Leo McKinstry - Sir Alf

Playing alongside him made me realize that there was considerably more to defending than just punting the ball clear, as had become my custom. During a match I made a mental note of how Rocky used the ball; the manner in which he tried to find a colleague with his clearances; the confidence he always displayed when kicking the ball at varied heights and angles.

The great difficulty for Alf was that, no matter how much he improved his game, his path back to the first team was blocked by Bill Ellerington, who was one of the best full-backs in the country and would, like Alf, win England honours in that position. ‘Bill was a great tackler and a terrific kicker of the ball. He could kick from one corner flag to the opposite corner, diagonally, a good one hundred yards – and that was with one of those big heavy old balls,’ says Ted Ballard, another Southampton defender of the era.

Alf managed to play a few more first-team games that year but his big break game in January 1947, in rather unfortunate circumstances for Bill Ellerington. That winter was the bitterest of the 20th century. Week upon week of heavy snow hampered industry, disrupted public transport and so seriously threatened coal supplies that the Attlee government was plunged into crisis. More than two million men were put out of work because of the freeze, while severe restrictions were placed on the use of newsprint. Football, too, was in crisis. In the Arctic conditions, 140 matches had to be postponed. In the games that went ahead, the lines on the icy pitches often had to be marked in red to make them clear. Such was the public frustration at the lack of football that when Portsmouth managed to melt the snow at Fratton Park using a revolutionary steam jet, the club was rewarded with a crowd of 11,500 for a reserve fixture.

The freeze also had a direct effect on Alf’s career. Towards the end of January, Southampton went to the north-east resort of Whitley Bay, in preparation for a third-round FA Cup tie against Newcastle. Alf, as so often at this time, was a travelling reserve. One afternoon, the senior players went out golfing. In the cold weather, most of them wore thick polo-neck jerseys – except Bill Ellerington, who braved the course in an open-neck pullover. That night ‘Big Ellie’ felt terrible; he woke up the next morning wringing wet. He was rushed to hospital, where he was quickly diagnosed to be suffering from pneumonia. ‘I completely collapsed and ended up in hospital for three months. I did not come out until April,’ says Ellerington. One man’s tragedy is another’s opportunity. Alf was drafted into the side against Newcastle, and he showed more confidence than he had previously displayed, though he was troubled by Newcastle’s left-winger, Tommy Pearson, as the Saints lost 3-1 in front of a crowd of 55,800, by far the largest Alf had ever experienced.

With Ellerington incapacitated, Alf was guaranteed a good run in the side, and he kept his place for the rest of the season, growing ever more assured with each game. In February 1947 the Daily Mirror predicted that ‘only a few weeks after entering the big time, Alfred Ramsey is being talked of as one of the coming men of football’. The paper went on to quote coach Bill Dodgin, who paid tribute to Alf’s dedication: ‘You can’t better that type of player. The player who thinks football, talks football and lives football is the man who makes good.’

One particularly important match for Alf took place at the Dell in April against Manchester City, when he had the chance to witness at first hand City’s veteran international full-back Sam Barkas, who, at the age of 38, was playing his last season. Ramsey was immediately captivated by the skills of Barkas and decided to make him his role model. ‘It was the most skilful display by any full-back I had seen,’ he told the Evening News in 1953. ‘The brilliance of Barkas’ positional play, his habit of making the other fellow play how he wanted him to play, all caught my eye. What impressed me most of all was Sam Barkas’ astute use of the ball. Every time he cleared his lines he found an unmarked colleague,’ he wrote later.

Exactly the same attributes were to feature in Ramsey’s play over the next eight years; one of Alf’s greatest virtues was his ability to absorb the lessons of any experience. In his quest for perfection, he was constantly watching and learning, experimenting and practising. As Ted Bates put it in an interview in 1970:

Alf was very single-minded. He would come to the ground for training and he wanted to get on with it – no messing about. I believe he was a bit immature then but you could not dispute his single-mindedness. He sole interest was in developing his own game. He was the original self-educated player – all credit to him for that. But he always had this polish – it is the only word – and it made him stand out in any team.

Alf’s soccer intelligence, allied to a phenomenal dedication to his craft and an unruffled temperament, made him a far more effective player than his innate talent warranted. Eric Day says:

He had a very, very good football brain. If he hadn’t, he would not have played where he did, because he was not the most nimble of players. Not particularly brilliant in the air, because he did not have the stature to jump up. But he was a decent tackler and a great passer. He could read the game so well, that was his big asset. That was why he became such a great manager.

Ted Ballard has the same assessment:

He was a great player, a super player. He was a quiet man, very strict on himself, very sober and trained hard. The only thing he lacked was pace; he could be a bit slow on the turn because he was built so heavily round the hip. But he made up for it with the way he read the game so well.

Stan Clements, who played at centre-half and was himself a shrewd judge of the game, told me:

He was two-footed. You would not have known the difference between one foot and the other. He was a tremendously accurate passer. When he kicked the ball, it went right to the other player’s foot. All the forwards in front of him always said that when Alf gave them the ball, it was easy to collect. They liked that because they could pick it up in their stride. His judgement of distance, his sense of timing was just right. The point about Alf was that he was so cool. One of the remarkable things about him was that at free-kicks and corners, when the goalmouth was crowded, he seemed to have the ability almost to be a second keeper on the goal-line. He seemed always to be able to read exactly what was going on. His anticipation was superb. He was always in the right position to chest the ball down and clear it. He must have saved us at least a goal every other game. He understood football better than most people. I always knew he would make a good manager, because of his ability to size up the game. Bill Dodgin and Syd Cann, the trainer, used to have this layout on the floor of our dressing-room, with counters for the players. And they would use this to analyse our tactics, especially in set-pieces. Alf was always very good at understanding all that; he would take it all on board quickly.

Alf was so dedicated that, even at the end of the 1946-47 season, when he returned to Dagenham, he carried on practising in the meadows behind his parents’ cottage: ‘I used to take a football every morning during those months of 1947 and spend an hour or two trying hard to “place it” at a chosen spot.’ Alf knew that only by developing his accuracy would he be successful in adopting the Sam Barkas style of constructive defence. The hard work paid off, and Alf did not miss a single game during the 1947-48 season; indeed, he was the only Southampton player to appear in all 42 League fixtures. Such was the strength of Ramsey’s performances that Bill Ellerington, who had gradually recovered from his illness, could not force his way back into the side, though, as he told me, that did not lead to any personal resentment: