn’t going to dish out any juicy gossip on his team-mates. Perhaps it’s out of respect. He mentions the level of togetherness in the dressing room on three separate occasions and I wonder if that bond is still there.
There’s one man Cliff has no trouble talking about, however.
“The game I remember most was against Brazil in the quarter-finals, perhaps just for one reason. Pele. Nobody had heard of him before that. Garrincha, Didi, Vava, we’d heard of those players, but not Pele.
“I can remember him picking the ball up in his own half and he’s gone past three Welsh defenders, smashed the ball towards goal, Jack Kelsey’s had to tip it over the bar and we’re all looking around at each other like, ‘Who is this kid? Who is he?’
“Nobody had heard of him, but my word they were going to. In that World Cup he showed everybody what a great player he was.
“I always say he’s the greatest player the game has ever seen. In many ways it was a privilege to see the emergence of such a player.”
A star was born, as the 17-year-old stepped over Wales and into the limelight, netting the only goal of a game that, for him, would become a mere footnote in an illustrious career.
Wales, in contrast, were cast out into the wilderness and Cliff admits he can’t quite believe it’s taken this long for his country return to world football’s top table.
John Charles was one of the greatest players ever. They called him the Gentle Giant, but you wouldn’t mess with John Charles
IT IS safe to say no World Cup has generated as much debate and controversy before a ball is kicked as the finals in Qatar, which will at last get under way this month after a build-up of almost 12 years. This was a tournament “awarded in an unacceptable way, with unacceptable consequences”, Norway’s Football Association president Lise Klaveness told FIFA Congress in Doha earlier this year. “Human rights, equality, democracy, the core interests of football, were not in the starting XI,” she added.
There were immediate calls for a rerun of the vote and even talk of boycotts, when FIFA’S executive committee of 22 members awarded the tournament to Qatar in December 2010, ignoring warnings even from FIFA’S own bid evaluation report of the “potential health risk” of playing the tournament in searing desert heat in June and July.
Beating bids from the US, South Korea, Japan and Australia, it is the first Arab nation to host the tournament, with the Qatari football team having never previously qualified. In fact, Qatar’s football heritage is minimal at best.
Qatar was accused of paying FIFA officials £3m ($3.7m) in bribes to secure their backing, but was cleared after a two-year FIFA investigation.
An independent ethics investigation into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process by Michael Garcia, a former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was released in 2017 and identified no ‘smoking gun’ of corruption to warrant the withdrawal of Qatar’s hosting rights.
The old FIFA regime that made the award has been widely discredited in the years since 2010, though, even by the current president Gianni Infantino, who has talked about “money disappearing” from the organisation under his predecessor Sepp Blatter.
Infantino has also overseen reforms to the World Cup bidding process, which he now says is “bullet-proof”. Infantino is nevertheless an enthusiastic supporter of Qatar’s hosting and has spent a good proportion of his time based in Doha this year in the run-up to the finals.
Which brings us to what Klaveness described as the “unacceptable consequences” of giving the World Cup to Qatar. The most obvious sporting consequence was the calendar disruption the finals caused. The tournament was officially moved to the European wintertime back in 2015 and will force leagues on this continent and elsewhere to halt mid-season.
But the human consequences have been far graver. Qatar has spent more than Us$200bn (£177.7bn) on infrastructure since 2010, according to the Supreme Committee responsible for organising the finals. That infrastructure has largely been built by migrant labourers, whose working conditions have been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny since the World Cup was awarded.
The Guardian reported last year there had been 6,750 deaths of south Asian migrants in Qatar since 2010, with labour rights advocacy group Fairsquare Projects saying a “significant proportion” of those migrant workers were only in the country because of the World Cup award.
Critics of Qatar, including human rights group Amnesty International and Klaveness, accept there have been improvements and that labour reforms passed by the government to end the ‘kafala’ system, which effectively tied workers to an employer, are a welcome step.
However, Amnesty is less impressed with how those reforms have been implemented on the ground and has said it is “business as usual” in many ways. Mahmoud Qutub, a senior advisor to the Supreme Committee, told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in October: “Challenges remain – but there is no finish line to this work.”
Members of a UEFA working group on Qatar have also called on FIFA to follow through on promises to support the creation of a migrant workers’ centre and a compensation scheme.
Amnesty wants the global governing body to put up US$440M (£381m) towards those projects – equivalent to the World Cup prize money pot as part of its #PAYUPFIFA campaign.
FIFA has also been criticised for staging a World Cup in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalised. Tony Burnett, the chief executive of anti-discrimination group Kick It Out, said it was akin to awarding a World Cup to apartheid-era South Africa.
Organisers are at pains to stress everyone is welcome, but ask that visitors to Qatar are good guests and respect local culture.
Enabling law introduced for the duration of the tournament is expected to mean a degree of latitude is applied by security forces, but the fact remains that this is a country where public displays of affection – even between heterosexual couples – are not part of the local culture.
LGBTQ+ rights campaigner Dr Nasser Mohamed insists players have an “absolute responsibility” to raise awareness of these issues during the finals, even if they had no choice in the decision to award Qatar the World Cup, as the secretary general of the FIFPRO world players’ union Jonas Baer-hoffmann has pointed out.
“It was an awful deal [to award Qatar the World Cup], with a lot of people not consenting to it,” Dr Mohamed said. “[Qatar’s LGBTQ+ community] didn’t consent to it either, but we’re here. And right now we have to deal with all the awfulness that it’s caused, causing and may continue to cause post the World Cup.”
Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup has been criticised by human rights organisations as an attempt by the Gulf state’s government to ‘sportswash’ its international reputation.
But the counter to that is, had Qatar not succeeded with a World Cup bid, would there be so much attention on its migrant worker record and its attitudes towards LGBTQ+ lifestyles?
For those who will remain in Qatar after the final ball is kicked on December 18, the desperate hope is that the scrutiny continues.