Continuing our series commemorating the 50th-anniversary of the Club’s FA Cup final triumph over Fulham, we look back at the role played by courageous Club captain and Hammers legend BILLY BONDS, who lifted the trophy at Wembley exactly 50 years ago...
How fitting.
Bobby Moore and Billy Bonds – voted the two Greatest Hammers of all-time – are the only West Ham United captains ever to have lifted the FA Cup during the Club’s illustrious 130-year history.
How fitting it is, too, that the former Claret & Blue team-mates curiously and coincidentally also ended up opposing each other in the 1975 FA Cup final.
Three seasons earlier, the dejected duo had trudged off the pitch at Old Trafford following our League Cup semi-final second replay defeat (2-3) at the hands of eventual winners Stoke City.
And while Moore had already memorably made it a hat-trick of triumphant Wembley finals a decade earlier with the FA Cup (1964), European Cup Winners’ Cup (1965) and, unforgettably, the 1966 FIFA World Cup, Bonds reckoned his opportunity to play in the shadows of the iconic Twin Towers had disappeared into a miserable, murky Manchester night forever.
“After those seven hours of football against Stoke, I feared my chances of ever making it to Wembley had gone,” Bonzo, now aged 78, told the Club’s Official Matchday Programme a few seasons ago. “And then in 1974/75, I picked up a niggly groin strain that had got progressively worse as we got into our FA Cup run. I’d tried resting, I’d seen specialists who wanted to operate, I’d had cortisone injections and had also taken some of the most horrible-tasting pain-killers to get me through all of our ties leading up to the final.
“I’d missed nine of our last dozen league matches, too, and going into that Fulham game it was touch and go whether I’d play. I warned John Lyall: ‘Look, I’m only 75% fit and I’m worried I won’t last 90 minutes.’ But John replied: ‘Bill, that’s fine, just get out there and go for it.’ Thankfully, I got through my first-ever Wembley final.”
In hindsight, there was no way that the Hammers boss was ever going to omit his captain courageous from his starting line-up exactly 50 years ago today.
“I’d have to set Billy apart from most of the other players I worked with,” Lyall later wrote in his autobiography Just Like My Dreams. “In terms of athleticism he was phenomenal and within football circles his fitness was legendary. He was one of West Ham’s all-time greats – his competitive instinct made him an inspiring captain and he became very influential in the careers of the younger players around him.”
Indeed, that is an opinion seconded by Bonds’ long-standing team-mate and friend, Sir Trevor Brooking.
“Bill is the most genuine person I’ve known in football,” insisted the 47-times capped England international in his own autobiography My Life in Football. “I’ve always considered him to be the best signing in the club’s history. Bill’s loyalty to West Ham inspired generations of players, including me.”
Despite only being 28 himself, William Arthur Bonds MBE – the son of a south London bus mechanic – was the man who would carry no passengers as he steered the Hammers forward on an unforgettable journey towards a 2-0 win over Fulham.
The buccaneering Bonds – who tops the Club’s all-time appearance charts with a seemingly invincible 799 outings during 21 seasons down West Ham way – had taken over the captaincy from Moore in March 1974, when the 108-times capped FIFA World Cup-winning captain swapped the Boleyn Ground for Craven Cottage.
And after unlacing his boots for the final time at the incredible age of 41 years and 226 days in April 1988, he then also led West Ham to two promotions during his 237 matches in the Hammers hot-seat.
“I’d been in awe of Bobby since I’d met him as a 14-year-old kid,” admitted Bonzo, whose entry into the pantheon of Claret & Blue legends was rubber-stamped when he was voted into second-spot in our 2018 poll of #50GreatestHammers. “My Sunday morning football team had won a trophy and our coach – Mr Flowers – arranged for a surprise guest to present the medals in our local school hall. This good-looking lad turned up with his wife-to-be and they watched us from the stage, while we did some skills and drills on the floor below.
“Born in Woolwich, I was a Charlton Athletic fan and, although I knew that the blond, well-built fellow sitting up there was a West Ham United player, I didn’t really know any more than that.
“But even then, it was obvious that this young lad, Bobby Moore, definitely had something about him. Seven years later, we ended up playing in the same side. Unbelievable!
“Everyone remembers Mooro playing for Fulham in the FA Cup final – and as a former West Ham team-mate, too – we all went and shook his hand because we had such tremendous respect for him.
“Alan Taylor’s two goals meant that I did actually get to walk up to the steps to the Royal Box and lift the FA Cup for West Ham United at Wembley,” continued Bonzo who would become the only Hammers captain to twice hoist the famous old trophy when he repeated the feat against top-flight Arsenal (1-0) five years later. “It was a great moment for those supporters, who’d always been brilliant to me from the moment I walked through the Green Street gates after signing from Charlton in 1967.
“I never underestimated their importance and always put in a shift for them because I respected and appreciated what those fans had to do to go out and earn a living every day,” insisted Billy, who received the third of his four richly-deserved Hammer of the Year awards during that 1974/75 FA Cup winning campaign. “I would’ve happily played down at the local park for nothing but was fortunate enough to get paid to be a footballer. Trust me, I realise just how lucky I was to have had such a fantastic career with West Ham United.
“It was also a great afternoon for my Dad, Arthur, who’d been a big part of my life both in terms of football and how he’d brought me up,” concluded Bonzo with one final glance towards 3 May 1975. “In his later years, Dad still had a window-cleaning round and, on the Monday morning, you could see the spring in his step as he walked off down the road with his ladders knowing that I now had an FA Cup winner’s medal in my pocket.”
