[Deathwatch] Sir Bobby Robson, athlete / manager, 76

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Sir Bobby Robson dies of cancer

By Simon Kuper

July 31 2009 

Few in British football have received more abuse than Bobby Robson did
as England manager, and nobody took it with more dignity. Even his
worst critics came to like him. The miner?s son from County Durham died
on Friday aged 76 after his fifth bout of cancer and a peculiarly
British journey: from public enemy in his prime to national institution
in old age.

Robson grew up in Langley Park, a mining village hit so badly by the
Depression that the local football club folded because it could not
afford a match ball. Like many future football managers, he learned to
deal with men by growing up among brothers: he had four. He kicked
around lumps of coal on the street, and watched his beloved Newcastle
United play at nearby St James? Park.

The second world war turned him into a fervent patriot, who revered
soldiers. As England manager, he described his captain Bryan Robson to
the author Pete Davies thus: ?You could put him in any trench and know
he?d be first over the top. He wouldn?t think, well, Christ, if I put
my head up there it might get shot off.? It was a fine example of
Robson?s baroque rhetoric.

As a shy seventeen-year-old he moved to London to play in midfield for
Fulham. He divided his career between the west Londoners, West Bromwich
Albion and the Vancouver Royals, and played 20 times for England. He
then managed Ipswich from 1969 to 1982, winning the FA Cup and Uefa
Cup. ?I had 14 years of tranquillity and happiness working with lovely
people and then ? well, then the England job,? he said in Niall
Edworthy?s The Second Most Important Job in the Country. ?Nothing,
nothing can prepare you for the England job.?

He survived eight years with England. Judged match by match, wrote
Edworthy, ?Robson?s record is as good as that of anyone who has ever
managed England.? His team lost to Argentina in the quarter-finals of
the world cup of 1986 because of Diego Maradona?s handled goal ? ?the
worst moment in my career?, Robson called the defeat ? and lost the
semifinal of the 1990 world cup to West Germany only on penalties.

Players did their best for Robson, but he didn?t so much guide them to
victories as sit on the sidelines and watch. He was not a brilliant
tactician. Few British managers of his generation thought hard about
football. Yet even his occasional failures ? England missed
qualification for the European championship of 1984 ? could not explain
the abuse he received.

It was Robson?s misfortune to manage England just when old-fashioned
British deference was fading and the two biggest daily tabloids, the
Mirror and The Sun, were fighting a circulation battle. The press
invaded his private life. Every bit of abuse had to be topped by the
next. ?In the Name of God, Go!? a typical back page implored him. When
England played in Saudi Arabia this was amended to, ?In the Name of
Allah, Go!?

The News of the World called him ?the most vilified Englishman since
Lord Haw-Haw? To put this in perspective: Lord Haw-Haw, real name
William Joyce, was hanged for broadcasting to Britain on Nazi radio
during the second world war. Amid the hysteria, Robson always stayed
civilised. He told himself, ?I?m not going to behave like them. I?m
going to be above that.?

One problem was that the English public then shared his own inflated
patriotic expectations of what the ?mother country of football? should
achieve. Robson never saw England as just another midsized nation.

England eased him out of the job in 1990. By then he was nearly 60,
rich, and could have retired. But bravely for a monolingual Briton, he
reinvented himself by going to work abroad. For the next decade he
coached PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona, Sporting Lisbon and Porto, won the
first league titles of his career, quietly beat cancer, encouraged his
Portuguese interpreter Jose Mourinho to become a coach, and rebuilt his
own reputation. Everywhere people admired his decency. ?Een gentleman?,
the Dutch called him. He never lashed out, not even when Barcelona
demoted him to chief scout and made him fly tourist class inside
Europe. He had a gift for remembering people, if not their names: he
once called Bryan Robson ?Bobby?.

In 1999 he returned home to manage his beloved Newcastle. He was as
happy as a pensioner managing a neighbourhood boys? team. He was
knighted in 2002. Last Sunday, in a wheelchair, he appeared at St
James? Park to say goodbye. The occasion was a rerun of that world cup
semifinal of 1990, featuring many of the original players, to raise
money for cancer victims in the north-east. By then he had come to
terms with death. He had loved football, loved England and loved life. 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary