The one tangible legacy of England’s football history was the World Cup in 1966. And three players at the core of that victory, Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, and Martin Peters, were boys from the West Ham academy formed by Greenwood.
“Reverend Ron” was a teacher and a preacher of something beyond the winner-takes-all ethic, and far from the belief that England could prevail through route one football. If the game was worth winning, Greenwood believed, it had to be worth enjoying and worth applying intelligence and expression to match the Continentals and even the Brazilians.
Don’t laugh at this. Don’t scoff or think back to the time when Greenwood’s West Ham would regularly succumb to the Liverpool machine of that era. It happened, right enough, that Liverpool came down to win 3-0 at Upton Park. But by the time Greenwood had dispensed his wisdom with his renowned post-match sherry to the media, many a report read that Liverpool took the points but West Ham played all the football. In that sense, Greenwood was a
forerunner of Arsène Wenger. He did not accept pragmatism without style, he strove for football that engaged the full range of senses, and if he lost to Liverpool or Manchester United the way that Wenger’s Arsenal currently lose to Chelsea’s more functional football, it would only make Ron the more determined to coach the game his way. His commitment to a more aesthetic game was particularly valuable at a time when the Football Association had a director of coaching, Charles Hughes, who espoused a doctrine of one-dimensional “direct football”.
Greenwood was a child of Burnley but a scholar in West London quite close to Wembley stadium, where, as a school-leaver at 14, he used to paint the signs on advertising boards. After a career as a forceful centre-half at Bradford Park Avenue, Chelsea, Brentford and Fulham, his vision of the game was changed by seeing the Magical Magyars of Hungary destroy England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953.
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“I knew then that football was a combination of thought and intelligence, fun and concentration, vim and vigour and everything, even art if you want to call it that,” he wrote.
The pinnacle of his influence was in persuading Hurst that his talents lay in not merely being a sturdy wing-back, but in using his athleticism to get forward and score goals. He gave Moore leadership not just at West Ham, but as an England youth player when Greenwood took charge of the team.
He attended the first FA coaching courses at Lilleshall, and before graduating to West Ham, Greenwood was assistant manager at Arsenal. His watchwords were simplicity and what he called the principles of the game. It took many of us quite a few sessions, and numerous sherries, to appreciate that far from simple and very far from the soft touch that became the northern myth about Greenwood’s West Ham, there was a deeper kind of courage laced into his preaching.
It stemmed from a centre- half’s awareness of the beauty in forwards whose touch and movement he tried to suppress. It came from looking abroad, not just in the way that Ferenc Puskas and Hungary handed England such a lesson, but in the battle of wit, muscle and character. It hurt him to see the domestic game mutilated by impatient directors, accountants with acid in their pens, frightened managers, poor coaches, dull theorists.
But it was easy for anyone to blunder into Greenwood’s strictures around West Ham before his England stint as manager between Don Revie and Bobby Robson from 1977 to 1982. By then, Greenwood was over 60, and ready to retire. He had built the West Ham training academy and inspired a dynasty of managers and coaches, among them Malcolm Allison, Dave Sexton, Noel Cantwell and his own successor at Upton Park, John Lyall. He laid the base that Trevor Brooking, now the FA director of coaching, personified in his teams — elegance of movement, depth of thought, and even as the mercenary age seeped into the game, a genuine love of playing. If that is soft — if it is a sin to care about values other than winning — then as Greenwood himself observed, “count me a sinner”.
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Now that he has gone, some of us learn things we did not know about him. Apparently the former RAF serviceman with his feet firmly on the ground experimented with a radio system to communicate with players, a contraption about half a century ahead of the ear piece that Vanderlei Luxemburgo, the former Brazil manager, was forbidden to use this season with Real Madrid.
There were other ways that Greenwood changed perceptions. He was among the first club managers to challenge the racist belief that black players were not suited to English league football. “The only colour that matters,” Greenwood said after introducing Clyde Best into the West Ham side, “should be the colour of his shirt”. He carried that philosophy into the England dressing room, where Viv Anderson,
Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis became the first three black players to represent England. How could Greenwood, a student of the world game, see what Pele had achieved for Brazil and not shake up the myopic English misconception that black players were somehow inferior, or different, to white? Greenwood’s England teams won 33 of his 55 matches in charge and lost 10. He never considered that any tour of national duty could be shrugged off as a “meaningless” friendly.
And for all that coaching has acquired a mystique of its own, Greenwood’s theory was that football is a simple game, the hard part was making it look simple.
He came through a time when other managers won more, Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, for example. His legacy was to open players’ minds and assist in the one triumph thus far for England.