On the morning of 14 November 1973, Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey. The day had been declared a bank holiday. An estimated 500 million people watched it on television, only the second time in more than two centuries that a member of the British royal family had married a commoner. That evening, at a quarter to eight, 88,000 went to Wembley for a football match that nobody in official England quite wanted to call important.
It was a friendly. England had already failed to qualify for the World Cup, held to a 1–1 draw by Poland on this same pitch four weeks earlier. Sir Alf Ramsey was still the manager. Bobby Moore was still the captain. Italy, who had beaten them in Turin in June, arrived with Dino Zoff, Giacinto Facchetti, Gianni Rivera and Luigi Riva, and with a Juventus midfielder named Fabio Capello. The English papers, Capello later recalled, had found a useful insult for the visitors. Thousands of Italians in London worked in restaurants and bars, so this was “the national team of the waiters”. They had also, he said, decided that England’s victory would make a handsome wedding gift for the princess.
Three minutes remained, and Italy had spent most of the second half defending, when the waiters scored.
Stephen Brenkley, writing in the Independent on the 25th anniversary, set the scene as well as anyone has managed since. “Italy broke rapidly. They had been confined to their own half and mostly their own area, but their catenaccio defence had been imperiously regulated. Suddenly, they surged down the pitch and swept into England’s box, where Fabio Capello applied the touch which mattered.” It was Italy’s first win in England, Moore’s 108th and last cap, and the last goal Ramsey’s England would ever concede. A month after the night that had actually ended the era, the era was given a proper ending, whether anyone on the home bench cared to admit it or not.
My captain, my right-hand man
Moore was 32, and he had been Ramsey’s captain for so long that the two jobs had come to look like one. He had won his first cap in Lima in May 1962, nine months before Ramsey took the team, and he would leave the side six months before Ramsey was dismissed. In between he played 100 of Ramsey’s 113 matches, 27 more than anybody else who served under him. “Just remember you are here to play for me, for England, and to do as I say,” Ramsey had told him at the start, as David Lacey later recorded. In practice, Lacey wrote, Moore was never a factotum. He was “more an extension of Ramsey the player”, a right-back whose mind had always been quicker than his legs.
The compliment Ramsey paid him after his death, in February 1993, still does most of the work. “My captain, my leader, my right-hand man. He was the spirit and the heartbeat of the team. A cool, calculating footballer I could trust with my life. He was the supreme professional, the best I ever worked with. Without him England would never have won the World Cup.” That last sentence is the one that gets quoted, and it is true enough, and it is also the sentence that can swallow the rest of the career. The useful way to read the tribute is the first half. Moore was not a mascot who happened to lift a trophy. He was the way Ramsey’s team thought.
People who played against him said the same thing in different registers. Jock Stein, talking to Hugh McIlvanney, put it as a complaint. “There should be a law against him. He knows what’s happening 20 minutes before anybody else.” Ron Greenwood, who had him at West Ham for sixteen years, was blunter still. “Bobby is not a bread and butter player. He is made for the biggest occasions. The more extreme the challenge, the more commanding he will be. He should play at Wembley every week.” Malcolm Allison, who had him first, offered the shortest instruction of the lot when Moore arrived at Upton Park as a 17-year-old in 1958: “Stand big.” He did, and went on standing.
He was not, in the ordinary athletic sense, a complete defender. Greenwood, again via Lacey, listed the defects without softening them: heavy-legged, not a good runner, a poor header of the ball. Moore knew it, and he had a theory that he was not particularly shy about. “OK, if speed is only a matter of taking yourself physically from A to B, then I’m not fast,” he told McIlvanney in 1975. “But isn’t it important to know earlier than the next man that it’s necessary to go from A to B? Isn’t speed of thought as vital as how fast you can move your legs?” McIlvanney called it an understatement that should have been auctioned. The point, for a last-cap piece, is simpler. By November 1973 the legs were 32 years old, the mind was still the mind, and the gap between the two had started to show.
He had first captained England in May 1963, against Czechoslovakia, at 22 years and 47 days, still the youngest man to do it. It was the only time he led the side in his first 18 appearances. From the following summer he missed the armband only once in 90 games, standing aside in April 1970 so that Bobby Charlton could captain England on his 100th appearance. By the night of the Italy match he would be level with Billy Wright on 90 captaincies, a joint record that has not been broken. He would also, on that same night, be playing at Wembley for the 43rd time for England. Only Peter Shilton and Charlton have been there more often in a white shirt.
