Nobby Stiles
Norbert Peter Stiles MBE was an English footballer and manager. He played for England for five years, winning 28 caps and scoring one goal. With Manchester United, he won two League titles and one European Cup. In 1971, he became the first player to win the Premier League title with the club. He later became a manager at Preston North End.
About Nobby Stiles in brief
Norbert Peter Stiles MBE was an English footballer and manager. Stiles played for England for five years, winning 28 caps and scoring one goal. He played every minute of England’s victorious 1966 FIFA World Cup campaign. With the Red Devils, he won two League titles and one European Cup. He is one of only three Englishmen, alongside Bobby Charlton and Ian Callaghan, to have won both the World Cup and Europe Cup. After 395 matches and 19 goals, Manchester United sold Stiles to Middlesbrough for £20,000 in 1971. Two years later he became a player-coach at Preston North End. He died in a car crash on a motorway in North Manchester in 1998. He was buried in Collyhurst, a working class district of North Manchester, attending the local St Patrick’s Catholic School. The son of Charlie, a manager of an undertakers’ parlour in a family business, and Kitty, who supplemented the family income working as a machinist, he was born in the cellar of the family home during an air raid. He had several teeth missing and wore dentures, the removal of which prior to matches gave him a gap-toothed expression which had the potential to scare. He also needed strong contact lenses when playing, and wore thick spectacles off the field.
His best performance in an England shirt was probably the semi-final of that tournament against Portugal, where he was given the job of marking the prolific Eusébio. His post-match celebration featured Stiles dancing on the Wembley pitch, holding the World World Cup trophy in one hand and his false teeth in the other. His simple passing game and fearless ball-winning skills saw his swift conversion into a holding midfielder player of a type now a feature of all top teams but still a rarity at a time when forward lines consisted of five players and the midfield was restricted to covering half-backs. He made his Manchester United debut as a full back in October 1960 against Bolton Wanderers. In 1967, Stiles won his second League championship medal with Manchester United, but greater club honours were to come. He became United’s first midriff to lift the first English club’s main trophy, the European Cup, with just a few minutes left to score against Alex Stepney. In 1971, he became the first player to win the Premier League title with the club. He spent two years as manager of Manchester United before being sacked by the club in April 1973. He later became a manager at Preston.
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This page is based on the article Nobby Stiles published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
