Jude Bellingham is channelling the spirit of Duncan Edwards

The famous 1966 tableau of England World Cup winners has always been haunted by the ghost of the player who should have been at its centre. Duncan Edwards, who died in the 1958 Munich air crash, aged just 21, would without doubt have been the beating heart of that team. The youngest player to be capped by his country, Edwards had already won 18 caps by the time his life was so tragically cut short. 

But it’s not quite true to say that Edwards was not present in that indelible picture in which Bobby Moore, hoisted on team-mates’ shoulders, holds the Jules Rimet trophy aloft. Because you can see him in the eyes of Bobby Charlton, on the edge of the photo. Charlton, who was among those who lived through the plane crash in which his Manchester United team-mate and roommate died along with 22 others, played his storied career thereafter with a mixture of PTSD and survivor’s guilt. Legendary victories for club or country were always shadowed for him by the memory of that night, the golden lads who should have been there with him.

Charlton was not a histrionic man but he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to “big Dunc”. When a lifesize bronze statue to Edwards was unveiled in Dudley, his hometown in the West Midlands, in 1999 Charlton, accompanying his late pal’s mother, gave the address: “I find that I think about Duncan a lot,” he said, voice breaking. “I have seen all the players who in their time have been labelled the best in the world – Puskas, Di Stefano, Gento, Didi, John Charles and the rest – and not one of them has been as good as Big Duncan…I am not a person to dramatise things or dispense fulsome praise. A man is a good player or he is not. But Duncan Edwards was the greatest. I see him in my mind’s eye and I wonder that (sic) anyone should have so much talent. He was simply the greatest footballer of them all.”

Charlton was far from alone in that assessment. Matt Busby, the man who brought Edwards to Manchester United, described him as follows: “He was a colossus. Whatever was needed, he had it. He was immensely powerful. He was prodigiously gifted in the arts and crafts of the game. If there was ever a player who could be called a one man team that was Duncan Edwards. His death, as far as football is concerned, was the single biggest tragedy that has happened to England. He was and has always remained, to me, incomparable.” 

I grew up hearing some of those stories. Mum was born a mile or two from Edwards in the Black Country in the same year as him, 1936, and in my football-mad household there was only ever one properly sainted player; the one who could have achieved anything, the one who died in the year both he and my mother had come of age. 

I don’t know if Jude Bellingham was also raised on any of those legends, but no doubt he would have walked past that dramatic statue of Edwards in Dudley shopping centre as a boy – Bellingham grew up in neighbouring Stourbridge – and looked and wondered. It is impossible to compare players of different eras but the parallels between England’s current champion and the one that was cruelly lost feel a little uncanny. Aside from the proximity of their formative years, Bellingham too became England’s youngest player, and he too has always possessed that kind of preternatural strength of character and purpose and talent that has had team-mates and fans grasping for superlatives, knowing they are in the presence of a different kind of athlete. 

Other England players have been compared to Edwards over the years – Bryan Robson and Steven Gerrard in particular – but the resonance feels closer to Jude. There are only a handful of clips of Edwards in his brief prime on YouTube, but watching a couple of them at the weekend, and rereading Gordon Burn’s elegiac book Best and Edwards, about the two great lost souls of Manchester United’s post-war era, it is hard not to feel that Bellingham is channelling something of that spirit of 68 years ago. In the grainy clips Edwards does everything, is everywhere – just as Bellingham has been in the past week, even in the thin air of Mexico City. Edwards too was as good with either foot, could both glide past any opponent and outmuscle them; was always both his team’s best defender and its best attacker. He also never suffered fools, speaking his mind with those same warm, confrontational Black Country vowels that Bellingham rolls out in post-match interviews. (His wonderful blunt “whatever?” to the suggestion of ITV’s Gabriel Clark that Thomas Tuchel had questioned the team’s quality in Miami was pure Dudley).  

Jude, as far as I know, has never spoken of Dunc, though while a player at Borussia Dortmund he did donate a signed shirt to the Duncan Edwards Peace Field charity in Dudley, which takes inspiration from the 1914 Christmas Day match at Flanders in raising money for football pitches in conflict zones. The Dudley Museum last week paid tribute to Bellingham (and to his great Black Country-born England teammate and friend Morgan Rogers) in a post that linked them with the borough’s most famous footballing son. The Labour group on Dudley council last week called for Bellingham to be awarded its highest honour, the freedom of the borough. 

There is a wonderful story in Burn’s book, of when Bobby Charlton was billeted with Edwards when they did their national service together at barracks in Shrewsbury (close enough to Old Trafford to make it to match days). A year older than Charlton, Edwards was already an old hand when his young friend arrived. Seeing that Charlton had been given a mattress with a spring coming through it, Charlton recalled how Edwards simply picked up the iron framed bed and its mattress, “you’re not having that”, put the lot on his shoulder, and replaced it with another. 

The life of a footballer in the 1950s – living in digs, apprenticed to local tradesmen, paid a few pounds – could hardly have been further removed from Bellingham’s millionaire life as one of Madrid’s Galacticos. But if the World Cup is to come home finally, and against the odds, you know for a fact it will be because Bellingham has picked up this England team and borne it on his broad shoulders, and not taken no for an answer. And if that happens you can rest assured that at the victory celebrations in Dudley, there will be one or two of the older, mistier eyes in the crowd who will see a ghost finally laid to rest.

Photograph by Reg Burkett/Getty Images