Therapy

ever seen. Everybody in the film dies violently. I honestly believe that every character you see is shot to death — the police who shoot the Harvey Keitel character at the end are just voices off camera. Amy didn’t seem disturbed by the mayhem. She was more bothered by the fact that she couldn’t recall what she had seen one of the actors in before, and kept muttering to me, “Was it House of Games ? No. Was it Taxi-driver ? No. What was it?” until I had to beg her to shut up. As we came out of the cinema, she said triumphantly, “I remember now, it wasn’t a movie at all, it was an episode of Miami Vice.” Just at that moment I clocked a newspaper billboard, “BOBBY MOORE DIES.” Suddenly the deaths in Reservoir Dogs seemed cartoon-thin. I hurried Amy through her supper so that I could get back to the flat to watch the telly, and she decided to go home straight from Gabrielli’s. “I can see you want to be alone with your grief,” she said sardonically, and she wasn’t far wrong.
    There were lots of clips of Bobby Moore in his prime as a player in Sportsnight, with of course a special emphasis on the World Cup Final of 1966, and that unforgettable image of Moore receiving the cup from the Queen, carefully wiping his hands on his shirt first, and then turning to face the crowd, holding the trophy high in the air for the whole of Wembley, and the whole country, to worship. What a day that was. England 4, Germany 2, after extra time. A story straight out of a boys’ comic. Who believed at the start of the tournament that, after years of humiliation by South Americans and Slavs, we’d at last be world champions in the game we’d invented? What heroes they were, that team. I can still recite the names from memory. Banks, Wilson, Cohen, Moore ( capt .), Stiles, Jack Charlton, Ball, Hurst, Hunt, Peters and Bobby Charlton. He cried on that occasion, too, I seem to remember. But not Bobby Moore, always the model captain, calm, confident, poised. He had immaculate timing as a player — it made up for his slowness on the turn. Seeing the clips brought it all back: the way his long leg would stretch out at the last possible moment and take the ball off an opponent’s toe without fouling him. And then the way he would bring the ball out of defence and into attack, head up, back straight, like a captain leading a cavalry charge. He looked like a Greek god, with his clean-cut limbs and short golden curls. Bobby Moore. They don’t make them like that any more. They make overpaid lager louts plastered with advertising logos, who spit all over the pitch and swear so much that lip-reading deaf viewers write to the BBC to complain.
    (I make an exception of Ryan Giggs, the young Manchester United winger. He’s a lovely player, thrilling to watch when he’s running at a defence with the ball apparently tied to his feet, scattering them like sheep. And he still has his innocence, if you know what I mean. He hasn’t yet been kicked into caution and cynicism, he hasn’t been worn down by playing too many games too close together, he hasn’t had his head turned by stardom. He still plays as if he enjoys the game, like a kid. I tell you what I like about him most: when he’s done something really good, scored a goal, or dribbled past three players, or made a perfect cross, and he’s trotting back towards the centre circle, and the crowd are going wild, he frowns. He looks terribly serious, like a little boy who’s trying to seem ever so grown-up, as if it’s the only way he can stop himself from turning cartwheels or beating his chest or screaming with excitement. I love that, the way he frowns when he’s done something really brilliant.)
    But back to Bobby Moore and that glorious June day of the 1966 World Cup Final. Even Sally, who was never a great soccer fan, got caught up in the excitement, put Jane to sleep in her pram and sat down to watch the telly with me and Adam — who was too young to really understand what it was all about, but sensed intuitively that it was important and sat patiently through the whole match with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket-comforter pressed to his cheek, watching me all the time instead of the screen. It was our first colour set. England wore red shirts instead of the usual all-white strip, strawberry-jam red. I suppose we tossed up with Germany for the privilege of wearing white, and lost, but we should have stuck with red ever after, it seemed to bring us luck. We