EVAN MARSHALL is from Northern Ireland and has worked in television there for the last thirteen years, much of that time with Doubleband Films where he was the archivist on a number of series for BBC Northern Ireland. He worked extensively on Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive, and it was here that he first saw a Pathé news report on the 1958 Northern Ireland team. This footage inspired his acclaimed documentary film, Spirit of ’58, which he produced and directed. In 2013 he established his own production company, Clackity Films. He has written articles for many years on the subjects of music, sport and television and has contributed to Record Collector, FourFourTwo and the Belfast Telegraph. A collection of his writing can be found at evanrobertmarshall.wordpress.com. He lives in Belfast with his wife and son.
SPIRIT OF ’58
THE INCREDIBLE UNTOLD STORY OF NORTHERN IRELAND’S GREATEST FOOTBALL TEAM
EVAN MARSHALL
First published in 2016 by
Blackstaff Press
4D Weavers Court
Linfield Road
Belfast, BT12 5GH
© Evan Marshall, 2016
© Foreword, Michael O’Neill, 2016
© photographs, as indicated in photograph credit, 2016
© cover, Two Associates, 2016
All rights reserved
Evan Marshall has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Produced by Blackstaff Press
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library
Epub Isbn 978 0 85640 981 3
Kindle Isbn 978 0 85640 982 0
www.blackstaffpress.com
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Peter the Great
Building the Team
Turning the Tide
The Qualifying Rounds
Taking on England at Wembley
The Battle of Windsor
Second Time Lucky
Never on a Sunday
Onwards to Sweden
A Swedish Home from Home
The Dream Start
Mighty Argentina
Up Against the Champions
Magic in Malmö
The Last Stand
Homeward Bound
Spirit of ’58
Appendix 1: Northern Ireland Internationals under Peter Doherty
Appendix 2: Player Appearances
Photos
FOREWORD
Like most Northern Ireland fans today, I wasn’t born in time to experience the achievements of the Northern Ireland team in 1958. Football then was very different – the 1958 squad was built against the backdrop of a society coming together in the aftermath of the Second World War. Now, like all competing nations, we have highly professional facilities, structures and preparations in place to give us the best chance of success. There are still, however, similarities between then and now: the selection problems, injuries, the euphoria, success and total togetherness.
The question I probably get asked the most is ‘How have you done it?’ The answer is team spirit. The 1958 squad also had the kind of true team spirit that will ensure that names – and characters – such as Peter Doherty, Peter McParland, Wilbur Cush, Willie Cunningham and Alf McMichael, along with the likes of Billy Bingham, Danny Blanchflower, Harry Gregg and Derek Dougan, will remain an important part of our history.
Spirit of ’58 is full of terrific stories from the era that are sure to resurrect memories for those who were around at the time and will paint a picture of what it was like for those who weren’t. The downgrading of a World Cup qualifier against Italy at Windsor Park to that of a friendly because the Hungarian officials failed to show up, and it then becoming anything but friendly. The horrors of the Munich Air Disaster. Northern Ireland’s unofficial thirteen-year-old mascot, Bengt Jonasson, the boy who seemed to have taken up permanent residence outside the Halmstad training camp, as an unlikely superfan. Gerry Morgan pouring two bottles of whiskey over goalkeeper Norman Uprichard’s injured ankle, enabling him to play on and break his hand … I can hear the quotes included from Dr Malcolm Brodie MBE’s copy from the 1950s, read aloud in his voice. All of this and more makes up the story of a squad that stood just one game away from a semi-final in the World Cup against Brazil.
Countless people have congratulated our players, staff and the Irish FA for what we have achieved, and said we’ve brought the spirit of ’82 and ’86 back to life. It’s something quite remarkable to hear, as I know how those teams inspired a generation and kept people dreaming for thirty years. Billy Bingham and his back room could well have been told the same thing, that they had rekindled the spirit of ’58. These memories are precious to so many hundreds of thousands of people, and we’re aiming to create some unforgettable times in France this summer – stories to be handed down to another generation.
