The irreplaceable Jimmy Armfield
With the sad death of Jimmy Armfield, English football becomes instantly poorer in many ways. It has lost one of its most familiar and comforting voices, who generations grew up listening to. It has lost one of its strongest links to a famous past, not just of 1966, but the even more sepia-tinted exploits of Stanley Matthews, Duncan Edwards and Tom Finney. And it has lost someone who, as today’s tributes made clear, was revered by those who knew him for his decency as much as his expertise and sporting wisdom.
Few ex-players are as comfortable with microphone in hand as they were with the ball at their feet. Yet Armfield, more a figure of the past than any of his commentary peers, managed always to remain a voice of the present. To listen to him weekend after weekend, all shrewd observations without the slightest hint of nostalgia, was to assume that broadcasting was his metier. Younger listeners had to discover for themselves that this was also the man who had led out England alongside Alfredo di Stefano’s Rest of the World in 1963; who had been Stanley Matthews’ right-hand man at Blackpool, helping invent the modern role of the attacking full-back into the bargain; and who, after his exploits at the 1962 World Cup, was considered the best in the world in his position.
Like Richie Benaud, whose captaincy of the Australian cricket team corresponded with Armfield’s stint wearing the England armband, he became more famous for his sporting afterlife than his prime. And like Benaud that was only true because he respected broadcasting as an art in its own right, not an extension of a playing career that could be sustained by a player’s perspective and talents alone. The Australian learned his art at the feet of the legendary racing commentary Peter O’Sullevan, part of a BBC training course. It is hard to imagine any contemporary going to the same trouble.
Armfield and Benaud were not just of the same era but the same school: experts who let their experience inform and illuminate commentary without ever intruding on it. Outwardly modest men who wore their extensive achievements so lightly that you would never have guessed from first impression that they even existed.
Any one of Armfield’s achievements — captain of his country, record appearance holder for his club, World Cup winner as a player, European Cup finalist as a manager, widely-admired broadcaster for over three decades — would have made for an extraordinary career in its own right. Together they amount to what was an extraordinary life, one that means his death will be mourned by millions, from those who remember him as a player and manager to the many for whom he was a voice of childhood. English football will not see, or hear, his like again.
