Charlton, Jack (1935–2020), soccer player and manager, was born 8 May 1935 in Ashington, a coal-mining village in Northumberland, near Newcastle, the eldest of four boys of Bob, a miner, and his wife Cissie (née Milburn), a housewife. He attended Hirst North Primary School and then Hirst Park school, a secondary modern. At a young age, he started playing soccer, partly inspired by his older cousin, Jackie Milburn, one of the greatest centre-forwards in the history of Newcastle United, and by four uncles, all of whom were professional footballers. He played for local boys’ teams, first with Ashington YMCA and then with Ashington Welfare.
In 1950, aged fifteen – having flirted with becoming a miner or a policeman – he joined Leeds United. He made 773 appearances (629 in the league) for Leeds, scoring 96 goals, before retiring just before his thirty-eighth birthday. With Leeds he won the first division title (1968/9), the second division title (1963/4), the Football Association (FA) Cup (1972), the League Cup (1968) and the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (1968 and 1971). In 1967 he was named the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year.
Making his England debut when he was twenty-nine years old in 1965, he won 35 caps (scoring six goals) and played in the World Cup final on 30 July 1966 when England defeated West Germany 4–2 at Wembley Stadium. His brother Bobby was also on the England team. While Bobbie was celebrated as a stylish and technically gifted footballer, Jack was a 6ft 3in (1.9m) central defender who was robust, pragmatic and ferociously competitive. One of the iconic images from the aftermath of England’s World Cup victory is of Jack and Bobby embracing on their knees on the pitch. Nonetheless, the brothers had a difficult relationship and were estranged for many years.
Following his retirement from playing, Jack was appointed manager of Middlesbrough in May 1973. He led his team to the Division Two title for 1973/4, becoming the 1974 English Manager of the Year. In 1977 he resigned and applied to take charge of the England team but received no reply. Instead, he managed Sheffield Wednesday for the next six years taking the club from the third division to the second division in 1980. Following a brief return to Middlesbrough in 1984, he endured an unhappy spell managing Newcastle United in 1984–5.
Although he had a respectable career in club management, his appointment as Ireland manager in 1986 came as a surprise. It was, moreover, shrouded in controversy as the former Liverpool manager, Bob Paisley, was believed to have been the preferred choice of the senior executives within the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). Initially considered an outsider for the job, Charlton emerged as a compromise candidate and narrowly prevailed after five ballots of a bitterly divided FAI Council.
Charlton’s first game in charge of Ireland was a friendly against Wales in Lansdowne Road, Dublin, on 26 March 1986 – a 1–0 defeat before fewer than 15,000 supporters. But he quickly made progress. As the sportswriter, James Lawton, wrote of Charlton: ‘In a highly-strung, quick-fire personality, there was a most powerful streak of natural-born leadership’ (Irish Independent, 12 June 2018). Charlton moulded a strategy that was clear and pragmatic. This meant playing long balls to turn opposing defenders towards their own goal and then harrying them into mistakes. His evocation of this style as ‘Put ’em under pressure’ became the catch-cry of ‘the Charlton Era’.
For all that his detractors considered the approach unpleasant on the eye – and ill-fitted to the quality of players at his disposal – there was no denying its success. Charlton demonstrated tactical innovation and a willingness to evolve that belied the views of critics who saw no sophistication in his methods. His deployment of first Mark Lawrenson and then Paul McGrath – both accomplished central defenders – as holding midfield players was inspired. That he had neither strikers nor wingers with exceptional pace further led Charlton to concentrate on pinning teams in their own half, rather than hitting them on the break.
Initial signs of progress came when Ireland went to a three-team tournament in Iceland and beat the hosts and Czechoslovakia. Then, as part of the European championship qualifying campaign (1986–7), Ireland travelled to play recent World Cup semi-finalists, Belgium, and drew 2–2. Vital wins against Scotland (away) and Bulgaria (at home) followed as Ireland topped its qualifying group for the 1988 European championships in Germany. It was the first time that Ireland had qualified for the finals of a major international soccer tournament.