We want to establish a legacy, to have something for players at all levels to aspire to, and to ensure future managers of Northern Ireland have sustainable foundations to build upon. We all can see that the construction of the National Football Stadium at Windsor Park and its world-class facilities will make a marked contribution to this, and we hope that investment in coaching and player development throughout Northern Ireland will help future generations to realise their dreams.
As Euro 2016 draws closer, our focus is entirely on making these finals an occasion to remember, and to reward the fans who have travelled the length and breadth of Europe and beyond to support us.
This book, Spirit of ’58, couldn’t be coming out at a better time. It shows Northern Ireland football at its typically raw and determined best – and that’s something to inspire us all in the months ahead.
Michael O’Neill, Northern Ireland team manager
April 2016
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to the team at Blackstaff Press in Belfast for their help and encouragement on the book. In particular, I am grateful to Patsy Horton as editor and Helen Wright as proofreader – both helped to make this a better book. Thanks also go to Jim Meredith and others at Blackstaff for help along the way.
Between 2013 and 2014 I was lucky enough to interview Harry Gregg, Billy Bingham, Jimmy McIlroy, Peter McParland, Billy Simpson and Bengt Jonasson for the documentary, Spirit of ’58 (2015). I have quoted liberally from these interviews in the book and I am especially grateful to those interviewed for giving me such a great sense for what it was like to be involved with the Northern Ireland team in the 1950s. Additional thanks are due to Ben Price who was cameraman and editor on the film and who recorded the interviews for me.
Thanks also go to Dan Morgan, son of Northern Ireland’s most famous trainer, Gerry. My conversations with Dan provided yet more stories about his father and his generous gifting of photographs and memorabilia from Sweden has been of immense use in the film and the book.
After Spirit of ’58 was made, I discovered that the historian John Bew had conducted interviews with Bertie Peacock, Norman Uprichard and Malcolm Brodie in 2002 for a possible documentary. I am extremely grateful to John for permission to use the interviews, as well as to Gerry Gregg of Praxis Pictures in Dublin who located and sent the old cassette tapes to me. The Peacock interview was a particularly important source for me as I had no other extensive interview with him on the subject of 1958. The other two interviews were useful for general context.
Further quotes come from a number of media sources. Danny Blanchflower made several appearances on the Parkinson series and he was also the subject of an edition of Desert Island Discs. Although incomplete in the archives, his edition did include a segment on the England game in 1957. This fragment, along with many other editions of the series, is available online.
Malcolm Brodie is surely the most famous and most passionate sports writer in Irish journalistic history, with a career spanning over half a century. Shortly before his death he gave an interview to BBC Northern Ireland in which he talked about the Northern Ireland team. Thanks to Declan Doherty of BBC NI for arranging a viewing of the complete rushes of this interview in which Brodie spent a few minutes talking about the Doherty era and his own experiences at the World Cup.
I found a television clip on YouTube that focussed mainly on Northern Ireland’s qualification against Italy and the subsequent World Cup. It was of huge interest to me because it featured interviews with Bertie Peacock and the IFA Secretary at the time, Billy Drennan. Despite searches in the archives of BBC NI and UTV no one could find any information on when it was broadcast or by whom, the suspicion being that it had long since been wiped. Although the VHS recording that had been uploaded to YouTube was not of high enough quality to use in the documentary, the interviews proved useful for the book.
Of course the players have written about their experiences at the World Cup and of playing under Doherty. Four of the players I interviewed had written autobiographies that I was able to use to supplement what they told me in interviews – Billy Bingham, Soccer With the Stars (1962); Harry Gregg, Wild About Football (1961) and, with Roger Anderson, Harry’s Game (2002); Jimmy McIlroy, Right Inside Soccer (1960); and Peter McParland, Going for Goal (1960). Several late players had also written autobiographies or football books, and these proved extremely useful too – Danny Blanchflower, Soccer My Way (1955), Danny Blanchflower’s Soccer Book (1959) and The Double and Before (1961); Peter Doherty, Spotlight on Football (1947); and Norman Uprichard (with Chris Westcott), Norman ‘Black Jake’ Uprichard (2011). With the exception of Uprichard’s, these books are long out of print but second-hand copies are available. They make for interesting reading on a very different and bygone era of football and I recommend all of them without hesitation.
