Blub. Photo by PAUL ELLIS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Every morning during the 1966 World Cup campaign, Norbert Peter Patrick Paul “Nobby” Stiles would rise early and walk the short distance from the England team hotel in Hendon to St Edward the Confessor’s church in Golder’s Green to attend mass. It’s said that on the morning of the final itself he made his Confession and was therefore in a state of grace before locking horns with Wolfgang Overath and Franz Beckenbauer on the hallowed turf of Wembley.
Stiles was a product of the working-class Irish suburbs of Manchester, and became a fixture in the great United teams managed by Sir Matt Busby – another daily Massgoer and son of the Irish diaspora (who held a Papal Knighthood alongside the “K” he received from Queen Elizabeth). There were several more players of Irish extraction in England’s 1966 squad: Gerry Byrne, John Connelly and Ian Callaghan (not to mention Peter Bonetti, whose family were Swiss Italians) and the Irish immigrant backgrounds of many of the current England team are striking: Kalvin Phillips’ mum is Irish and Harry Kane’s dad is from Galway, Harry Maguire’s grandparents come from Northern Ireland, while Declan Rice’s come from Cork – and not only did Jack Grealish (like Rice) represent Ireland in his youth, but he was a talented childhood GAA player too.
If anything, Stiles’ religiosity was more unusual for a footballer then than it is now (although Jack Charlton seemed to offer up thanks at the final whistle, and his boss at Leeds, Don Revie, would surprise his roommates by kneeling in prayer at bedtime). For not only have football matches become increasingly liturgical – barely a week goes by without a minute’s silence, or a minute’s applause, black armbands, rainbow laces and compulsory poppies, and now the players actually genuflect before every game – but the faith of the players themselves is more obvious too.
Raheem Sterling, Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford are all practising Christians – recalling a time when muscular Christianity sprouted football teams across the country, including Everton, Southampton, Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers; and in Rashford’s case his effective campaign to provide free school meals had echoes of the Poor Children’s Dinner Table, a charity in Glasgow founded by an Irish Marist brother, which became Glasgow Celtic FC.
Both Rashford and Raheem Sterling have spoken movingly about the grinding childhood poverty that shaped them. Sterling’s experiences were almost Dickensian, for after his father was murdered in Jamaica, his mother brought the family to England to find a better life. This entailed working several jobs simultaneously to make extra money to pay for her degree, and the England midfielder has written that “I’ll never forget waking up at five in the morning before school and helping her clean the toilets at the hotel in Stonebridge. I’d be arguing with my sister, like, “No! No! You got the toilets this time. I got the bed sheets.”
But the boys of 1966 were no stranger to hardship: Martin Peters had been evacuated from the East End of London during the Blitz; Ray Wilson had “Egypt never again” tattooed on his arm after an unhappy spell in the army in the 1950s; and Gordon Banks’ brother was mugged and killed when he was a child, and Banks himself built his upper strength through the hard graft of coal-heaving and hod-carrying before he turned professional.
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