Four Lions: The Lives and Times of Four Captains of England

By Colin Shindler

FOUR LIONS explores the changing landscape of postwar England through the careers of four iconic England football captains: Billy Wright, Bobby Moore, Gary Lineker and David Beckham. Between Wright, who fought in World War II, and Beckham, whose battles against Germany were played out on the football field, huge shifts in English society were mirrored by seismic changes to the national game as television transformed the way in which it is financed and consumed.

In England, more than any other nation, the man with the captain's armband has symbolic significance: he embodies the nation. And these four lions embody half a century of change: Wright smoked a pipe and had a side parting; Moore, hero of '66, exuded the cool of his era but never found a role beyond football; the savvy, telegenic Lineker hung up his boots to become the face of BBC football; while in the tattooed body of Beckham can be read the impact of commercialisation, corporate sponsorship and the cult of celebrity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784082727

Colin Shindler

Colin Shindler is a social and cultural historian, lecturing at Cambridge University. Among the dozen books he has written are the bestselling memoir Manchester United Ruined My Life and National Service, a social history of conscription 1946–62.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

OF CAPTAINS AND CAPTAINCY

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Billy Wright leads out England against Hungary at Wembley, 25 November 1953 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).

At the last count there have been 109 captains of the England football team since Cuthbert Ottaway led out his men to play Scotland on 30 November 1872 in the first ever international match. Not all of them became legends of the game. Who now recalls Arthur Grimsdell? Or Basil Patchitt? Or Charles Wreford-Brown? Who even remembers that the honour once devolved to Trevor Cherry and Colin Bell apart from the players concerned and their close family? If you think about England captains, two names come instantly to mind, provided you were watching football before the start of the Premier League. Billy Wright and Bobby Moore each captained the side on ninety occasions over a ten-year period. A book about the captains of England has to start with those two. Arguably more contentious is my choice of the other two – Gary Lineker and David Beckham.Third on the list of longest-serving England captains is Bryan Robson who skippered England on sixty-five occasions, more than any other player apart from Moore and Wright. He was an inspiration to both Lineker and Beckham and would, on the face of it, be a more logical candidate for inclusion than Lineker, having captained the side in fifty more matches than his erstwhile team-mate. It isn’t just an aversion on the part of this author to spend more time than is strictly necessary in the environment of Manchester United that consigns Bryan Robson to the Outer Darkness. The criterion for selection to this Inner Conclave is based on the captains being somehow representative of their age. Robson was a fist-pumping captain of the old school and does not satisfy the strict entry requirements.

Even Kevin Keegan would appear to have a better claim for inclusion than the former Leicester City, Everton and Spurs striker. Keegan stands eighth in the list of England captains with thirty-one matches as skipper out of a total of sixty-three games played. Uniquely, he is the only captain who has also managed his country, apart from Alf Ramsey who filled in as captain for three matches during the reign of Billy Wright. It is certainly possible to argue Keegan’s cause as an innovator. In fact, it could be said that Keegan did all the things that Lineker did but he did them ten years earlier. He moved from an unfashionable club, in his case Scunthorpe United, to the heights of international football; he moved abroad to play in Germany in the late 1970s at a time when the most recent precedents who had gone in search of European glory had been Jimmy Greaves and Denis Law a decade and a half previously, both of whom had returned home as fast as they possibly could. In contrast, Keegan became European Footballer of the Year twice. Unlike George Best, he took a thoughtful stance on commercial endorsements and on the direction of his career off the pitch. However, he ended up as a manager, just as so many players had done before him. Lineker on the other hand carefully planned an entirely new career after retirement and he planned it in the media with the help of his agent, whose significant influence on the lives of footballers beyond his own client list will be fully demonstrated in subsequent pages. That’s why Lineker makes the cut and Keegan doesn’t.

David Beckham needs little justification to be asked to sit at this table. If Lineker was known nationally and in parts of Spain and Japan during his playing career, Beckham was known globally. There has never been a captain of England like David Beckham. Having survived the dark days of 1998 and the public opprobrium that followed his dismissal in the defeat by Argentina in that year’s World Cup, Beckham was made captain of England in 2000 by Peter Taylor and confirmed in office the following year by Sven-Göran Eriksson. Clever manipulation of the media and shrewd commercial moves by his management team in conjunction with his own fierce resolution combined to change his personal circumstances to an astonishing degree. Beckham’s celebrity (fame is not a strong enough word to describe his position in contemporary culture) is so powerful that it is impossible to imagine a situation occurring in which he would be targeted in the way that Bobby Moore was before the start of the World Cup finals in 1970 when he was falsely accused of stealing a bracelet from a gift shop in a Bogotá hotel.