An essential piece of reading for the film Spirit of ’58 was a book on the Doherty years, The World at Their Feet (2008), by Ronnie Hanna, a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast. Ronnie became an important part of the documentary as an interviewee and I greatly enjoyed our discussions on 1950s football during production. Although Ronnie had completed interviews with the surviving players for his book, I wanted to tell my own version of the story so I haven’t referenced any of them. Nevertheless, his book is very highly recommended (my own treasured copy is signed by all five living players, Ronnie and Bengt Jonasson) and it is well worth tracking down.
Further useful reading on the 1958 World Cup or individuals connected to the Northern Ireland story can be found in: Dave Bowler, Danny Blanchflower, A Biography of a Visionary (1997); Malcolm Brodie, The History of Irish Soccer (1963); Malcolm Brodie, 100 Years of Irish Football (1980); John Camkin, World Cup 1958 (1958); Steven Gordos and David Harrison, The Doog: The Incredible Story of Derek Dougan: Football’s Most Controversial Figure (2008); David Tossell, In Sunshine or in Shadow: A Journey Through the Life of Derek Dougan (2012).
I would like to thank the always friendly and helpful staff of the Belfast Newspaper Library located at Belfast Central Library who assisted me during my many hours of research for both the film and the book over the last few years. This archive is a little-known national treasure and it has been a joy to lose myself in the newspapers of the period and become distracted by Cold War stories, reports of the Suez Crisis and other world events of the 1950s. The newspapers of the time are mostly kept in bound volumes as opposed to microfilm and it is a pleasure to thumb through them. The Belfast Telegraph, Northern Whig, Irish News, Belfast News-Letter and Ireland’s Saturday Night have provided a wealth of contemporary comment on events in this book and my account would be much poorer without them.
Some crucial information was accessed from the pages of the Daily Mirror. UKPressOnline provide an astonishing service by presenting every single page of the paper from 1903 to 1980. It’s not free to use but I’ve always found it a very useful resource and various other newspapers are also available at the same website.
A number of foreign language publications have helped me in my research: Herberger’s Tapfere Elf (West Germany, 1958); Fussball-Weltmeisterschaft 1958 (West Germany, 1958); and Fotboll-VM i Sverige (Sweden, 1964). I have also found the following Swedish magazines useful, all from 1958: All Sport (Nr 5) Fotbolls VM Special; All Sport (Nr 6/7) VM Special; and Fotbolls-VM 1958.
Derek Dougan, member of Northern Ireland’s World Cup squad, has also written a number of books. While they contain little on the Northern Ireland team in the 1950s, they are valuable for Dougan’s intelligent and often prescient thinking on football over the years and for giving such a great sense of the personalities and the period covered in this book. The following are recommended: Attack! (1969), The Sash He Never Wore (1972, updated version 1997), On the Spot – Football as a Profession (1974), Doog (1980) and How Not to Run Football! (1981).
Two online resources have often been of use to me:
Northern Ireland’s Footballing History (which incorporates Today in Our Footballing History)
https://northernirelandsfootballinghistory.wordpress.comNorthern Ireland’s Footballing Greats
http://nifootball.blogspot.co.uk
These sites are invaluable for those interested in the history of Irish football and I am indebted to the people who curate them and contribute to them.
Finally, many thanks to all those who helped with fundraising and financing the film version of Spirit of ’58. Without the generosity of so many people it would have been impossible to complete the documentary and it is likely that this book would not exist. It’s impossible to list all those people here (although we did give them their place in the end credits of the film) but it would be remiss of me not to mention the support shown by the Our Wee Country Facebook page and the heartwarming gesture made by the Amalgamation of Northern Ireland Supporters’ Clubs who do such a good job in organising local fandom. Thank you also to Colin Beattie, who shared a chance conversation with me a few years ago and who has been a great help and source of encouragement ever since. His unwavering support of football, rugby, cricket, boxing and athletics in Northern Ireland marks him out as a true sporting polymath. His assistance is always much appreciated while his unbridled passion for sport and its history is both admirable and infectious.