A hundred at Hampden, and a night in Chorzów
The year of the ending had begun as a celebration. On 14 February 1973, at Hampden Park, on a pitch Norman Giller later described as “treacherous, snow-carpeted”, Moore won his 100th cap in a Scottish FA centenary match and helped wreck the party. England won 5–0. He was the third man to reach a hundred, after Wright and Charlton, and at 31 the youngest. Allan Clarke scored twice, Mick Channon and Martin Chivers once each, Peter Lorimer put through his own net, and the tabloids, Giller remembered, went with “England hit the High Cs”. Nine months later Clarke, Channon and Moore would be on the same Wembley pitch for a very different sort of night. Only the first two would still have a future in the shirt.
The trouble came in the summer, in the World Cup qualifier at the Silesian Stadium in Chorzów on 6 June. England played in yellow, a kit David Coleman, commentating, could not decide whether to call gold or lemon. They did not get a point. In the seventh minute a free-kick was driven low to the near post and the ball came off Moore, then off Peter Shilton, and in. There is still an argument about who should be credited — Robert Gadocha took the kick, Jan Banaś was arriving behind Moore — but Moore himself did not dodge his part in it. Early in the second half he tried to take the ball round Włodzimierz Lubański, was dispossessed about 30 yards from his own goal, and Lubański ran on and scored. England lost 2–0. Alan Ball was sent off late on. Ramsey used none of his substitutes.
It was, in Lacey’s phrase, a rare failure, and Ramsey’s response to it tells you most of what you need to know about the two men. “Had he wept then, we’d have all wept with him,” Alf said. Moore did not weep. Four days later, in Moscow, he won his 106th cap and equalled Charlton’s appearance record in a 2–1 win over the Soviet Union. Four days after that, in Turin, he broke the record with his 107th. Italy beat them 2–0, with goals from Pietro Anastasi and Capello, the first time the Azzurri had ever beaten England. The partnership had held. The form had not.
Left out of the match that mattered
Moore then missed the next two games: a 7–0 win over Austria at Wembley at the end of September, and, on 17 October, the return with Poland, which England had to win. Norman Hunter came in for him. Martin Peters, another of the 1966 remainder, took the armband. The decision has been argued about ever since, and the kinder reading is also the more painful one. Ramsey had stayed loyal through Chorzów. He could not, in the end, stay loyal enough to risk the qualifier on a defender whose last serious night in the shirt had gone wrong in exactly the way this one could not be allowed to go wrong.
It went wrong anyway. Hunter was robbed, Jan Domarski scored, Shilton was left with a night he would still be asked about decades later, and although Clarke equalised from the spot, Jan Tomaszewski — the goalkeeper Brian Clough had called a clown — kept the rest out. England drew 1–1 and were out. The full wreckage of that evening belongs in the Shilton piece FBH published last week. What matters here is where Moore was while it happened. He was on the bench, in the stadium where he had always been the most certain man on the pitch, watching somebody else try to do his job, and then watching the job fail in a rhyme of his own mistake in Chorzów. Qualification had gone. So, in any honest account, had the Ramsey years. The only thing left was the fixture list.
Ramsey did not resign. At the FA council meeting of 5 November, three weeks after the Poland draw, the international chairman Dick Wragg was minuted as offering Sir Alfred the “unanimous support and confidence of the senior committee”. Moore was restored for the midweek friendly with Italy. There is no public record that either man was told this would be the last time. There didn’t need to be. Everybody in the ground could do the arithmetic.
The waiters at Wembley
The team Ramsey sent out that night still looked, at a glance, like his England. Shilton in goal, Paul Madeley and Emlyn Hughes at full-back, Roy McFarland beside Moore, Colin Bell, Tony Currie and Peters in midfield, Channon, Peter Osgood and Clarke up front. It was, in the old language, a wingless 4-3-3, the system with which Ramsey had remade the side a decade earlier. Kevin Hector, the substitute who had been thrown on far too late against Poland, came on for Clarke after 73 minutes. It was Osgood’s fourth cap, and his last. It was Hector’s second, and his last. It was Peters’ 65th of 67. The past was leaving by stages, and not always in the matches that get remembered.