Beckham is not English in the way that Wright, Moore and Lineker were as captains. He belongs to the world and the affection for him is as intense, possibly even more so, in those countries where he is visible only as an image on a television set, computer screen, tablet or mobile phone. Beckham does not represent the England of Churchill as Wright did, or the England of Harold Wilson as Moore arguably did. His gold leaf-covered statue has been placed at the altar of a revered Buddhist temple in Bangkok. It would be absurd to imagine Billy Wright, or indeed any other English footballer, being accorded such deification. It is hard to think of a country in the world that doesn’t know of David Beckham or of a country that wouldn’t welcome him in the extravagant way in which the world’s Roman Catholic communities greet the Pope. Research commissioned by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and major international institutions based in Britain indicates that David Beckham appears on every list of the three most recognised British names. He may not be selling too many shirts and associated tat in the so-called Islamic State but that’s about the only place on earth where he might be accused of stealing a bracelet. From the stop press of the Wolverhampton Express & Star where Billy Wright first saw his name as captain of the England football team to an altar in a Buddhist temple in Thailand is a journey only sport can provide. Through the lives of these four men we can trace the contours of the cultural landscape of their country over the past seventy years.

The four captains evoke almost instantly an image that defines them. For Billy Wright it might be the photograph of him exchanging pennants with Ferenc Puskás; for Moore it is almost certainly one of him holding the Jules Rimet trophy; Lineker is seen almost every week during the football season in the studio of Match of the Day and then of course there is Beckham whose image is ubiquitous from wearing sunglasses to the notorious photograph of him in his underpants exhibiting his tattoos. Mention of this last poster might give the impression that this book is simply the statement of a prejudiced, old-fashioned, myopic traditionalist that the world is going to hell in a handcart. That might still be the impression that is conveyed at the conclusion of this story but that is certainly not the reason the book was written, although the author’s prejudices no doubt shine through.

In his G. M. Trevelyan Lectures delivered in Cambridge in the Lent term of 1961, which later became the basis of a popular and briefly highly influential work of historiography called What is History?, the Marxist historian E. H. Carr mused on the relationship between the historian and his subject:

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar, Jones of St. Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St. Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.

In other words, by referencing different images from the ones quoted above, different captains or even different facts from the lives of the same four players, it would be possible to construct an entirely different narrative of the pattern of post-war English social history. Possible – but pointless.

I first became aware of football around the age of five or six, during the time of the Suez crisis – a not entirely coincidental collision of facts of which E. H. Carr would no doubt quickly approve. It was, as subsequent pages will detail, a time that demonstrated to the world that Britain was no longer the Great Power she had been before the outbreak of war in 1939. My generation of baby boomers was taught in primary school that national pride was extremely important and was to be found in the British triumph in the Second World War with particular reference to the dark days of 1940 when We Stood Alone. We could also point to the profusion of pink on the maps of the world which decorated our classrooms and which boasted still of the extent of the British Empire, now slowly dissolving into the more politically acceptable concept of the British Commonwealth.

We had conquered Hitler’s Germany and we had conquered the world’s tallest summit, Mount Everest. Despite the fact that the two men who reached it were a New Zealander and a Nepalese sherpa, it was, after all, Sir John Hunt’s expedition and he was a jolly fine example of British pluck, spirit and entrepreneurial organisation. Almost as importantly, we had recently conquered Lindsay Hassett’s Australians, regaining the Ashes for the first time in nineteen years. The first England football match I became dimly aware of was the 7–2 crushing of Scotland at Wembley in 1955 and the following year’s 4–2 victory over the rising stars of Brazil. At the end of that 1954–5 season, England went on tour and won 5–1 in Helsinki and 3–1 in Berlin against West Germany who were, at the time, the world champions, having won the 1954 World Cup by defeating the popular favourites, Hungary. The Germans called it ‘The Miracle of Bern’. We remembered who had won the century’s two world wars. The victory in Berlin seemed an appropriate reminder to the Germans not to get above themselves.

