David James takes aim at the 1966 World Cup final and, in one swing, shatters part of the myth. “As a game of football, it was rubbish, wasn’t it?” the England goalkeeper says. “We behold this event in the world of English football and most people haven’t seen it in its entirety. Now I, fortunately, have seen it on DVD. Someone sent it through to me and I looked at it and I was thinking, ‘This is loose.’”
On their Fantasy Football League programme, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner had a feature called Old Football Was Rubbish. James would appear to agree. “I watched Nottingham Forest versus Hamburg the other night on ESPN Classics and the players were all knackered,” he said of the 1980 European Cup final that Brian Clough's side famously won. “There were 20 minutes to go and they were all in the corner, bent over with their hands on their knees. I was thinking: ‘This is a pub match.’ That was the pinnacle of league football.”
James is intrigued as much by how football's history can be written as the history itself. He marvels at how Gordon Banks's flying stop from West Germany's Uwe Seeler in the 1966 final, when the score was level at 1-1, can be completely forgotten, whereas the goalkeeper's wonder save from Pele in the 1970 World Cup group tie, which England lost to Brazil, has stood the test of time.
“Banks's save in the final wasn't just a continental tip-over-the-bar, fling-your-legs-about job, it was a proper decent save and I never knew anything about it until I saw the DVD,” James said. “It's bizarre. We lost the [1970] game 1-0 to Brazil but the overriding memory was of Banks’s save, whereas he made a save in 1966 which was more important because it contributed to a win for England. But no one talks about it.
“It was a better save because of the outcome. It was the unsung bit of goalkeeping – he does something that influenced the outcome of the match. The Wembley pitch was awful by the way. And again, some of the passing was loose …”
History may be unkind to the goalkeeper in a victorious team but it forgives almost anything of players who win the big one. It is an adage that James carried with him on the flight to South Africa yesterday, as he and the other 22 members of Fabio Capello's England squad ramped up for the nation's latest tilt at glory.
“That is the point,” James said. “It's not about how well you play, it’s just about getting through. Greece are probably the best example, when they won the Euros in 2004. They won just about every game 1-0, but it’s effective. It was the equivalent in some senses to Inter beating Barcelona in this season’s Champions League semi-final and being criticised for rubbish tactics. But they got through to the final, Barcelona didn’t.”
James says England travel to South Africa with confidence, and not only because of the unfussy manner of their qualification. The squad, he feels, has the components to face any challenge, be that to play incisive football or, most importantly, to grind out results.
“Of course we have got that,” James said. “I’m not going to mention names specifically but anything you need in a game of football, we have the player capable of doing it. Mr Capello will be looking at it, in essence, as being a squad rather than 11 players who just want to go and beat anyone. It will be: ‘I’ve got 23 players that I can pick from to go out and batter teams or defend and score on the break.’
“I expect 100% performances in each game, because of the way that Capello has set us up. Beyond that, we can’t ask for any more. But the confidence I have is that England as a team, playing 100% – we don't get beaten. Simple as that.”
The notion of it being a squad game is highlighted by the goalkeeping situation. Although James is the favourite to start England's opening Group C match against USA on Saturday week, Capello has offered no guarantees to anyone. As a result James, Robert Green and Joe Hart, the squad’s three keepers, find themselves on a knife-edge.
It was a different story when James went to the previous two World Cups. In 2002 David Seaman was the undisputed No1; in 2006 it was Paul Robinson. The merits of Capello leaving the position open are debatable - James admits that a goalkeeper takes a different mind-set to the finals when he knows that he is a back-up - but, despite never having played at a World Cup, the 39-year-old is determined to prioritise the collective.
“There have been times in the past, in earlier years, when you would just hate the person in front of you,” he says. “You'd sit on the bench saying, ‘Go on, let one in. Go on, through your legs,’ all that stuff, and wish them all the worst things in the world. But in the end, you just think: ‘Why would you want them doing that to you?’
“I don't look at this World Cup as a personal mission. I look at it as a team mission. Yes, you want to be No1, you want to play every game and lift the World Cup, but if that doesn't happen it will be a case of: ‘If I’m there, my contribution will have aided whatever success we have.’ Within training, you are preparing yourself each time to play and with Fabio's selection process, until the team is announced, you are never actually sure, which is good.”
James was asked how he found Capello on a personal level? “Capello on a personal level … that's almost like an oxymoron,” he says. “I mean, he seems to deal with everyone the same. He's the boss and that’s it, which is fine. The things that he has put in place are about respect for each other and he will also tell you how he feels at any given moment.
“We had one session where a ball went over the back stick and everyone assumed it was dead but it’s been knocked back in and Jermain [Defoe] has smashed it in. Capello had a go at me for not being in the right place. Your initial reaction is that you want to remind him that he's never been a goalkeeper but then you think: ‘He’s the manager, if that’s how he feels then fine’.
“He keeps everything clear for the team, you don’t have any ambiguous situations. He gives the players the environment to work in, he arms us with the knowledge of the opposition and he trusts that the ability we have is good enough to beat that opposition.”
James won his 50th cap in the friendly victory over Japan on Sunday to join Banks, Ray Clemence, Peter Shilton and Seaman in reaching the landmark. But it seems as if an age has passed since his first. “Mexico, 1997, 2-0, Wembley, bang,” he said. “Sheringham and Fowler. Two crosses dropped. It was a bad game for me. I gave my gloves away to some kid and he didn't seem that impressed.”
James has an unerring memory and his arrival in Africa may trigger some more. The GCSE history paper that he wrote on Nelson Mandela; his first meeting with the great man on a pre-season tour with Liverpool in the mid-90s; the visit to Malawi on an Aids awareness campaign, which motivated him to set up a foundation in the country to tackle some of its other issues, namely farming and irrigation.
He has come a long way since his formative days in Hertfordshire, when his first team was the less-than-mighty Welwyn Pegasus. “Two years I was there and we were awful,” he said at the launch of Umbro’s “Tailored by” campaign, which features an appropriate wall painted in each player's hometown. “Me and two or three friends would play on the Parkway in Welwyn and the dad of one of the boys was Pegasus’s manager.
“I was always a goalie and I remember my introduction to goalkeeping quite vividly. It was by virtue of a school games lesson and I was stood there in the middle of this pitch, the odd kid who didn't know what he was supposed to be doing. But I realised that the lad who was in goal wasn't doing particularly well so I went in, and stopped a few. People were quite happy with me and it took off from there.”
The World Cup finals appear set fair for James as a swansong. He is after results to enjoy a favourable judgment in the years to come.
The 23 members of England's squad and the manager, Fabio Capello, have had a wall in their hometown painted with the player's shirt number and the name of the place they grew up in as part of Umbro’s “Tailored by” England campaign. These include the captain Rio Ferdinand's wall on Peckham High Street, Wayne Rooney's in Croxteth and David James' in Welwyn Garden City.