Italy, under Ferruccio Valcareggi, came as themselves. Zoff in goal, already embarked on one of those long spells in which nobody could score against him. Facchetti, the captain, at left-back, with Tarcisio Burgnich and Mauro Bellugi beside him and Luciano Spinosi at right-back. Romeo Benetti, Franco Causio, Capello, Rivera, Chinaglia, Riva. It was a side that had just qualified for the World Cup England would be watching on television, and it was, Capello later said, in “an excellent moment”. They had beaten Brazil as well as England that year, and he had scored against Brazil too. Friendlies, he pointed out, carried a different weight then, because there were so many fewer of them. “Playing against Germans, Brazilians, the English, especially in their own house, charged us up a great deal.”
He also knew the date. 14 November was the anniversary of the Battle of Highbury, the 1934 meeting in which Vittorio Pozzo’s world champions had lost 3–2 in London with ten men, and had left with their honour, as the Italian papers told it, intact. “Wembley intimidated us,” Capello said. “None of us had ever played there, except Rivera, who as a very young man had won the European Cup with Milan ten years before. But we were aware of our strength, and we showed it.”
What the English papers had shown, in his telling, was something else. “The papers talked of nothing else: they said that, as a wedding gift, the England national team had promised the princess victory against Italy. And then they had artfully stoked the controversy about the waiters. In London thousands of Italian emigrants worked in restaurants and bars as waiters, and so they had defined us as ‘the national team of the waiters’. They didn’t know it was the best way to prod our pride.” Whether every Fleet Street desk had in fact offered the princess a result is a matter for Capello’s memory and the cuttings. The slight, if it was a slight, was a stupid one. The men in blue were Zoff, Facchetti, Rivera and Riva. Calling them waiters was a good way of making sure they remembered the evening.
For the first hour and more, though, it looked as if the wedding gift might still be delivered. England, as Brenkley later put it, had Italy “confined to their own half and mostly their own area”, but could not find a way through a defence that had been “imperiously regulated”. Gianni Rivera, from deep, kept opening England up with the sort of passes that make a back four look a yard slower than it is. Zoff dealt with the rest. It was a very Italian way of being under siege: sit in, break cleanly, wait. Wembley has always been a difficult place to do that, which is why so few visiting sides had managed it. Italy had never managed it at all.
Three minutes
The goal, when it came, was a textbook of the method. Capello, interviewed on its 50th anniversary, walked through it as if he were still on the pitch. Italy cleared a corner. Zoff rolled the ball to Causio, who carried it a few yards up the right. Rivera dropped off, drew two white shirts, and found Spinosi, who had seen Capello moving into the space at halfway. Capello took it on and, with the outside of the foot, spread the play to Chinaglia on the right wing. Chinaglia ran at Moore, feinted the cross, went to the byline and hit a ball that was not quite a shot and not quite a centre. Shilton, in yellow, could only parry it. The loose ball dropped on the six-yard line, between Madeley and McFarland, where Capello had kept running. “To stop the ball bouncing off him,” the account runs, “with an odd twist of the body, he simply offered it the inside of his right foot.” It was enough. The ball rolled in. Shilton’s dive did not get there.
It has been called a scuffed goal, and it was, and it was also the only one of the night, and it was also, in the end, the only one that mattered. “The best moment of my career?” Capello has been quoted as saying. “Scoring against England at Wembley in 1973.” He had already scored against them in Turin in June. The Wembley one is the one he kept.
“Even today I still meet people who remind me of the happiness they felt watching that goal. Not only on television,” he told Il Foglio. “That evening in the stadium there were a great many Italians who worked in London. For me too the Wembley goal has a particular meaning, for the joy of having made many people happy in that moment. The English papers had given the match a great deal of prominence. There was more than one reason for them to consider that game much more than a friendly.”
England threw themselves forward in the last minutes and got nothing. At the end, as a Guardian gallery caption later put it, fans came onto the pitch. The picture is of Madeley, McFarland, Currie, Osgood, Moore and Channon, still in white, still there, the night already over. Moore had captained England for the 90th time. He had equalled Wright. He had set an appearance record that would last, for an outfield player, until David Beckham came on at half-time against Slovakia at the new Wembley on 28 March 2009 and won his 109th cap. Shilton, who had been behind him on this night, would eventually take the overall record to 125. None of that was knowable on a bank-holiday Wednesday. What was knowable was that the man who had wiped his hands before taking the trophy from the Queen, the calmest person in the stadium on the most important afternoon English football had ever had, had just played his last game for England, and that the official result was a 1–0 defeat in a friendly.