There’s always so much more to learn from the past and research should be ongoing. Even when I thought I had written the final sentence for this book and was in the process of signing off on the proofs, one last source of information came to light. I found a lengthy Belfast Telegraph supplement for the 1979 Home International series when Danny Blanchflower was manager. It contained a short interview with Peter Doherty in which he made some references to 1958. Gold dust! If I had found this interview even half a day later it wouldn’t have made it into the book. I had actually owned this supplement since I was eight years old and had thrown it into my bedside drawer along with other old football memorabilia of the late 1970s and early 1980s when I moved house ten years ago. This priceless interview has been just inches away from me through all my years of research and I had never realised – only finding it by a bizarre accident on the last possible night that I could make use of it. There’s always more to find and I hope that this book encourages readers to delve into our sporting history and gain as much enjoyment from it as I have done.
INTRODUCTION
In October 1958 Northern Ireland came off the pitch at Windsor Park following a 3-3 draw with England. Just ten years earlier the game would have been an easy afternoon’s work for mighty England, but such had been the transformation in the Northern Ireland team during the fifties that the men in green were now very much their equals. It had been a thrilling game and England was lucky to escape with a draw. That October day Northern Ireland were heroes, newly returned from a stellar performance in the 1958 World Cup, and they received a rapturous reception from the packed stadium. Spirit of ’58 tells the story of the transformation of the Northern Ireland team in the 1950s and their incredible success in the 1958 World Cup.
I grew up during the early 1980s, and was a football fan during that extraordinary decade when Northern Ireland qualified for two successive World Cups, won two British Championships and beat the European Champions, West Germany, home and away. For me the beginning of that great footballing era was the appointment of Billy Bingham as manager in 1980 – that was the start of everything, or so I thought.
Then, about ten years ago, while I was doing research in the Northern Ireland Digital Film Archive, I stumbled on some footage of Northern Ireland’s final qualifying game against Italy from January 1958 and it opened up a new chapter of footballing history to me. As I watched the old newsreels and the flickering black and white images of those footballers from half a century ago, a feeling of exhilaration came over me, but it was tinged with sadness. Those players, in the prime of their lives, were at the centre of everything back then and they had lived in extraordinary times. Now they appeared insubstantial, unreal almost. Many of them had already passed away and those that hadn’t were old men going about their daily business. Their stories were unknown and, for the most part, forgotten.
I felt a very strong desire to take these figures and make them live again, to bring them out of obscurity. I wanted to turn those black and white images into full colour – to restore Northern Ireland’s drab grey shirts to their glorious bright green; to replace the silent cheering of the fans in the newsreels with the roar of tens of thousands of Northern Irish voices booming out around Windsor Park; and to tell the story of those real people, families, fathers with sons tucked in protectively at their sides, all come to lend their collective passion and support to the men on the pitch. Those players weren’t ghostly, flickering and insubstantial. These were eleven men carrying the weight of expectation and hope on their young shoulders. They were full of energy and passion for the game and they were proud to be wearing the colours of their country. Agony and ecstasy would unfold on the pitch and in the stands. My aim was to capture the spirit of this time, to follow the incredible journey of a team who during seven magical years in the 1950s went from being regarded as no-hopers to becoming world-beaters.
I immediately set out to find out as much as I could about the team during that period and soon discovered that the 1958 World Cup was, in many ways, the culmination of Northern Ireland’s development in that decade from a fairly lacklustre team into one of international renown. It was also a story that took in the Munich Air Disaster and a bizarre civil war within the Irish Football Association about Sunday observance and it brought together a great cast of characters, including football legends Danny Blanchflower and Harry Gregg, as well as team trainer and all-round joker Gerry Morgan, inspirational Northern Ireland manager Peter Doherty – described by sports journalist Malcolm Brodie as ‘the father of Irish international football’ – and players such as Wilbur Cush, Tommy ‘Iron Man’ Casey and Norman ‘Black Jake’ Uprichard, players who with their team-mates helped to put Northern Ireland on the world footballing stage.