Those of us fortunate enough to be born in the years after 1945, who grew up after the end of rationing, who received non-repayable grants to fund our time at university, who started looking for work when full employment was not a historical or possibly mythical concept and who bought our houses before the house-price inflation of the 1980s and 1990s, have a particular view of life, history and sport shaped by exactly those experiences. For all the scepticism I now feel for the English Premier League and its soap-opera excesses, I know perfectly well that a ten-year-old boy today, who is as in love with football as my generation was in 1960 will, in forty or fifty years’ time, pine nostalgically for the days of 2016 when real footballers played for the love of the game or some such mystical nonsense. It is the consequence of history and the consequence of the natural process of ageing.

I am of the generation that lived through 1966 and 1970. I was seventeen when England won the World Cup and nineteen when Manchester City won the First Division League Championship. Both events seemed to me to be entirely logical if not predictable. I had lived through dark times and had emerged triumphant to bask in the sunshine of victory. If I had learned anything from the story of the Second World War, it was that this was how the narrative went. A similar feeling arose when I first read Herbert Butterfield’s book The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield’s general theory was that nineteenth-century historians were inclined to present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment, citing in particular the growth of constitutional government, democratic freedoms, progress in science and widespread economic prosperity. The Industrial Revolution gave the British economy a head start and the astonishing acquisition of other people’s lands and natural resources gave the country an empire that stretched around the globe, ruled by a handful of men who had been educated at English public schools.

Yes, there were problems caused, it was generally agreed, mostly by the ambitions of the Kaiser and Hitler, although some were also caused by the feckless Irish and other unreliable foreigners. Then there was the ingratitude of the working classes and of the colonial peoples who mysteriously did not seem to appreciate the manner in which Britain had so nobly shouldered the White Man’s Burden. However, that burden, like the Whig interpretation of history, always held out the promise of a Happy Ending, as in a Hollywood film. When Bobby Moore held aloft the Jules Rimet trophy and when the whistle blew at St James’s Park (as it was called then) on the last day of the 1967–8 season to proclaim Manchester City’s ascendancy it was not only a joyous experience for me but in some way it felt to me as if it had been divinely so ordered.

Of course, nothing lasts in sport and it is the change that is the real problem not the absurd belief in some kind of Golden Age, as people in the inter-war years harked back to a non-existent Elysium before the outbreak of war in 1914. The eras of Billy Wright and Bobby Moore might not have been a Golden Age, but the 1950s and 1960s were decades in which football was played in a different spirit from the relentlessly hysterical and frequently unsavoury atmosphere on the pitch and in the stands that exists today, for all the so-called ‘gentrification’ of football and the specious nonsense talked about the football ‘family’.

Football in the 1960s probably contained just as many insalubrious characters as it does today. Those who knew football men like Alan Hardaker do not recall them with any fondness. Hardaker ran the Football League as a personal fiefdom and ordered Chelsea to pull out of the new-fangled European Cup in 1955 because he believed that they shouldn’t get mixed up in some fancy foreign competition when their job was to play English football with English players for English spectators. We might wonder at the ineptitude of the current FA but nobody could seriously want to return to the days of Bert Millichip or Harold Thompson. Burnley supporters of a certain age might pine for their wonderful championship side of 1960 but would they welcome back their neighbourhood butcher and petty dictator Bob Lord, who was their chairman for twenty-five difficult years? Those of us who have little time for the over-mighty rulers of Abu Dhabi certainly have no wish to return to the days of Peter Swales, and even those Manchester United supporters who love United but hate the Glazers probably wouldn’t be that thrilled to have Louis Edwards – what is it about the meat trade? – reinstated in the Old Trafford boardroom. The choice is a stark one: the trivial ambitions of local tyrants weighed against the geopolitical and financial ambitions of multi-national corporations, Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern dictators.

In the years between 1966 and 1970 when, as indicated above, I was more in love with football than at any other time in my life, England were world champions and were developing a team to play in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico that looked as though it might be even better than the team of 1966. The era of rationing and austerity into which I had been born but of which I had little memory was long gone. Abortion and homosexuality were tolerated for the first time by parliamentary legislation. The laws on obscenity were relaxed and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office no longer acted as the censor of stage plays, thereby – as Kenneth Tynan remarked – dragging British theatre kicking and screaming into the second half of the eighteenth century. The early 1960s appears in retrospect to have been a golden time for the British theatre and British television. British films, too, were benefiting from the terminal decline of the old Hollywood studio system and for all the boom-and-bust nature of the British economy, people were far more prosperous and generally better off than they had been at any time in the 1950s. Despite the fact we all recognised we were living ‘under the shadow of the Bomb’, it seemed to my teenage self to be an era of boundless optimism. The strength of the England football team was a significant factor in that heady feeling.