Brenkley was right about the tone of it. “He deserved a sweeter farewell. He had adorned the England team for more than a decade and for most of that time had never been less than magisterial. Usually, he had been a lot more besides. Perhaps the end should have come sooner. Perhaps he had travelled a few games too far. But Bobby Moore’s journey had been monumental and it was perfectly understandable that he should be allowed to continue it.” The last part is the part that still stings. Ramsey had not been ready to end it in October, and he was not ready to end it now. The game ended it for him.
The last goal, and a room at Lancaster Gate
England did not play again for five months. On 3 April 1974, in Lisbon, Ramsey took a side stripped by FA Cup ties and late withdrawals and handed first caps to Phil Parkes, Mike Pejic, Martin Dobson, Dave Watson, Stan Bowles and Trevor Brooking, Moore’s colleague at West Ham. They drew 0–0 with Portugal. Brian Glanville, in the Sunday Times, noted that the Portuguese critics “gave great credit to our players’ individual techniques. Times may indeed be changing.” They were. It was Ramsey’s 113th and last match. Because it finished goalless, the goal Capello had rolled in at Wembley in November stood as the last one England conceded on his watch: 113 games, 69 wins, 27 draws, 17 defeats, 224 scored, 98 conceded. The Italy night was also Ramsey’s final match at Wembley. His next game, and his last, would be the goalless draw in Lisbon.
He did not know he was already finished. Frank Keating, writing on the 25th anniversary of the sacking, reconstructed the sequence from Dave Bowler’s biography. On the morning the team left for Lisbon, a subcommittee chaired by Sir Harold Thompson — Ramsey’s old antagonist on the FA, a man with whom he had once rowed about a cigar at breakfast — had already agreed to terminate the contract. On 21 April, still unaware, Ramsey was called down from his poky upstairs office to the oak-panelled council chamber at Lancaster Gate. “It was the most devastating half-hour of my life,” he said. “I stood in a room almost full of staring committee men. It was just like I was on trial. I thought I was going to be hanged. Typically I was never given one reason for the sack.” They offered him what he called a “tissue” of a handshake, suggested he go on holiday after clearing his office, and that was the end of the most successful manager England have ever had. Joe Mercer took the side on as caretaker. Don Revie followed, and that is another story.
Moore went to Fulham, played in an FA Cup final against his old club, and never added to the 108. The England that played on without him spent the next 30 years, and then some, trying to recover the thing he and Ramsey had made look like a method rather than a miracle. In 2008 the FA, having tried almost every other sort of man, appointed Fabio Capello. The papers, inevitably, reached for Wembley 1973. “The final defeat of Ramsey’s reign was sealed by a scuffed goal from Capello at Wembley, the first time that Italy had won in England,” Harry Pearson wrote in the Guardian. “Such is the Machiavellian aura of Capello that you could begin to imagine that, even then, he was planning his application.” It is a good joke, and it is slightly unfair on the player, who had simply arrived in the six-yard box at the right time. It is not unfair on the pattern. The man who scored the last goal of Ramsey’s England was, eventually, given Ramsey’s job. He did not win a World Cup either.
Capello, who is not much given to sentiment, has always known what the evening was. His English friends, he said in 2023, still try to wave it away. “It was just a friendly match!” He did not sound convinced, and he did not sound as if he thought they were either. “I believe, though, that they haven’t forgotten it.”
They shouldn’t. On a bank-holiday Wednesday, after a royal wedding, in a match the home side had every institutional reason to treat as an afterthought, Bobby Moore walked out at Wembley for the 108th time, captained England for the 90th, and lost 1–0 to a goal the scorer would still be describing 50 years later, pass by pass. Ramsey was still in the dugout. The recorded attendance was 88,000. The result is in every record book as a friendly, which is accurate, and incomplete. It was the last night of a partnership that had defined English football, played in the stadium that partnership had made matter, and finished by a man in a blue shirt who was too good to be a waiter, and too late to be forgotten.
