Cantwell dream contrasts sharply with reality of today’s imploding discipline
Posted in News on Tuesday September 20th, 2005 7:02pm
From The Independent:
A great football man was buried in Peterborough yesterday. It is not one of the power bases of football, but it is where the big man from Cork chose to end his career and for his admirers this is maybe distinction enough for the little town on the edge of the Fens.
Noel Cantwell, 73, was never festooned with honours, but he had a few: he won a Second Division championship medal with West Ham United and he led Manchester United on their first step to post-Munich glory with victory in the 1963 FA Cup final. He gained 36 Republic of Ireland caps in various positions, but his specialist role was full-back: he was one of the first of his breed to grasp that diving into tackles on a Tom Finney or a Cliff Jones was one of the last words in human folly. What you had to do was jockey and make sure of support.
His glory, though, was not in his trophy cabinet but in his vision of what football could be and in his impatience with what he saw as the great malaise of the English game. He wanted football to grow up here as it had across Europe and South America. This was recognised in the church yesterday when the pews were filled by men like Sir Bobby Charlton and Denis Law, Ian St John and Paddy Crerand, Martin Peters, John Giles and Tommy Docherty.
The funeral of Noel Cantwell had a double poignancy yesterday. There was pain at the passing of a brave, generous and handsome man who had a passion for life as well as football.
Cantwell had a dream. It was of a game where everyone fought for improved training techniques in a drive to enhance performance, where footballers behaved like professional men and were given the respect, and the rewards, that were their due. The sadness in his story is the reality of so much of today’s football, the game of agents and spiralling rewards and imploding personal and collective discipline.
View other posts by Administrator