It would be absurd to claim that the eras of Billy Wright and Bobby Moore were ‘better’ or more important than the era of David Beckham and Wayne Rooney. The eras were separated by decades of rapid social change so they were just different from each other. There are any number of ways in which this can be illustrated. One might be a comparison of the ‘autobiographies’ of famous sportsmen. The World’s My Football Pitch by Billy Wright, published by Stanley Paul in November 1953, is unlikely ever to join the ranks of the literary classics. Possibly November 1953 was an unfortunate month to choose to launch a book ‘written’ by the captain of the England football team, as his side were notoriously beaten at Wembley 6–3 by the superb Hungary team on the last Wednesday afternoon of the month. The defeat, England’s first by a foreign team on home soil, provoked a national trauma that was not healed until Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup in July 1966. A work of no distinguishable literary merit written at a time of sporting humiliation is perhaps best consigned to oblivion, but what makes the book so interesting more than sixty years after its publication is the manner in which it is written and in particular its genuine reverence for the hierarchy of the Football Association.

On the first page Wright tells the story of the ‘splendid banquet’ given in his honour by the FA at the end of the 1951–2 season to mark Wright’s breaking of Bob Crompton’s record of forty-one England caps which had come to an end when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo.

The banquet was conducted in that kind manner which has become their trademark… Mr Amos Brook Hirst, the FA Chairman… shook hands, congratulated me, and then revealed a grand human touch by announcing that Mr Arthur Drewry, for so long chairman of England selectors, had been invited to make the presentation…

Mr Drewry rose and handed out a pat on the back which made me blush. I looked beyond the handsome figure of Mr Drewry to the many tables packed tight with friends and acquaintances...

We should perhaps at this point withdraw into the antechamber at Lancaster Gate, where BBC radio reporters used to lurk in the days when the wooden balls were slipped into the velvet bag and given a good shake before the draw for the next round of the FA Cup. We could then leave Billy and his all-male dinner-jacketed acquaintances to their misty-eyed reminiscences of an international career which had begun in a war-weary country six years earlier.

Sporting biographies, and that pernicious innovation the sporting autobiography, which the subject has neither written nor, in some cases, even read, tend to follow slavish lines of fashion. Currently, the books that sell the best are those which reveal to a gawping public the tensions of the dressing room. It appears that cricket fans who used to flock to the ground to admire the virtuosity of Kevin Pietersen at the crease want to read about their hero’s apparent contempt for his team-mates and management staff rather than his duels with the best bowlers of his time. Similarly, fans who have admired Roy Keane as a footballer are fascinated by his loathing of the man who had been his manager during his successful years at Manchester United.

Books that contain such controversial opinions and lurid revelations are seized upon eagerly by newspapers for serialisation in an attempt to boost circulation. Editors of radio and television programmes can’t get enough of them because they are quite sure that this is what their listeners and viewers want and that their programme’s ratings will benefit accordingly. It is all a long way from Billy Wright’s reverent gratitude for the beneficence bestowed in kindly paternal benevolence by the Football Association in May 1952.

Wright discovered that he had been appointed captain of England for the match against Northern Ireland in October 1948 while sitting on the bus that took him from the Wolves training ground to his digs in Tettenhall. On the seat next to him was a large ham he was taking home for his landlady, Mrs Colley. In rationed Britain, this present from the grateful people of Denmark, against whose national side Wright had recently appeared in an international match played in Copenhagen, was of considerable value. Alan Bennett’s film A Private Function, set at the time of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip in November 1947, makes clear the lengths to which British people might go in search of a loin of pork or a shoulder of ham.

