Mick Duxbury: Beating Brazil at the Maracana and my England experiences

“Every time he took the ball further I said shoot!” he recalls of that famous night when England beat Brazil on their own turf.

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“Then he took it on again. I was just thinking, ‘Shoot Barnesy!’ “Then he took it on again!

“But in the end he put it in the back of the net.”

Duxbury was in England’s starting line-up that night, one of 10 appearances for his country.

It had been quite a journey from his beginnings in Accrington to victory at the home of arguably the world’s most revered football nation.

“Brazil were my team growing up - the 1970 World Cup team with Pele, Tostao and all these great players,” he says.

“To actually play against them and beat them in the Maracana, it was such a highlight.

“Back home they said it wasn’t one of the best Brazil sides ever but that wasn’t our fault. You have to play against whoever’s there.

“There were only 60,000 at the Maracana in a 200,000 stadium and the pitch was shocking, but I remember it for the right reasons and John Barnes’ goal just topped it off.

“And I finally got a Brazil shirt. I’d wanted that since day one.”

Not that Duxbury knows whose shirt he actually got that night.

“People ask me that, I know it was the number 11 but I don’t know the lad’s name!” he laughs.

It was the stand-out moment in what Duxbury admits was otherwise a difficult England career.

Despite being established player with Manchester United, the defender admits he was intimidated by the prospect of going into the England dressing room for the first time when he was called up in 1983.

“It wasn’t the football side for me but the social side, that was the part I always found hard,” he said.

“It was the integration with new players I didn’t know from other teams.

“Even nowadays I don’t find it easy, in new social groups. I’m not the most talkative person. If I’m in a group I will be one who will sit and listen.

“I think I did find it intimidating with England. It wasn’t because of the other players. They always tried to integrate you.

“At the time there was Bryan Robson and Ray Wilkins from Manchester United, Remi Moses got in a few squads and Gary Bailey sometimes.

“Then it was people like Glenn Hoddle, Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence, top names in English football.

“Bobby Robson was great too, a lovely man who couldn’t do enough for you.

“It was just me and how I was. For my first game Steve Coppell was there from Manchester United but I don’t think anyone else was, and on another trip there wasn’t anybody for whatever reason.”

Duxbury’s debut came in a dead rubber qualifier in Luxembourg, after England had already missed on Euro 84.

“We had a decent victory and I think I did okay but there was hooliganism at the game and in the town,” he said.

“It was sad, it was just that time that football was going through.

“Some of my England games stand out for the wrong reasons unfortunately, for mistakes I made.

“We played the USSR in a friendly at Wembley, it was one of the first live Saturday afternoon games and I made a horrendous boob.

“I went to bring the ball down and I fell over, then they went through and scored. All I wanted to do was dig a hole at Wembley.

“The next day Accrington Carnival was on and I said I’d open it. You can imagine how I felt but I went to it, you’ve got to carry on.

“At under 21 level I wasn’t bad, we won the European Championships, but at full level I did really struggle.”

After the honour of playing for England, Duxbury had the unusual distinction of playing against his own country in the final match of his career in 1996.

After spells with Blackburn Rovers and Bradford City he had reached the end of two years with Golden FC in Hong Kong, when a unique opportunity arose.

“It’s a great pub quiz question, who played for and against his country?” Duxbury says.

“It wasn’t an international as such, but England played in China ahead of Euro 96 and then we played them in their last game in the Far East before going back.

“It was our club, it wasn’t a Hong Kong XI, although they called it that. Our club put up the money to play them.

“I had a great time in Hong Kong. The lifestyle was great for the family. We could spent a lot of time together and see different places in the Far East.

“When the England game happened I thought we were going to get absolutely battered. What are you doing playing England?

“We brought one or two players in. Dave Watson came out from Everton to play for us.

“We only got beat 1-0 and we had a chance to draw 1-1. There was a lot of bad press in England about that.”

If the result was not making good headlines on the back pages for England, the events of that evening made the front pages as Paul Gascoigne and some of his international team-mates were photographed having drinks poured down their throats in a makeshift dentist’s chair in a night club.

“We went out for a meal that night with the England lads, we went to this famous restaurant in Hong Kong called the Jumbo Floating Restaurant and both teams ate together,” Duxbury remembers.

“We were leaving Hong Kong the next day, so we went to get some last minute things sorted.

“The England lads went out into Hong Kong. There was a night club called the China Jump and there was a dentist’s chair.

“They got a lot of stick about that and I think on the plane home one of the TVs got broken, so it was all getting a bit messy.

“The spotlight was on for Euro 96, but they turned it round.

“Gascoigne scored that great goal against Scotland and somebody came and poured the drink like in the dentist’s chair for the celebration, so they used it.

“I hadn’t actually given a decision that the England match was going to be my final game of football.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen when we came back home. I went training at Accrington Stanley but nothing came of it.

“But ultimately if you can say your last game of professional football was against the country you played for, it was nice.”

Tomorrow: The night I beat Maradona and Barcelona... and I was actually a boyhood Burnley fan