Sir Stanley Matthews(1915–2000)

Stanley Matthews was born on 1 February 1915 in Seymour Street, Hanley, one of the six towns of the Staffordshire Potteries, second of four sons of Jack Matthews, a barber and a featherweight prize-fighter known on the local circuit as the *Fighting Barber of Hanley*. His father set up the rope on a small piece of waste ground behind the shop and ran the four boys through running, skipping, weight training and shadow-boxing from when each could walk. Stanley joined the ground staff at Stoke City Football Club at fourteen as an office boy in 1929, signed amateur forms at fifteen, and made his first-team debut at seventeen on 19 March 1932 against Bury at the old Boothen End ground at the Victoria Ground. He played his last first-team match for Stoke on 6 February 1965 at the same ground, five days after his fiftieth birthday, against Fulham. The thirty-three years between were the longest first-class career in the history of English football.

The first decade made the technique. The right-wing position in 1930s English football was specialist work: small, quick, two-footed, able to beat a full-back on the outside with the right foot and on the inside with a feint that drew the leg before the body. Matthews built a single move on that base which the game came to call the *Matthews dribble*. He would shape to take the ball outside, halt, drop the left shoulder, transfer his weight in a single half-step to the outside foot, draw the defender's stance with him onto that wrong foot, and at the moment of commitment cut back inside on the other foot and accelerate. The full-backs could not stop knowing it was coming and could not stop being beaten by it. He played the move at international level for England from 1934, won fifty-four caps over twenty-three years (still the longest international career of any England player), and was selected as the first Footballer of the Year in 1948 and the first European Footballer of the Year in 1956.

He transferred from Stoke to Blackpool in 1947 for eleven thousand five hundred pounds, partly over a dispute with the Stoke board about an away-fixture bonus and partly to be closer to the Blackpool hotel he had bought for the family. The Blackpool years were the headline years. Blackpool reached the FA Cup Final three times in five seasons: lost to Manchester United in 1948, lost to Newcastle in 1951, beat Bolton on 2 May 1953 at Wembley in the match the country called the Matthews Final. It was the first FA Cup Final shown on live television. Blackpool were 3–1 down with twenty-two minutes left. Matthews, thirty-eight years old, set up two equalising goals for Stan Mortensen (who had a hat-trick on the day) and crossed the winner for Bill Perry in the last minute of normal time. The technical merit of the hat-trick was Mortensen's; the match took Matthews's name because the comeback was driven by his work in the last twenty minutes from the right wing, and because the country had decided that May that he should win the Cup he had been five times in the final for. He picked up his medal from the Queen.

He went back to Stoke in 1961 for three thousand five hundred pounds at the age of forty-six. He helped the club win promotion from the Second Division in his first full season back. He played his last first-team game in February 1965, three weeks after his fiftieth birthday. He never smoked, never drank, ate two meals a day (the second usually a glass of carrot juice), trained six days a week through every off-season of his career, and went on a Monday morning fast every week until the season started in August. The knighthood that the New Year Honours of 1965 gave him made him the first footballer to be knighted while still playing the professional game; the citation was for *services to association football*. He retired three weeks later. The Stoke testimonial in April 1965 brought thirty-five thousand to the Victoria Ground; the world XI Matthews picked included Lev Yashin and Ferenc Puskás. He coached in Malta, in Soweto (he was the first major European footballer to coach in apartheid-era South African black townships, on his own initiative), and in Toronto through the 1970s and 1980s.

His marriage to Betty Vallance, who had been his Stoke City landlady's daughter and the dressing-room secretary at the Victoria Ground when he was sixteen, lasted fifty-four years and produced two children; she died in 1999. He died at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary in Stoke on 23 February 2000, eighty-five years old, after a short illness. The funeral cortège ran from his sister's house in Lightwood to Stoke Minster, lined the whole way by mourners; his ashes are buried under the centre circle of the Britannia Stadium (now bet365 Stadium), the home ground of Stoke City. The Matthews name in its dominant English form, the patronymic of the gospel Matthew rooted in the Welsh March border counties, carries him on the right wing for as long as the moves that beat full-backs are remembered. The statue of him outside the bet365 Stadium has his right boot in the air in the half-shape of the dribble he never had to teach the country to name.