Matthews—Knight Among Worlds Soccer Players

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30653, 20 January 1965, Page 13

Matthews—Knight Among Worlds Soccer Players

THE conferment of a knighthood on Stanley Matthews, the 49-year-old Stoke City footballer, has been rapturously received in Britain and noted with satisfaction in every country where soccer is played. There is no doubt that Matthews would be in every-

one’s list of the 10 greatest soccer players of ail time. Matthews is not the first man associated with soccer to be given a knighthood. Sir Frederick Wall and Sir Stanley Rous received this honour while secretary of the English Football Association, but it is believed that Matthews is the first to be knighted while still an active player. The announcement was a little masterpiece of timing. Matthews will be 50 next month, this will be his last season as a player, and he will bow out of a game he has adorned for 34 years next May in a carnival of soccer when his own selected team plays a World XI in Britain. This match will quite probably be the greatest swan song that any sportsman has ever had, for thousands will want to be there and millions will have to be satisfied with second best, a seat before the television set.

Matthews has been a firstclass soccer player. for so long that his passing will be a sentimental occasion for every follower of the sport, and for many who have less love for the game. For Matthews has throughout his playing career been the epitome of that much ill-used word “sportsmanship.” A professional through and through, he has yet brought to soccer a touch of the old4ame amateur. Never a breath of scandal has touched a man who has gone on and on playing the game he loves with a dedication that few have matched. He has played for England on more than 50 occasions, and this figure might have been doubled but for the war years and the frailties of the English selectors on several occasions. A brilliant individualist, Matthews was often omitted from English teams because the selectors considered in their wisdom that he was not a

team man or that he wasted too many openings by holding the ball for too long. Yet, had Matthews been born in one of the South American countries quite possibly at 49 he would still be a regular international—or even the country’s President. For his genius and popular appeal would have swept all before him. There are hundreds of stories about Matthews: they have been spread by every player who has been detailed to mark him and has left the field a wiser man. The secret of Matthews’s football has been probed and investigated by hundreds of experts. They' all agree on one fact: that Matthews is a soccer-playing genius, and that as a genius he cannot be pinned down for he does only what is completely natural to him. But Matthews had to work and train to win this position. His greatest weapons are superb bail control, passes and centres that he can drop on to a sixpence, tremendous speed over the first vital 15-20 yards, and perfect balance. These combine to mesmerise his opponents who can only see the bail as if attached to Matthews’s boots, his twinkling feet never still, his body seemingly going one way but actually going another. He has left the greatest backs in the world flatfooted and floundering. His triumphs are legion, but none more so than the 1953 Cup final when he turned a 1-3 deficit against Bolton Wanderers into a 4-3 victory for Blackpool in the most glorious one-man soccer showpiece of the century. Soccer players and supporters everywhere salute Sir Stanley Matthews, a knight among footballers.