he told his mother, ‘are the failures. Football is not as easy as some would have you think. Anyway, I’m not convinced that I am good enough to earn my living at the game.’
Alf agreed to meet Dodgin in a sandwich bar at Waterloo, just the sort of mundane venue with which he was most comfortable throughout his life. Dodgin told Ramsey that they were prepared to pay him the weekly sum of £4 in the summer, £6 in the season, and £7 if he got into the League. With his characteristic mix of self-confidence and wariness, Alf told the Southampton manager that the offer was not good enough. ‘I wanted to start a career in football – but not on £4 a week,’ he explained later. It is a measure of Alf’s importance to the club that his strategy worked. He was invited down to the Dell and offered enhanced terms: £6 in the summer, £7 in winter and £8 if he got into the League side. This time he accepted.
But immediately after he signed, his concerns about money again came to the surface. Because in the summer of 1946 he was still officially in the armed forces, awaiting demobilization, Alf did not receive the £10 signing-on fee to which professionals would normally be entitled in peacetime. In his 1952 book, Talking Football, Alf claimed, ‘That did not matter.’ The reality was very different. Alf was actually furious at missing out on his £10. Mary Bates, who had taken up her position as Southampton’s Assistant Secretary in August 1945 after working for the Labour Party in Clement Attlee’s landslide general election victory, has this recollection:
£10 was quite a lot at that time. And this day he came to sign as a professional. When he arrived in the office he was in his infantry gear.
‘What are you doing in your uniform?’
‘I haven’t quite left the army yet.’
‘Well, until you do, I can’t pay your signing on fee. You’ll have to wait until you’re demobbed before I can officially sign you on. Those are my instructions.’
He nearly went beserk at those words. He was so upset. He had obviously been expecting the money. It was very unlike Alf, who was normally so calm. He was usually very nice, gentlemanly. But he did almost lose his temper on this occasion. He was usually very pleasant, but he was not very pleasant about losing his £10.
After seven years of disruption, the Football League officially resumed in August 1946. But, after all the drawn-out negotiations over Alf’s contract, it was hardly a glorious return to professional football for him. Still unclear about his correct position, he began the season in the reserves. In the autumn, however, coach Bill Dodgin and trainer Syd Cann made a crucial move, one that was to completely change Alf’s playing career. Sensing that Alf was uncomfortable at both centre-forward and centre-half, they suggested that he moved to right-back. It was exactly the right place for Alf, one that exploited his ability to read the game, to judge the correct moment for intervention and to make the telling pass.
Though he had been a fine footballer in his youth, he had never been blessed with the sort of exceptional natural talent which defines true greatness. After all, he had never fulfilled his ambition to play for London Schoolboys; nor had any League club shown any serious interest in him before the war; and his performances with Southampton since 1943 had been inconsistent. His prowess on the field had lain more in his mental strengths: his coolness under pressure, the respect from other players and his gift of anticipation. Now, with a characteristic spirit of determination, Alf set about moulding himself for his new role at full-back. He sought to improve his technique with long hours of practice on the training ground, working particularly on the accuracy and power of his kicks. He raised his fitness levels, not just by training in the gym, but also by taking long walks through the Southampton countryside. Above all, he strove to develop a new tactical awareness. Fortunately for Alf, the trainer at Southampton, Syd Cann, had been a full-back with Torquay United, Manchester City and Charlton, and was therefore able to pass on the lessons of his experience through practice sessions and numerous talks over a replica-scale pitch – measuring one inch to the yard – in the dressing-room at the Dell. The master and pupil developed a close relationship, as Cann later recalled in a BBC interview:
My first memories of Alf were as a centre-forward. He played several times there in the reserves, not too successfully, and I felt that perhaps he had better qualities to play as a full-back. And after discussions with the manager Bill Dodgin, we decided to try him in this position. We spent a lot of time in discussions, Alf and I. He was a very keen student. He wanted to learn about the game from top to bottom. We had a football field painted on the floor of the dressing-room at Southampton and Alf came back regularly in the afternoons, spending hours discussing techniques and tactics. I have never known anyone with the same sort of application, with the same quickness of learning as Alf Ramsey. He would never accept anything on its face value. He had to argue about it and make up his own mind. And once he had made up his mind that this was right, it was put into his game immediately. I spent hours on the weaknesses and strengths of his play. He accepted, for instance, that he was inclined to be weak on the turn on and in recovery. So we worked on that so he became quicker in recovery. Very rarely was he caught out. He was the type of player who was a manager’s dream because you could talk about a decision and he would accept it and there it was, in his game.
Ramsey’s diligence soon had its reward. On 26 October 1946 Alf was selected for Southampton’s Division Two game at home to Plymouth, after the regular right-back Bill Ellerington had picked up an injury. Eight years after that fruitless approach from Portsmouth, Ramsey was finally about to play League football, and he was understandably nervous. When Saturday afternoon arrived, however, he was helped by the reassuring words of his fellow full-back and Saints captain Bill Rochford: ‘You’re not to worry out there. That’s my job. It’s another of my jobs to put you right, so always look to me for any guidance.’ That encouragement was very different to the ridicule often accorded to debutants. But then Rochford was very different to the cynical old pro more worried about his own place than the fortunes of the side. Uncompromising, passionate, selfless, he was hugely admired by his fellow Southampton players. ‘He was the Rock of Gibraltar,’ says Eric Day. Bill Ellerington, Alf’s rival for the right-back position, reflects:
Bill Rochford was my mentor. We called him Rocky. He was a good captain. It’s easy to be a good captain when you’re winning. But when the chips were down, Bill was great at keeping us going. He could tear you off a few strips. Once against Bradford we were winning 3-0 with only about ten minutes to go and I flicked the ball nonchalantly back to the keeper and it went out for a corner. 3-1. Then they had a free kick. 3-2. We managed to win with that score but afterwards Bill tore me to shreds for being casual. He was right.
Rochford’s guidance helped Alf through his first game, as Southampton won easily. ‘Steady Alf, I’m just behind you,’ the captain would shout during the game. But Alf quickly recognized how deep was the gulf between the League and the type of soccer he had previously experienced. Alf wrote in Talking Football:
It dawned on me how little about football I know. Everybody on the field moved – and above all else thought – considerably quicker than did I. Their reactions to moves were so speedy they had completed a pass, for instance, while I was still thinking things over.
After one more game in the first team, Alf was sent back to the reserves once Bill Ellerington had recovered.
It was inevitable that Alf should find it a struggle at first to cope. The only answer was yet more practice, learning to develop a new mastery of the ball and a more sophisticated approach. Again, he was indebted to the influence of his captain Bill Rochford:
Playing alongside him made me realize that there was considerably more to defending than just punting the ball clear, as had become my custom. During a match I made a mental note of how Rocky used the ball; the manner in which he tried to find a colleague with his clearances; the confidence he always displayed when kicking the ball at varied heights and angles.
The great difficulty for Alf was that, no matter how much he improved his game, his path back to the first team was blocked by Bill Ellerington, who was one of the best full-backs in the country and would, like Alf, win England honours in that position. ‘Bill was a great tackler and a terrific kicker of the ball. He could kick from one corner flag to the opposite corner, diagonally, a good