Bob­by

For rea­sons too great and tedious to get into here, Eng­land will nev­er again lift the World Cup. At least not in my life­time. That’s not a cast-iron guar­an­tee, obvi­ous­ly; as any Leices­ter City fan will attest foot­balling mir­a­cles do occur from time to time, no mat­ter how seem­ing­ly unlike­ly. Just not to those peren­ni­al near­ly-men select­ed every cou­ple of years to rep­re­sent the Three Lions on the inter­na­tion­al stage.

Giv­en the unerr­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty with which this admit­ted­ly pes­simistic yet whol­ly ratio­nal and sin­cere belief is rein­forced, England’s sin­gle vis­it to football’s top table becomes all the more remark­able and roman­tic when put into con­text. The nation­al team’s dis­mal record at major tour­na­ments (50 years of hurt, but who’s count­ing?) will always be off­set by the win­ning exploits of Alf Ramsey’s World Cup heroes, in par­tic­u­lar England’s eter­nal cap­tain, Bob­by Moore. But how much, if any­thing, can a new doc­u­men­tary about the man most syn­ony­mous with that momen­tous occa­sion tell us that we don’t already know?

We know, for instance, that Bob­by was dif­fer­ent class – a top, top, top, top play­er – and that his hum­ble East Lon­don roots made him a poster boy for what in the 1960s was still very much a work­ing-class game. He was a born leader and role mod­el to mil­lions whose pop­u­lar­i­ty tran­scend­ed sport. But there was more to him than this, a vul­ner­a­ble, some­what trag­ic side that very few ever saw.

In focus­ing pre­dom­i­nant­ly on Moore the play­er, this enter­tain­ing fea­ture doc­u­men­tary in turn reveals some­thing about the man. It also does an excel­lent job of pro­vid­ing a bal­anced insight into Moore’s life – cour­tesy of emo­tion­al trib­utes from his two wives, Tina and Stephanie, and daugh­ter Rober­ta – which was evi­dent­ly one of extreme highs and lows both on and off the pitch. It’s by no means the full pic­ture, but serves as a handy primer on his influ­ence and legacy.

Ini­tial­ly direc­tor Ron Scalpel­lo appears intent on adding to the myth, min­ing famous scenes from Moore’s career for max­i­mal nos­tal­gia (that the film’s title is styled ​‘Bo66y’ in the open­ing cred­its is a clear enough indi­ca­tion of this). So we kick off with misty-eyed eulo­gies from the likes of Har­ry Red­knapp and Ray Win­stone, as well as ex-team­mates Geoff Hurst and Mar­tin Peters, each of whom wax lyri­cal about how one of their own led Eng­land to vic­to­ry against the old ene­my. It’s all a bit fuzzy and ineffectual.

Yet while it may be absolute­ly nec­es­sary to include sen­ti­ment-wring­ing archive footage of ​“Moore‑o” hoist­ing the gleam­ing Jules Rimet tro­phy aloft against a back­drop of blue-skied nation­al eupho­ria, it’s to Scalpello’s cred­it that he pro­ceeds to shift the focus away from ​’66 and all that. Skim­ming over sub­se­quent World Cups – swap­ping shirts with Pelé and that tack­le in Mex­i­co ​’70; the ignominy of fail­ing to qual­i­fy for the finals in West Ger­many four years lat­er – to the reas­sur­ing­ly buoy­ant tune of theme song from The Great Escape, we begin to learn about Moore’s per­son­al strug­gles and late career fade into obscu­ri­ty via a string of ​“impos­si­ble jobs” man­ag­ing non-league Oxford City and low­ly Southend Utd, to doing local radio com­men­tary with Jonathan ​“JP” ​“Pearce‑o” ​“San­cho Pan­za” Pearce.

The film ends on a slight­ly sour note, with Red­knapp cas­ti­gat­ing the FA and Moore’s beloved West Ham for not doing enough to involve and hon­our him while he was still alive – a view sup­port­ed (albeit begrudg­ing­ly) by cur­rent FA Chair­man Greg Dyke. Although stat­ues were erect­ed posthu­mous­ly out­side Wem­b­ley and close to West Ham’s now defunct Boleyn Ground, it’s telling that Moore did not receive a knight­hood (latent cock­ney and West Ham sup­port­er Rus­sell Brand’s asser­tion that some peo­ple are knight­ed not by mon­archs but by the peo­ple feels espe­cial­ly glib). A triv­ial foot­note, per­haps, but by far the film’s biggest rev­e­la­tion con­cern­ing Moore’s often com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with the game he loved.