The highlight of the European championships came in the first game at the Neckarstadion in Stuttgart (12 June 1988), when Ireland defeated England, courtesy of a Ray Houghton header and a superb goalkeeping display by Packie Bonner. After then playing brilliantly in a draw with the USSR (in Hanover), the Irish were unlucky to depart the competition by losing the final group game in Gelsenkirchen against the Netherlands to a freakish late goal. Thousands of Irish fans travelled to Germany for the tournament bringing a new dimension to the Irish sporting experience. This was captured in Christy Moore’s ballad ‘Joxer goes to Stuttgart’ (1989).
Interest in the national soccer team grew further during the qualifying campaign (1988–9) for the 1990 World Cup. The campaign started with three difficult away games, which resulted in draws against Northern Ireland and Hungary, and a loss to Spain. Then, however, a run of four home wins over Spain, Malta, Hungary and Northern Ireland left Ireland needing to defeat Malta away. Two John Aldridge goals brought a comfortable victory.
The first Irish team to qualify for the World Cup contained many British-born players who were the sons or grandsons of Irish emigrants. Charlton mined the Irish diaspora, adding players such as Ray Houghton from Glasgow and the Liverpudlian John Aldridge to home-grown players such as Ronnie Whelan. Of the fifty-six players who played for the Republic of Ireland during the Charlton era, thirty-three were born outside Ireland. Against a historic and contemporary backdrop of mass emigration and contested ideas about Irish identity, the national soccer team expressed a broad, inclusive vision of Irishness that celebrated the diaspora.
The World Cup was held in Italy with Ireland in a difficult group alongside the Netherlands, England and Egypt. The first match was a 1–1 draw with England in Cagliari, Sardinia, where Kevin Sheedy equalised for Ireland seventeen minutes from time. It was greeted in Ireland like a victory. Crowds poured onto the streets across the country. There was also relief that the game had passed off without great incident, given the reputation of England’s supporters. Italy’s leading sports daily, Gazzetta Dello Sport, noted that the sterility of the football had even put the hooligans to sleep.
Ireland followed this with a disappointing scoreless draw against Egypt in Palermo, Sicily. There was a major national controversy when RTÉ television pundit Eamon Dunphy outraged public opinion by declaring himself ‘embarrassed and ashamed at that performance’. Dunphy was Charlton’s most vocal critic, and the controversy intensified when he travelled to Italy but was prevented from asking a question at an Irish team press conference. RTÉ’s saturation coverage fuelled a public interest that extended beyond traditional sporting audiences, turning the World Cup into a shared national experience – it also confirmed Charlton’s status as the most popular figure in Irish public life.
In the final group match in Palermo against the reigning European champions, the Netherlands, the Irish trailed to an early goal until the seventy-first minute when Ireland’s long-ball tactics pressured the Dutch goalkeeper into fumbling the ball into the path of Niall Quinn, who scored, securing yet another draw. This qualified Ireland for the second round where the match with Romania in Genoa ended scoreless after extra time. In Ireland’s first ever penalty shoot-out in international competition, a Packie Bonner save from Daniel Timofte was followed by a clinching penalty from David O’Leary.
Three days before the Irish team played Italy in the quarter-finals in Rome, they were granted an audience with Pope John Paul II. Charlton recorded in his World Cup diary: ‘As a non-Catholic, I found it a very moving experience’ (Jack Charlton’s World Cup diary, 161). Ireland saved its best World Cup performance for the Italian match – but lost. Before 73,000 spectators at the Stadio Olimpico, Italy’s Salvatore ‘Toto’ Schillaci scored the decisive goal in Ireland’s 1–0 defeat. An estimated half a million people welcomed the Irish team home to Dublin – 50,000 of them waiting at the airport to greet them as they stepped off the plane.
There was disappointment (and, indeed, surprise, such were the changed level of expectations) when the Irish team narrowly failed to qualify for the 1992 European championships. A rejuvenation of the team during the qualifying campaign for the World Cup in the USA in 1994 saw the emergence of Roy Keane, one of the best midfielders in the English Premier League, along with promising young players such as Gary Kelly, Phil Babb and Jason McAteer. The qualifying campaign reached its endgame with Charlton’s team needing at least a draw against Northern Ireland at Windsor Park, Belfast. Amid a dramatic worsening of violence in Northern Ireland, the match was played on 17 November 1993 in an exceptionally hostile atmosphere. The Republic of Ireland scored a late equaliser to snatch a draw and with that, World Cup qualification.
