Story of Nobby Stiles embodied a special era of footballers

There is no such thing as a bad football book. Obviously, this is a personal opinion.

Given the genre’s low reputation in places, it will be called a wayward one by some, who are likely to cite lists detailing the very worst of these books.

Wayne Rooney’s 2006 offering My Story So Far is often near the top and yet some of us found it enlightening. Even the five-word opening line – “I was nearly called Adrian” – is interesting, is it not? As Rooney explains, his father Wayne was such an Everton obsessive, he wanted to name his son after Adrian Heath.

Rooney was 20 when the book came out. Roy Keane was 30 when his first autobiography appeared, 34 when a second half emerged. Considering the acres devoted to Keane many would have thought it has all been said but a couple of months ago Eoin O’Callaghan delivered Keane: Origins to prove otherwise.

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Did all of us know, for example, that Keane’s older brother Denis was considered the better player at Cobh? Had we heard the story of Keane telling Packie Bonner he was “shit” in Malta in 1989, 13 years before Saipan?

Last week Extra Time landed, Daniel Gray’s latest set of pithy chapters on the miscellaneous: ‘Holding a football’; ‘Hearing the players’; ‘The roar after a minute’s silence.’ Books keep coming and there is always – always – something in them you did not know.

‘Older brothers’ sounds like a Gray chapter, one that could include Denis Keane, and it has been poignant this week to revisit Nobby Stiles’s autobiography, After The Ball, to read of his love for his brother Charlie.

Anyone interested in the history of 20th century working class England, particularly Manchester, needs to read the opening sections of Stiles’s book. That Stiles’s thoughts were put together by a masterful writer, James Lawton, helps of course, and they produced a gripping evocation of 1950s Mancunian life, a song to the dying days of Cottonopolis. You can practically hear Hilda Ogden.

Collyhurst cavalcade

Steven Patrick Morrissey is one who would appreciate the early days of Norbert Peter Patrick Paul Stiles. Morrissey began his autobiography with the sentence: “My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets.” And Stiles takes us from his birth in the basement of 263 Rochdale Road during a 1942 German blitz, through Livesey Street, Abbott Street, Oldham Road and so on. It’s a Collyhurst cavalcade full of priests, pubs, families and football.

There is a cinematic quality to Stiles’s memories and Lawton’s prose, and there is an early cinema reference by young Nobby to his brother Charlie. It’s the ‘I could ‘a been a contender,’ scene from On The Waterfront: “You should have looked after me, Charlie . . . You’re my brother, Charlie.”

In real life, Charlie Stiles did look after his brother. Nobby’s talent had taken him onto Manchester United’s groundstaff at 15 and brought Nobby a certain local celebrity. He was invited to be one of the lads, having a pint on Oldham Road with a character called ‘Sugar’ Poole.

Charlie, Nobby tells us, was an excellent player, good enough to go professional. But his moment had passed. When he saw Nobby that night in the pub: “Charlie looked at Sugar quite coldly and said: ‘No, he isn’t one of the lads, Sugar - he’s different from you and me and the rest of the lads here. We’ve all had our chances and I think we know we’re not going to make it. The kid’s got a chance and I’m not going to stand here and see him pissing it away like the rest of us.’”

It’s best read a la Marlon Brando.

Nobby Stiles felt it was a key day in his life. He had been looked after. Half a century later he was still reflecting on it. Stiles remembered, too, his one and only holiday – to Bray – after his father, an undertaker, had won a lump on the horses. “We were seven hours on the boat from Holyhead and it was absolutely brilliant . . . After Collyhurst, the air was so fresh it made you feel giddy.”

It would not be Stiles’s last Dublin connection. At Old Trafford he met John Giles and from there Giles’s sister Kay. Nobby and Kay were married nearly 60 years.

Stiles had many Irish connections. A passage late in the book about George Best’s goal for Northern Ireland against England at Wembley in 1970 includes this: “There was someone who as a kid had something people in the game call the bounce, something mysterious, but real in its effect. It’s as though the ball knows something the rest of us don’t and it bounces kindly for the greatest players.”

That in turn takes you back to the first sentence of Giles’s autobiography: “Right from the start, I could kick a ball correctly.” What a line.

It is not a boast, more a statement of fact. Right from the start, Giles understood the power of his talent.

Like Stiles with Manchester, Giles describes his upbringing in Dublin’s Ormond Square with affection and gratitude. The men may have become famous for later deeds elsewhere, but an essence of Stiles and Giles lies somewhere in these origins.

Giles was 80 yesterday, his birthday happiness laced with sadness. Stiles’s passing was followed by news of Bobby Charlton’s dementia. Giles knows both inside out.

‘The greatest’

In another Giles book, The Great and the Good, he reserves a chapter for Charlton, which ends: “Bobby Charlton was not just great, he was the greatest.”

Giles was 14 when he first saw Charlton, who was 17. He says Charlton was “a player of the most abnormal ability”, and argues the normality of Charlton’s personality led to an under-appreciation of his gift. Giles says that after the Munich air crash “Bobby was more than brilliant . . . he probably did more than any other individual to keep the spirit of Manchester United alive.”

Charlton is not the type to talk of himself this way. There is a rare publication dating from 1960, Bobby Charlton’s Book of Soccer, in which the first six words are: “There is nothing special about me”.

He does go on to detail his extraordinary Northumberland football family, the Milburns, with nicknames like ‘Iron Horse’; how he and older brother Jackie would collect potato peelings for their father’s pigs and scour local beaches for washed-up sea coal; how a teacher wrote to the paper in Ashington when Bobby was eight to say “I would play for England one day”; and then the modesty Giles refers to – Charlton is thrilled to see Stanley Matthews before a match “in his everyday clothes, no different from anyone else!”

Charlton was different. All these players were. They made it. Their backgrounds helped see them through and that’s worth reading, and re-reading, long after the ball.