I was convinced that the story was a vital part of our sporting history, and that it would make a fascinating documentary. I wanted to capture the fire and passion of that 1950s team and to bring the stories and personalities from that period to a new generation of supporters. The result was the feature-length film Spirit of ’58 which was released in 2015. It was a labour of love for me. I spent months in archives and libraries, trawled through footage from every available source and was lucky enough to be able to interview the surviving players from the 1958 World Cup team – Harry Gregg, Billy Bingham, Jimmy McIlroy, Peter McParland, Billy Simpson. It was a huge delight to track down a film can that had been residing in the BBC archives in London and which should have either been returned to Swedish TV or destroyed back in 1958. Thank goodness it wasn’t because not only did it contain new and better footage of Northern Ireland’s 1958 World Cup game against France, it also contained the only known recording of Northern Ireland’s opening game against Czechoslovakia. This was footage that FIFA had told me did not exist and yet here it was. Being able to present it as part of the film was a great honour.
And yet I always knew that the story of that era was bigger than the documentary allowed. There, we were limited by time and to telling what we could show on screen with footage. Writing this book has allowed me to tell the full story and to give proper place to much of the detail and colour that I just wasn’t able to include in the film.
At the time of writing the Northern Ireland team have done the nation proud once more by qualifying for their first major tournament in thirty years and are deep in preparations for the 2016 European Championships in France. Interest in Northern Irish football is reaching heights unseen since I was a boy and the team are garnering many well-deserved plaudits. It therefore seems like the right moment to remind people of the footballing lineage of Northern Ireland and of that great team from the 1950s. It was built upon the pillars of skill, hard work, togetherness and a typical Irish sense of fun which, as you will see, made the team unique. This book attempts to breathe new life into the memories of those heady days and to restore these footballing heroes to their rightful place in Northern Ireland’s sporting history.
PETER THE GREAT
The footballing world of the early post-war years was vastly different from today’s, but then so too was much of Northern Ireland society. Like many other countries, Northern Ireland was recovering from the Second World War. Belfast had been particularly hard hit – its heavy industry, aircraft and shipbuilding capabilities had made it a target, and many areas of the city had been reduced to rubble by German bombs. However, the people of Belfast were indomitable and, like many other urban populaces that had been particularly affected by war, they were finding their feet again, balancing grief and loss with a new-found sense of hope in the future.
As recovery and rebuilding began, life for Belfast’s citizens started to return to normality. Events and activities which had been put on hold during the war – including competitive football, which was much loved in the city – were revived. Windsor Park in south Belfast, the home ground for the Northern Ireland team, had regularly been packed with fifty thousand supporters before war broke out and that same level of support resumed when the war ended. The fans were spurred on as much though by the prospect of seeing the superstars of the English or Scottish game as they were by any hope of Irish victory.
Back in the 1940s and ’50s, of course, there was no mass media coverage of the game, only occasional newsreel footage in the cinema, or newspaper articles on matches in Northern Ireland’s sports paper Ireland’s Saturday Night and dailies such as the Northern Whig and the Belfast Telegraph. Radio programmes often provided commentary on important games but football was all about the live experience on the terraces and it was ingrained within communities – every week, fathers and sons trooped religiously to their local ground. Clubs were more likely to be owned by local butchers or shop owners than by billionaire Russian oligarchs. Footballers, though, were regarded just as much as superstars then as they are now, perhaps even more so as entertainment options were much more limited. They were relatively well paid by the standards of the day, though they earned only a fraction of what the multi-millionaires of today’s game command. Their salaries were capped by a maximum wage rule, which many of the players found to be grossly unfair. As a result, their expectations were modest – many of them dreamt of running pubs and B&Bs as a way of earning some income after their retirement from sport.
The game too was very different – player positions such as inside left, wing half or outside right were commonly in use then; the WM formation was pretty much the only school of thought (the 4-4-2, 4-3-3 or 4-5-1 hadn’t even been thought of); and defensive tactics were much more primitive, meaning that huge scorelines were commonplace. It was difficult and expensive to travel great distances, so football tended to be a lot less international in flavour and, for a small team like Northern Ireland, it was almost exclusively confined to playing other British teams within the annual British Championship mini-league, fondly remembered as the Home Internationals series. Within the four-team group, Northern Ireland was unquestionably the poor relation – it was the smallest nation and was at a disadvantage when it came to organisation and resources – playing alongside the powerhouse that was England, a Scottish team that was often very good and a Welsh side that, although rarely trophy winners, could usually be relied upon to beat the Irish minnows. By the end of the 1940s, Northern Ireland had only won one Home Internationals series, and that was back in 1914. It was a good year to win, though – due to the hiatus caused by the war, Ireland remained champions until 1920 when the tournament next took place. But this was a high point and there followed a long and dismal run of form.
