England’s top strikers

Published : Nov 01, 2014 00:00 IST

Wayne Rooney seems to be making his way inexorably to the position of top scorer of all time for the England international team. At present, the record is still held by Bobby Charlton with 49 goals in 108 games. By Brian Glanville.

There are as we know three kinds of lie: lies, damned lies and statistics. Now, as Wayne Rooney seems to be making his way inexorably to the position of top scorer of all time for the England international team, that saying seems increasingly relevant. At present, the record is still held by Bobby Charlton with 49 goals in 108 games. Rooney at the moment is on 43 goals in 99 games, the last of them from an insidious free-kick in Estonia after which he blatantly missed the clearest of chances, when clean through the Estonian defence, to be thwarted by their goalkeeper.

Yet if you go by percentages rather than by totals, there is no doubt at all who comes top of the list. It has to be Bolton Wanderers’ Nat Lofthouse, once nicknamed the ‘Lion of Vienna’ for a brave goal he scored to win a game against Austria. Nat scored no fewer than 30 goals in 33 internationals, giving him a formidable percentage of 0.91. Far and away ahead of any other modern player, very much including Rooney whose average is a mere 0.434.

Charlton and Lofthouse both failed to figure in England’s ill-starred appearance in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden though for notably different reasons. Charlton was picked for the squad but to the accompaniment of outrage in the Press, never got a game. Lofthouse inexplicably didn’t get picked at all, though he had just crowned his season for Bolton with two goals (one of them through a blatant foul) against Manchester United, beaten 2-0 at Wembley in the FA Cup final.

Charlton in Gothenburg, where England controversially accommodated themselves in the Park Avenue Hotel, right in the middle of the city, cut an understandably forlorn figure. Though at least he was there, Lofthouse wasn’t: though England chose only 20 players when they could have had 22. It was only in the previous February that Bobby had miraculously survived the appalling Manchester United air crash at the Munich airport which killed so many of his team-mates. He himself having been shot to safety out of the plane still strapped to his seat.

True he had a poor game en route to the finals when England were thrashed 5-0 by Yugoslavia in Belgrade, but he was hardly the only one. Absurdly, for the eventual play-off, won by the Soviets 1-0, not only was Charlton again ignored but England picked two players, Peter Brabrook and Peter Broadbent, both of whom were making their international debut.

The crown of Bobby’s international career was the 1966 World Cup when one watched him at Wembley scoring a spectacular goal from far out on the right against Mexico and two more, crowning a superb all-round display against Portugal in the quarterfinals. Alf Ramsey used him in that tournament as a deep-lying centre forward. In 1962 in Chile, where he was fast, elusive and impressive, he was deployed as an outside left. Versatility was his watchword, but arguably his best position was as inside left. He shot fiercely with either foot, though naturally right footed. Intensive work had made his left foot just as potent. Above all, among all he was the only to win a World Cup.

Should Jimmy GReaves have done it too that year? His 44 goals in 57 games gave him an average of 0.77 to Charlton’s 0.46 but he was bitterly disappointed in 1966 and strangely ineffectual in Chile four years earlier. En route to the 1966 Finals, he scored four times in Oslo against Norway, and expressed his emotional hopes for England in the coming tournament. But he was, with his cheeky Cockney personality, never Alf Ramsey’s kind of player and when he dropped out injured after the second match against France in 1966, he was omitted even when fit again for the final.

Geoff Hurst, a very different kind of player, muscular and powerful in the air where Greaves was wonderfully quick in thought and movement with a remarkable ability to find space to score in the penalty area. Personally, I felt he should have been preferred for the final to Roger Hunt of Liverpool, whom Ramsey, to some ridicule, praised for “making space”. I am sure that if Greaves had the easy chance that Hunt missed for England in the first half he would easily have put it away. But Hurst with his third goal was the hero.

Gary Lineker came within a couple of goals of matching Bobby Charlton. I was at England’s lost match against Sweden in Stockholm in 1992 in the European Nations Cup. With 48 goals in 80 games, he was controversially pulled off by Graham Taylor, a disastrous England manager, to be replaced by Alan Smith whose role was allegedly to hold the ball up when England desperately needed the equaliser that they did not get.

Lineker achieved a triumph not matched by any other English player when he became top scorer of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, with half a dozen goals. Three of them came in Monterrey against Poland which gave England renewed life and hope in a tournament they had begun so badly. He would score twice against Paraguay in Mexico City, despite being brutally chopped across the throat by the opposing centre half. “It was an accident,” he said, wryly. “At least I hope it was.” And how well one remembers watching him score four goals for England against Spain in Madrid.

Rooney began his long career with England with a glorious all-round performance as a mere 17 year old against Turkey in Sunderland, when his precocious versatility saved a vital European qualifying match which looked sure to be lost. He was like Greaves, beyond doubt what Germans call a ‘wunderkind’, his finest England performance coming in Portugal in the European Finals of 2004, scoring four goals but alas kicked off the field early in the Lisbon quarterfinals versus Portugal themselves.

Yet if the World Cup is the ultimate criterion, he may be said to have failed; all three times. He was mediocre in Brazil last time, indifferent four years earlier in South Africa and sent off the field for an atrocious foul against Portugal in Germany in 2006 though he was badly provoked.

Unlike the other three, impeccable sportsmen, Rooney has an inflammable temper and his career has been punctuated by violent incidents and consequent suspensions. The record may still be his to gain; but statistics are mere statistics.

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