I made myself comfortable and feeling rather drowsy settled down to a smooth uneventful journey. ‘Congratulations,’ said a cheery voice from somewhere behind my left shoulder. ‘It’s a great honour to be chosen to captain England.’ I turned to see the clippie, Miss Helen Mearden, thrusting a copy of the Wolverhampton Express & Star at me. ‘Look in the Stop Press,’ she added quickly, obviously noting my look of blank disbelief. But she was right. The Stop Press informed me in an impersonal inky manner:

England team to meet Ireland in Belfast: Swift (Manchester City); Scott (Arsenal) Howe (Derby); Wright (Wolves) capt. Franklin (Stoke) Cockburn (Manchester Utd); Matthews (Blackpool) Mortensen (Blackpool) Milburn (Newcastle United) Pearson (Manchester Utd) Finney (Preston).

My hands were shaking quite literally with excitement as I re-read the paragraph time and time again. They were still shaking when we reached Tettenhall and, after a desperate scramble back into the bus to snatch up the forgotten ham, I ran every yard of the way home. ‘What’s all the excitement and hurry about?’ asked Mrs Colley. ‘Have you come into a fortune?’ ‘Better than that,’ I replied, ‘I’m captain of England.’

Allowing some licence for the somewhat breathless prose of the ghost writer, the picture painted is nevertheless that of an overgrown child almost speechless with excitement. It chimed with the readers because that childlike enthusiasm combined with a deep-seated patriotism is presumably how they too saw the captaincy of the England football team in 1948. Such emotion leaves other nations mystified.

In 2008, Fabio Capello arrived as manager of the England football team puzzling over the English obsession with their football captain and left after making a stand on retaining John Terry as his captain when his employers removed the armband from the Chelsea defender. At his first press conference, Capello was asked repeatedly which player he had in mind to lead England out at the start of his first match in charge. He dismissed the enquiry as an irrelevance to his wider task, which was to ensure that England qualified for the 2010 World Cup and then to make sure they were competitive when they got to South Africa. The assembled journalists, however, were not to be so casually dismissed. More questions on the topic followed: ‘Can you give us a hint, Fabio?’ ‘Can you tell us his initials, Fabio?’ It was partly mischievous, of course, but the mischief disguised a more profound anxiety. The journalists knew that Capello’s decision really mattered to their readers because for them the England football captain is anointed, not merely appointed.

Gary Lineker, despite having been an England captain, understood Capello’s befuddlement after his own experience of playing in Spain:

In England we probably overvalue the importance of the England football captaincy. In Barcelona, the players vote for who they want to be the captain. They vote for three or even four choices so if the captain who is the first choice is injured or dropped he remains as the squad captain but the guy the players voted as No. 2 will assume the armband and so it goes on. I’d never seen that till I went to Barcelona but when I saw that I started to think, ‘Why should the manager pick the captain anyway?’ The captain is the representative of the players and therefore should be chosen by the players. Eight times out of ten the manager would probably pick the same person. I thought that was a much better idea.

That was not dissimilar to Capello’s stated position on arrival in 2008 because the Italian understood from his own experience of captaincy that it was given to the player on the side with the most caps. It was a reward for seniority, a label only, of no real consequence. By the time he resigned in 2012, ironically over the issue of captaincy, Capello understood very well that the captaincy of the England football team was like the captaincy of no other country.

Where does this idiosyncratic feature of English sport originate? The captain of the England cricket team, whether the Test or the one-day captain, wields considerably more influence on the field of play because the game is longer and more fluid than football and the options available – and therefore the decisions that he must make – are so much more numerous. He might lead the team on to the field after discussions with the coach about who would be the best bowlers to exploit the prevailing conditions, but once the opposition’s innings has started, the pitch – which appeared to be green when he won the toss and put the other side in to bat – might have turned out to be as flat as a pancake. Even more worrying, Anderson and Broad are both pitching the ball in their own half of the pitch and are being cut and pulled at will by Warner and Finch. All the carefully conceived plans to keep the Australians under control at the start of their innings have gone out of the window by the end of the sixth over. It is entirely up to the captain how to get England out of the mess they now find themselves in.

The history of the England cricket team captains in the twentieth century is a useful comparative tool as we seek to examine the social or cultural origins of the mystique of the England football captain. Until the abolition of amateur status by MCC in November 1962 (not insignificantly, a date situated between the end of English football’s maximum wage in 1961 and the landmark decision in the George Eastham High Court case which was finally decided in July 1963) all England cricket captains (apart from the anomaly of Len Hutton) were amateurs and almost invariably they had some if only minimal contact with one of the two ancient universities. Even after the abolition, the captaincy was held by the former amateurs M. C. Cowdrey (Tonbridge and Brasenose College, Oxford), then E. R. Dexter (Radley and Jesus College, Cambridge), followed by M. J. K. Smith (Stamford School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford) before Ray Illingworth (Pudsey and Yorkshire) was reluctantly given the job and complicated matters by proving to be an outstanding captain and winning the Ashes in Australia in 1971.