The partition of Ireland in 1921 had significant consequences for football in Northern Ireland. In rugby, an all-Ireland team continued to compete against the other three home nations under a single governing body. However, the Irish Football Association (IFA) split and it was decided that there should be two football teams, one in Northern Ireland and one in the Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland). The governing body in Northern Ireland saw themselves as a direct continuation of the IFA and continued to call themselves by this name and to call their team Ireland. They also continued to select their players on an all-island basis, a practice that continued until 1950. As far as they were concerned, the onus was on their southern counterparts to form a new governing body for their breakaway association and to come up with a new name for their team. That was not how the new Irish state saw things, so bizarrely the two teams continued competing individually but both had the same name.
And so things continued until 1954 when both teams attempted to qualify for the World Cup. Although neither of the two Irelands were serious contenders for qualification, there remained the possibility that they would be drawn together. FIFA, the world governing body, intervened and the teams were obliged to adopt the names Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, in domestic competition, Northern Ireland continued to use Ireland, a name they would only start to relinquish in the late 1960s and that would not entirely fall out of use until 1973.
Going into the 1949/50 Home Internationals season the mood was strangely upbeat in the sports sections of the local papers, with the journalist who went under the moniker of ‘Ralph the Rover’ in the Belfast Telegraph proclaiming before the first match: ‘Let me say right off that our lads can win. If they can survive that first vital fifteen minutes … they stand a good chance of pulling off a victory.’ Even after Northern Ireland’s calamitous 8-2 hammering by Scotland in the opening fixture in October 1949, made all the worse for the match having taken place at home, one local journalist, ‘Omar’ from the Northern Whig, bravely risked his reputation by suggesting that the score had not reflected the game: ‘Maybe I will be said to be suffering from an overdose of sour grapes, but nobody will convince me that Scotland were as overwhelmingly superior as the score of 8-2 in their favour seems to indicate.’ But there could be no such positive spin the following month when the team travelled to Maine Road in Manchester to play England and lost 9-2. Conceding seventeen goals in two games left the Northern Ireland team nowhere to hide. The Irish Football Association knew that something was badly wrong in the team that needed to be put right quickly.
It is now generally accepted that teams need a single figure in control who will take responsibility for team selection and tactics on the pitch. This was not, however, how things worked at international level – back in the 1950s the teams were managed by committee. Players were chosen by a board of senior officials who had risen up the ranks through their connections to the local clubs – many had never been players themselves, or if they had, they had not been particularly good. In a world before televised matches, even seeing the players in action would have been very difficult for this committee. They were able to evaluate local players easily enough but they had to rely on reports in the press or one of them would have to travel to a game to see contenders in England or Scotland.
England had experimented by appointing a manager, Walter Winterbottom, in 1946 but this was highly unusual. So it came as a surprise when the IFA decided in 1951 that the way to tackle the problems of the team was to recruit a manager. The decision would transform Northern Ireland’s fortunes.
‘They brought in someone that I respected, and I listened to every word he said. And as a player, he was outstanding. I watched him play as a young boy at Windsor Park. He was my idol – I just looked up to him.’ This is Billy Bingham on Peter Doherty, whose name has largely faded from the pages of history. Immediately before the Second World War and shortly afterwards, however, he was one of the most famous names in British football. For the great Irish sports journalist and chief sports writer at the Belfast Telegraph Malcolm Brodie, Doherty was ‘the father … of Northern Ireland international football … second only to George Best. He was magnificent … Doherty came into it and he had the players there who could back him up. He made people feel tall.’