Ireland’s opening game at the 1994 World Cup was against Italy in Giants Stadium, New Jersey, on 18 June 1994. A huge proportion of the 75,000 fans present were Irish – those who had travelled to America and those who were based there – and they saw a remarkable 1–0 victory (again courtesy of a Ray Houghton goal) over an Italian side who went on to reach the World Cup final. Thereafter, however, Charlton’s players failed to cope with the heat, particularly in a schedule that had Ireland’s remaining games kicking off in the midday sun. The next match was a 2–1 defeat to Mexico in Orlando, before a draw against Norway back at Giants Stadium secured Ireland’s place in the last sixteen for the second World Cup running. But in the second-round match in Orlando, Ireland succumbed 2–0 to the Netherlands, ending their World Cup in a damp squib.
Charlton’s unsuccessful last qualifying campaign with Ireland – for the 1996 European championships – ended with two losses to Austria, home and away, and an embarrassing away draw with Liechtenstein. Pitted in a play-off against the Netherlands, Ireland lost 2–0 on 13 December 1995 at Anfield, Liverpool. Days later and before he could be formally sacked by the FAI, Jack Charlton resigned as manager of Ireland. He said: ‘In my heart of hearts, I knew I’d wrung as much as I could out of the squad I’d got – that some of my older players had given me all they had to give’ (Jack Charlton: autobiography, 298). He had been merciless in his removal of ageing players (Liam Brady) or those who did not do exactly as he said (David O’Leary), but by 1995 he did not have the same quality to allow for such ruthlessness.
By the time of his departure, he had presided over an era of unprecedented Irish achievement in international soccer. Charlton had boosted soccer’s popularity, but the sport remained beset by problems of weak organisation, poor infrastructure, and an inadequately funded and supported domestic professional league. This did nothing to diminish the magnificence of the social and cultural moment in Ireland, and Charlton’s role in providing many memorable occasions for communal celebration.
Charlton’s personality endeared him to many, as did his fishing trips and pub appearances throughout the country. He was as relatable as he was likeable, the earthiness of his character finding expression in an international team whose play was grounded in unending commitment. That he was English in Ireland during some of the worst years of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland inspired a diversity of sentiments. At his first match in Lansdowne Road a banner was displayed which read ‘Go Home Union Jack’. Later, his unique personality allowed for the consideration that he was not a typical Englishman. If nothing else, his presence demanded that a different aspect of Englishness be accommodated within the popular discourse. By contrast, English soccer supporters taunted him as a traitor and booed him during a match between Ireland and England at Wembley in 1992. He was visibly dismayed when English supporters rioted during Ireland’s ‘friendly’ with England at Lansdowne Road in 1995.
Subsequently Charlton was offered numerous managerial positions but declined them all. Instead, he traversed Britain and Ireland delivering up to five after-dinner speeches a week. He was involved in numerous football-themed publications, most notably his diaries for the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, while his autobiography came out in 1996. He also published books on hunting and fishing, and made more than twenty-five documentary films, on subjects ranging from salmon fishing and the Duke of Buccleuch (referred to as ‘His Dukiness’ by Charlton) to his national service in the cavalry and holidaying in Blackpool. All of this was in keeping with a childhood in which he was endlessly resourceful in developing new ways to make money – from selling newspapers, fire wood and fish, to making pig swill.
Awarded an OBE (officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1974, he was also appointed a deputy lieutenant of Northumberland, inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame (2005) and made a freeman of Leeds (2009). In Ireland he was made a freeman of Dublin (1994) and given honorary Irish citizenship (1995). He returned regularly to Ireland, keeping a holiday home in Ballina, Co. Mayo, from 1991 to 2014, using it as a base from which to fish. Diagnosed latterly with lymphoma and with dementia, he died in his home in Northumberland on 10 July 2020. He was survived by his wife Pat (née Kemp), whom he had married in 1958, and by their three children, John, Deborah and Peter. There is a life-size statue of him at Cork Airport and a mural on a wall in Ballina.