As a young right back at Blackpool Jimmy Armfield caused outrage by daring to sprint ahead of Stanley Matthews to cross the ball instead of England’s greatest winger. Matthews was invariably marked by two players, and because of this Armfield persuaded him to pass the ball forwards to where the young right back was overlapping and could receive the ball in lots of space on the right wing.
When Armfield first suggested the ploy in the 1950s, Matthews gave him a withering look, but eventually agreed to try it. Even after it was shown to work perfectly, Armfield was scolded by Joe Smith, the Blackpool manager. “The No 7 we have got has done quite well without your help thank you very much,” said Smith.
Armfield may not have been thanked at the time, but he had invented the role of the attacking full back that would become a key part of modern football. Indeed, he was so effective in the role that the press voted him the best right back at the 1962 World Cup in Chile.
Armfield captained his country 15 times and became one of the most loved figures in the British game for embodying old-fashioned values of sportsmanship. “Gentleman Jim”, as he was known, remained loyal to Blackpool throughout a career of more than 600 appearances. Off the pitch he was a committed Christian who became a lay preacher and played the organ every Sunday morning at his local church. If his team had lost the day before, the keyboard was “good therapy”. He later became a much-loved football pundit on BBC radio, where his distinctive Lancastrian burr became an essential part of Saturday afternoons for 35 years. Such was his standing, he was appointed by the Football Association to recommended the appointments of two England managers in the 1990s: Terry Venables and Glenn Hoddle.
Brian Clough, the celebrated but controversial Nottingham Forest manager, once invited Armfield into the dressing room and told his players: “This is Jimmy Armfield. A real pro. If you ever measure up to his standards you will have really made it in football.”
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James Christopher Armfield was born in Manchester in 1935 and brought up in the suburb of Denton. His father, Christopher, was a grocer and his mother, Doris, who came from an Irish family, worked as a factory machinist into her seventies. Armfield described his parents as “workaholics”.
When he was seven, he moved to Blackpool, where his mother went on to run a boarding house, while his father stayed in Manchester, visiting at weekends. He was a determined boy, once cycling 60 miles to Denton to see his father, despite not quite knowing the way. His father joined the family after the war and opened a shop in Blackpool, while Jimmy attended the rugby-playing Arnold School, where pupils could not even speak of football. Although he was a decent wing threequarter, Armfield became obsessive about football. He built his own table-football game, and the Polish airmen lodging in his boarding house began taking him to see Blackpool FC.
“I should never have really been a footballer,” he recalled. “I passed my 11-plus, went to a rugby-playing school and was accepted to study economics at Liverpool University. But then along came Blackpool Football Club.”
His association with the club began when his PT master put his name forward for a trial. He was watched by Joe Smith and started playing for the club’s colts team before he moved up to the A team and the reserves.
He was called up for National Service and Blackpool signed him as a professional on a retainer of £1 a week. He served with the King’s Own Regiment, where he became a corporal and a PT instructor, and played alongside the future Manchester United star Duncan Edwards for the army team. He returned to Blackpool after winning a medal as best recruit in his army intake and turning down a commission in favour of a career in football.
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He made his debut at Portsmouth in 1954, while still in the army, and was soon a regular in one of the country’s top sides, playing alongside Matthews — who was 21 years his senior and acted as mentor to the young right back — Stan Mortensen and the like.
Armfield played for seven seasons behind Matthews, but such were his own composed performances and extraordinary pace that Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United tried to lure him away. Blackpool’s refusal to sell him probably saved Armfield’s life; Matt Busby went to great lengths to sign him, but was finally rejected in December 1957, three months before the Munich air disaster. As Armfield later observed, he might easily have been on the aircraft that crashed on the runway, sitting next to his old army pal Edwards.
For ten years Armfield captained a team who had finished runners-up in the league in 1956 and punched above their weight in the 1960s, when the high-financed clubs from the cities of London, Manchester and Liverpool began to dominate the game.
At the height of his career Armfield earned £40 a week, double what he was earning before the maximum wage for footballers was abolished in 1961. When he once had the temerity to ask for some complimentary tickets for his family, he was told by a director: “If they won’t pay to see you, who will?”
Armfield was a member of England’s 1966 World Cup winning squad, but was unable to play because of a broken toe suffered in a warm-up game against Finland — his last England cap. Even if fit, he was unlikely to have displaced George Cohen, who made the right-back position his own. After winning his first cap in 1959 against Brazil, Armfield made a further 42 appearances for his country.
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His final game for Blackpool was in 1971 against Manchester United. He moved into football management at Bolton Wanderers and after steering the club to the old third division title in 1973, he turned down a lucrative offer from Everton. In 1974 he was finally lured away by Leeds United to replace Clough after his disastrous 44-day reign as manager.
The pipe-smoking Armfield was seen by the Leeds board as the man to restore stability. In his first season he took them to the European Cup final, where they controversially lost to Bayern Munich; questions are still asked about some of the refereeing decisions, and in 2008 even Armfield said: “I always thought we were robbed.”
While Armfield was never a man to raise his voice, he could use his dry sense of humour to good effect to put Leeds’s often volatile players in their place. One told him: “Sometimes I think you know sweet FA about the game.” Armfield replied gently: “Every time I put up a teamsheet with your name on it, I’m inclined to think you’re right.” Ultimately, Armfield could not repeat Leeds’s past glories. He was sacked in 1978 and vowed never to return to management.
Armfield, who lived in a two- bedroom terraced house in Blackpool, wrote columns for the Daily Express and Blackpool Gazette during his playing career. He was appointed OBE in 2000 and advanced to CBE in 2010, made a deputy lieutenant of Lancashire in 2004 and served as high sheriff of Lancashire in 2005-06.
In 2007 he announced on Radio Lancashire that he was having chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He was nursed through the illness by his wife, Anne, a former sister at a Blackpool hospital. The couple had married in 1958. She survives him along with their sons: Duncan is a manager in the NHS; John was a promising goalkeeper who played for the Manchester United youth team. He became a teacher and played non-League football for Runcorn, Barrow and Workington.
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In 2016 Armfield announced that he was undergoing treatment for cancer again. A few months later his alma mater, Arnold School, was renamed the Armfield Academy. When he returned to commentating in 2008, his first match back was at Bolton, where there was a note waiting for him in reception. It was from Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Bobby Charlton, and read: “Welcome back, Jimmy. We have missed you.”
Jimmy Armfield, CBE, footballer, was born on September 21, 1935. He died of cancer on January 22, 2018, aged 82