Doherty was born in Magherafelt in 1913 and joined the ranks of junior football in the north-west coast area before being spotted by Belfast side Glentoran. An outstanding inside forward, he scored one of the goals that secured the team’s triumph over Distillery in the 1933 Irish Cup Final. Such was his progress at the east Belfast side that he was soon spotted by scouts from across the Irish Sea and transferred to Second Division Blackpool. It was there that he won the first of his international caps before moving two seasons later to a bigger club, First Division Manchester City, for what was then a large fee of £10,000. In his second year there (1936/37) he finished the season as the top scorer in England with thirty goals, and Manchester City were crowned First Division champions for the first time. Doherty’s role in securing the victory had been pivotal as he had scored an incredible eleven goals in the final seven games in the title run-in. The outbreak of the Second World War robbed Doherty of the opportunity to accumulate the medals his talent deserved. He served with the RAF during the war and also turned out for many exhibition and British forces teams, continuing an enviable scoring rate that was not counted in the official record books. Doherty moved to Derby County after the war, where he formed a partnership with another of the great players of the time, Raich Carter. Together they steered Derby to the first FA Cup Final of the post-war period, with Doherty scoring as Derby triumphed 4-1. It was a huge occasion in front of 100,000 supporters and was followed eagerly by fans across the British Isles. Doherty was at the height of his powers but at the age of thirty-three it was also something of a swan song for him. He transferred to struggling Huddersfield as player–manager, helping them to avoid relegation from the First Division, before taking on the same role at lowly Doncaster Rovers whom he helped to win promotion from the Third Division (North) in the 1949/50 season. His growing experience and success as a manager came just at the time when his national team needed him most.
Doherty’s appointment as manager of Northern Ireland in 1951 was a huge inspiration to the players. Many of them had been brought up on stories about this local hero and, like Billy Bingham, would have been among the young faces packed into Windsor Park to watch him play for the national team. Jimmy McIlroy remembers the way he and the other players looked up to Doherty. ‘When I was a boy Peter was in his prime and he was the name in the Irish side. When I made it on to the Irish team I was in awe of him. He really was a superb footballer. He had tremendous energy.’
It’s a view echoed by Peter McParland – ‘Peter Doherty was the idol of every player in the team. We revered him.’ – and by Bertie Peacock, one of the many fine players who would be handed debuts by Doherty over the coming seasons: ‘He was a brilliant man, very likeable, good personality, firm: all the attributes that made a good manager.’
For goalkeeper Harry Gregg, who went with Doherty to Doncaster Rovers when he was player-manager at the club, Doherty’s appointment as manager was a game-changer. ‘The great Bill Shankly played with him in the army teams during the war. He said that Doherty was stopping moves, starting them and scoring them. In fact he said that he never got a bloody kick against him! Now for Doherty to become manager of Northern Ireland was the greatest thing which could have happened to us. He made us. I mean he made us what we were. All he ever talked about was the will to win. The will to accomplish something. That’s what he did and I think that’s what he helped me do.’
Despite being the most famous Irish player of the time, Doherty had been largely ignored by the selectors for the Northern Irish team, a puzzle that Danny Blanchflower explained in an interview on the Parkinson show in 1977: ‘They didn’t pick him in those days for the Northern Ireland team because he was too good for the others, that’s what the selectors said.’ It seems like a flippant remark but it is borne out by the facts – Doherty played for his country only sixteen times in his fifteen-year international career.
Doherty played one final international match for Northern Ireland against Scotland in 1950 but from September 1951 he called the shots as manager. The position was only a part-time one, therefore he also continued in his full-time role as player and manager at Doncaster. The panel of selectors remained in place and had the final say on team selection but Doherty was in charge of how the team trained and prepared for games, and of devising their tactics. The IFA were looking to Doherty for some fresh thinking and hoping that he might usher in a new generation of talent.
At the beginning of the 1950s most football teams trained and prepared for matches without actually playing any football, focusing instead on light fitness work. In his autobiography, The Double and Before, Danny Blanchflower paints a memorable picture of training in this account of his conversation with the manager of Barnsley, which was the first English team he played in: ‘I said I’d like to train with the ball. He said, “No, we don’t want you to train with the ball.” So I said, “Why not?” He said, “Well, we feel if you don’t get it during the week you’ll want it all the more on Saturday.” I said, “Well, if I don’t see it during the week I might not be able to recognise it on Saturday.”’