It is arguable that the qualities inculcated in the public schools in the Victorian era and in the ancient universities between 1850 and 1950 are fundamental to the English conception of sporting captaincy. Academic excellence was of little importance. If you could make a stab at translating Julius Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars from Latin to English that pretty much fitted you to run some part of the British Empire or change the bowling and set a new field at Lord’s. Being ‘clubbable’ was clearly important and the ability to shout ‘follow me, lads’ was as vital at the Sydney Cricket Ground as it was in the trenches on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The slaughter of ‘the flower of a nation’ during the Great War, with death making no distinction between officers and other ranks, calls to mind some aspect of captaincy. Whether you spoke fluent Latin and Greek or you could scarcely articulate an English sentence, what was required from an officer in the heat of battle was a quality of character and integrity sufficient to inspire others in what might well be a doomed cause.

The ideals of muscular Christianity developed in the High Victorian Age rather weirdly persist in the realm of contemporary English sport and particularly sporting captaincy, as they do not appear to survive in other areas of national life. Victorians placed considerable emphasis on integrity, courage and honour because those qualities built character. Sport was encouraged precisely because the playing of football, cricket and rugby pre-eminently led directly to the display of those virtues. Of course, a gentleman like the good Dr W. G. Grace was the most blatant cheat, but the money-making activities of this ‘shamateur’ and his determination to win by any means never affected the public perception of his heroic status. Is the difference in response to Grace then and John Terry now simply one of class snobbery?

Even in the meritocratic twenty-first century it is interesting that England cricket captains such as Andrew Strauss (Radley College) and Alastair Cook (Bedford School) retain something of the social class of the old Oxbridge-dominated days. The captain of the England football team, however, requires qualities different from his cricketing counterpart. It is perhaps easier to define what an England football captain should not be than to define precisely the attributes he must possess. David Bernstein was the FA chairman when John Terry was dismissed as England’s captain and in a revealing interview he gave at the time to Matt Dickinson of The Times he made plain the qualities he thought the captain of the England football team should display.

There’s something particular about an England football captain and actually I believe rather different to the way captains are perceived on the continent. And when you look at the statue outside Wembley of Bobby Moore, you can hardly say more than that because the history of Bobby and Billy Wright and so on is the stature that one is looking for from England captains. This particular accusation [of racially abusing the Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand] – which of course is totally unproven, I must keep saying that – the FA board, 14 people who had a uniformed view on this, felt that going into a European Championship with all the connotations that are involved and a long period to go between now and the championships, that it was an overhanging issue that was not appropriate and not in the best interests of England for that to be allowed to continue.

It is not surprising that John Terry was defended by Capello as well as Chelsea supporters. He was, for a long time, the best central defender in the country, unstinting in his effort, thoughtful in his positioning and over the course of his career he won more than a dozen trophies. He was, however, a constantly controversial figure and his misbehaviour provoked widespread condemnation long before the Anton Ferdinand incident which lost him the England captaincy. Previous to that he had been one of the Chelsea players who had abused American tourists after 9/11, he had urinated on the floor of a nightclub and had to deny allegations that he had taken an undercover journalist on a tour of the Chelsea training ground in return for cash. There were also the widely reported infidelities, including an affair with the former girlfriend of his team-mate Wayne Bridge. It could be argued that it was less surprising that he lost the captaincy than that he had hung on to it for so long. As a central defender and as an inspiring captain he had many virtues. As a role model for the rest of society, especially as far as impressionable youngsters were concerned, he had none apart from those playing qualities already mentioned.

One reason why it was not appropriate for Terry to continue in the role clearly was to do with the impending court case arising from the Anton Ferdinand incident, which would not be heard until after the 2012 European Championships had concluded. A second was the seriousness of the charge, but much more interesting is Bernstein’s instinctive evoking of the image of Terry’s two main predecessors, Bobby Moore and Billy Wright, two men cursed by a fondness for more alcohol than was good for them or indeed for the image of the England football captain. Happily for his clean-cut image, Wright’s alcoholism did not take hold of him until after he had finished playing; while Moore never allowed the effects of heavy drinking to impair the majesty of his performances on the field. He was fortunate nonetheless that his alcoholic excesses did not become known to the general public during his playing career. Nowadays, players are at the mercy of anyone with a mobile phone and a thirst for malice and personal publicity.

