WHAT were you doing when David O'Leary scored that penalty in 1990, the strike against Romania that took Ireland to the last eight in the World Cup, heights so vertiginous the entire nation suffered a nose bleed? Jack Charlton remembers precisely what he was up to. According to his autobiography, he was engaging with a spectator sitting behind him in the stadium.
Now some folk, unkindly interpreting the video evidence of Jack with his back to the action, suggested at the time that he couldn't bear to watch, that the tension had become too much for him, that he lost his bottle. Preposterous! Jack Charlton succumb to nerves? Never. It was just that he fancied a cigarette, so, as he always did, bummed one off the nearest person with a packet, had just got a light as O'Leary scored and thus almost missed the biggest moment in Irish sporting history. Somehow, it was typical of Charlton: in times of crisis, why alter the simple habits of a lifetime?
There are three things we all know about Jack Charlton: that he was a dreadnought defender when England won the World Cup in 1966, that he was Ireland's finest ever football manager, and that when he took his beloved Irish squad to meet the Pope, his Holiness recognised a true leader of men when he saw one: "I know who you are," the Pontiff said, "you're the Boss." But there is a fourth, less publicised attribute: that he has an attachment to his own wallet that would embarrass a limpet. Indeed, the uncharitable have suggested that was why he was so determined to do well in his Irish job: if he succeeded it would mean he would never have to buy another drink in the country again.
Making a little go a long, long way, his autobiography suggests, was always; Charlton's greatest skill. That's what he did as a whipper snapper young lad in war torn Northumbria, wheeling and dealing, harrying and poaching and ending up earning more than many a grown man; it's what he did as a footballer of average skill who made himself an indispensable linchpin of both club and country; and it is what he did as a manager of teams with limited resources, marshalling them into outfits feared throughout the world. In the parable of the talents, Jack Charlton could well be the role model for the son who trebled his God given within a fortnight.
The great joy of this autobiography is not the revelations on which it has been hyped in the hope of earning back the biggest ever advance in British sports publishing (rumoured to be £500,000). While it is intriguing to learn what he thinks of the English FA (not much), Eamon Dunphy (even less), or his brother, Bobby (nicely dismissed in the sentence: "I knew there was something odd about him: he didn't like fishing"), these are as nothing compared to the answer which emerges to the question fundamental to Jack Charlton: how, in anything and everything he attempted, did he manage to succeed way beyond reasonable expectation?
He did it, it seems, because he never over complicated a problem. For Jack, everything - football, politics, life was a matter of black and white, simple choices. And once he had made a decision, he stuck with it. In the spare, call a spade a bloody shovel prose style of the book, it all unfolds: where others wavered, Jack ploughed on, forever convinced he was in the right. The book oozes a bullish self certainty. Anyone he has ever argued with is dismissed as "a prat", always in the wrong. In the chapter about his love of field sports you can see it all: Jack's brow furrowing as he writes that he simply cannot understand how anyone could logically consider his affection for slaughtering the fauna of the British Isles in anyway distasteful.
The Charlton clarity meant and this was vital to his success - that he had an unerring eye for the big picture. The book is fascinating in its discussion of tactics. Rarely has any tome made football seem such an easy game. There are no Christmas trees here, or sophisticated deconstructions of the sweeper system. Charlton claims there was no point trying to match the continental teams for skill, so he instructed his Ireland boys simply to harry and chase. And that's how they won so much: if you can't join em, beat em.
With his vision distracted by the broader brush strokes, of course, the details were often fogged. But then, when Charlton did what he did, does it really matter that he couldn't remember the names of his own players? Or that on page 90 of his autobiography he writes he was glad West Germany beat Italy in the semifinals of the 1966 World Cup, because the Italians would have been tougher opposition in the final, when any schoolboy knows the Germans beat the USSR and the Italians had long gone home in ignominy after being beaten by North Korea? Perhaps Jack didn't realise at the time who he was playing. Anyway, he would say, what's it matter, just as long as they had a cigarette handy when a fella needed one; that's what counts.