The thinking behind the approach was that you had played with a ball since you were a boy so were unlikely to get any better with it but that your fitness was something that could be improved. This was the approach followed by most teams, including Northern Ireland and other international teams. Again Danny Blanchflower gets to the heart of it in this description of training before Doherty’s appointment: ‘The training stints were a shambles … “How about a five-a-side game?” somebody suggested. “We don’t want any injuries,” one of the two officials with the party shouted, and that knocked on the head any idea we had of a bit of action. We had not prepared much for an international match – but who cared? Nobody had done much, nobody had been hurt and nobody had been responsible.’
Fortunately for Northern Ireland, Peter Doherty believed this approach made no sense at all. And since he had played for Northern Ireland a number of times, he was well aware of the work that needed to be done to improve the team, as he explained in his book Spotlight on Football: ‘Ireland’s weaknesses became apparent to me during my first two international games. There was a complete lack of cohesion about the Irish team. It was a collection of individuals, each striving to play well, regardless of the performance of the team as a whole. Team spirit was almost non-existent. We were a collection of units, hastily summoned together, and as such we played.’
Doherty was the kind of player who really thought about the game and he began to develop his own philosophy around training: ‘It is often said that good footballers are “born, and never made”. Similarly, great singers and painters are said to merely acquire their genius at birth. Little account is taken apparently of the part played by hard work and unremitting practice. They “have it in them”. I disagree with this general principle, and in so far as football is concerned I know it to be positively untrue. Average ability, plus exceptional keenness and constant practice has pushed more men to the top than has hereditary genius. The remedy lies mostly in our own hands; footballers can be, and generally are “made”.’ He saw that while the game had evolved both on and off the pitch, attitudes to training had not kept pace: ‘Training methods are almost the same as they were twenty years ago. The old monotonous routine of lapping and sprinting … is still considered the best means of preparing players for a game.’ As to the practice of excluding football from training, he was scathing: ‘Some club managements believe that too much ball practice makes a player stale. It would be difficult to conceive a more stupid or erroneous idea. Every player, no matter how brilliant he is, has something to learn about ball control; and he can only overcome his difficulties by practising with the ball itself.’
As far as Doherty was concerned there was no reason why Northern Ireland couldn’t compete with their British rivals, given the right guidance and foundations to build on: ‘Football in Ireland has never been as highly organised as in England and Scotland … but, in my opinion, one of the chief causes of Ireland’s mediocrity in international soccer circles is lack of coaching facilities. There is a love of football in the country which equals the enthusiasm for the game shown in England, Scotland and Wales. But, by itself, it has never been enough. Guidance and instruction have always been necessary before it could ever hope to become effective.’
Even in 1947, Doherty was aware that a more structured and rigorous approach to training was the means of unlocking success for the Northern Ireland team: ‘There are thousands of boys in Ireland who are as keen on the game as I was. From amongst them, a team could eventually be built which would make Ireland a power to be reckoned within international soccer. But organised coaching is the only method by which such a desirable result could be achieved.’
Before he made the move into club management, and while he was still a player, Doherty took the highly unorthodox decision to submit a plan to the IFA for a top-to-bottom reorganisation of the local game along new coaching lines, including the setting up of soccer centres that would train boys and feed into local clubs. It was an idea that was years ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the scheme was deemed too expensive and was shelved, but it served as a marker of the type of radical thought Doherty was capable of and meant that when the IFA hierarchy realised they needed someone to take over as a manager he was an obvious candidate.
A great manager needs a great captain and Doherty found one in Danny Blanchflower, a player who went on to become as famous for his quick wit and intelligence as for his football. Raised in the terraced streets of east Belfast, Blanchflower had followed in the footsteps of his footballing idol Peter Doherty, signing for local team Glentoran. He was spotted by talent scouts of the English League and snapped up by Barnsley when he made his debut for Northern Ireland in their 8-2 demolition by Scotland in 1949. He went on to impress for both club and country in the coming seasons and his commanding performances in the centre of the field as a wing half (a modern-day midfielder) led to him being bought in 1951 by Aston Villa, one of the big clubs of the day. A further transfer to Tottenham Hotspur in 1954 made him one of the most famous and successful footballers in the English game.