Sir Stanley Matthews(1915–2000)

Stanley Matthews was born on 1 February 1915 in Hanley, one of the six towns of the Staffordshire Potteries, the son of a barber and prize-fighter who ran his four boys through running, skipping and shadow-boxing from the time each could walk. Stanley joined the ground staff at Stoke City at fourteen, made his first-team debut at seventeen in March 1932, and played his last first-team match for Stoke in February 1965, five days after his fiftieth birthday. The thirty-three years between were the longest first-class career in the history of English football.

The first decade made the technique. On the right wing he built a single move the game came to call the Matthews dribble: a shape to go outside, a halt, a drop of the shoulder, the defender's weight drawn onto the wrong foot, and the cut back inside and away. The full-backs could not stop knowing it was coming and could not stop being beaten by it. He won fifty-four caps for England over twenty-three years, the longest international career of any England player, and was the first Footballer of the Year in 1948 and the first European Footballer of the Year in 1956.

He moved to Blackpool in 1947, and the Blackpool years brought the headline. Blackpool reached three FA Cup Finals in five seasons and won the third, against Bolton at Wembley on 2 May 1953, in the first final shown on live television. Three goals to one down with twenty-two minutes left, Matthews, thirty-eight years old, made two goals for Stan Mortensen's hat-trick and crossed the winner in the last minute. The country had decided that May that he should win the Cup he had reached the final of five times, and the match has been called the Matthews Final ever since. He took his medal from the Queen.

He went back to Stoke in 1961 at the age of forty-six and helped the club win promotion in his first full season back. He never smoked, never drank, trained six days a week through every off-season of his career, and played top-flight football into his fiftieth year. The New Year Honours of 1965 made him the first footballer knighted while still playing, for services to association football. He coached afterwards in Malta, in Canada, and, on his own initiative, in the Black townships of apartheid-era South Africa, the first major European footballer to do so.

He died at Stoke on 23 February 2000, eighty-five years old. The funeral cortège, lined the whole way by mourners, ran to Stoke Minster, and his ashes lie under the centre circle of Stoke City's ground. The Matthews name, the patronymic of the gospel Matthew rooted in the Welsh-March counties, carries him on the right wing for as long as the moves that beat full-backs are remembered. The statue outside the stadium has his right boot in the air, in the half-shape of the dribble he never had to teach the country to name.