Both Wright and Moore played in a post-war era in which the captaincy of England automatically conferred on the holder of the office the odour of instant sanctity. To an extent it still does so – just as long as the captain is not the subject of negative comment for actions committed either on or off the field of play. It is arguably only England that demands such a high price of its football captains. Matt Dickinson makes the point that

You can have a lengthy ethical debate as to whether what Ryan Giggs was alleged to have done is worse than what John Terry was alleged to have done. But when Diego Maradona is appointed the captain of Argentina nobody sits there for a second worrying about his history of drug addiction. When he deliberately punches the ball past Shilton with his fist none of the papers headline an article that criticises him for not representing the kind of Argentina we want people to see.

The two ‘untouchables’, Wright and Moore, both captained their country for ninety matches and made over 100 appearances in an England shirt, but the reason their stars shone so brightly for so long was because in the 1950s and 1960s supporters of the England football team had no appetite for the demystification of their heroes in any walk of life they admired. There were plenty of seemingly untainted heroes around in those early post-war days: Hutton and Compton, Matthews and Finney, Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Montgomery, John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing – the news of whose successful conquest of Mount Everest reached Britain on 2 June 1953, the day of the coronation of the radiant young Queen Elizabeth II. A month previously, Stanley Matthews had finally won his FA Cup winner’s medal to national rejoicing; Gordon Richards – knighted in the Queen’s Honours List – finally won his first Derby at the end of his career four days after the coronation; and at the end of August, Denis Compton swept a four down to the gas holders at The Oval to regain the Ashes for England. At the dawn of the New Elizabethan Age, Great Britain appeared to have a surfeit of heroes in many fields of sporting endeavour.

Reviews for Four Lions

[aadyer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good, really readable and quite succinct look at four captains of the England football team and how intially they were representatives of Rnglish society, and how over time, they become structured, created and shaped by English society. With some cultural and political history this does also take into accounts subjects like football funding, the various Holliday related disasters of the 1980's and how Britian has changed in this time. For the more discerning, ploictically active thinking football fan.

[atticusfinch1048 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Four Lions – Four England CaptainsNow that Euro 2016 is over and the usual dissection of how badly England did continues, it is time to forget for most England fans. Four Lions takes the lives of four former England captains, all from different times and examines the game along with giving a social and cultural history.Colin Shindler has written an excellent book that examines the world that these four former captains lived and worked in. Billy Wright, England captain after the war and one of the first players to reach 100 caps for England. How the Second World War influenced the time and the austerity around England at the time. How during his time, the people who had come through the war looked at football as the golden age, against the backdrop of make do and mend.The choice of the four captains, Billy Wright, Bobby Moore, Gary Lineker and David Beckham, and how they reflected the nation at the time of their captaincy and the hopes and fears of the country. That, even though if you were to look at the captains individually you would think they had nothing in common. What we see through this excellent book is how they reflected us the country and everything about the country.This is an absolutely fascinating book and uses a wide range of source material to illustrate this book, which is all the better for it. I think this also happens to be an excellent way to introduce social and cultural history to a wide audience through the medium of football. This is an excellent read for the general reader as well as the football fan and cannot recommend this book highly enough.

[theyodamom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My family are diehard Manchester United fans, they are the best you know. Okay now that we have got that over with you can understand how this book about 4 great English football/soccer captains would grab my attention. Who wouldn't want to understand these great icons ? As an American I have not ever read or heard of much of the stories told here, and they fascinated me. Why couldn't school history have been so interesting ?It's not all about football it's about the force of the war, the economy, the country's mood and the profits. I read each page mesmerized by the amount of thought and effort that went into recovery that centered around this sport. I was floored I had no idea, history lovers you have to read this. The choice of captain is well thought out. The captain has a huge role to play and is held to a high standard. It is a wonder that they hold up so well with all the expectations, which change with times.I really stepped out of my comfort zone by reading this book and I so glad I did. I have plans to reads more from this author. I enjoyed his style very much.Thank you NetGalley for the chance to review this.