I never realized how good he was. To me, he was always 'the boss of that stylish Leicester team in the 70s'. So it came as a bit of a surprise to discover that as a player he was just as stylish as that team.
He made his name at Arsenal in the mid-50s. He played over 200 games for them as an inside forward, with a pretty good goal scoring record - 54 goals in total. Here's one of them - cutting inside the defender and curling it into the top corner. Kenny Dalglish would regularly get Goal of the Month for this kind of thing 25 years later.
18 months later he stars in a 2-2 draw at Everton - a historic occasion: the first League game under Goodison's new floodlights. No footage of this one - we'll just have to imagine it. Here's the match report:
In enjoying our floodlit honeymoon we must not rule out the possibility of future bleak cold nights that might tempt the greater part of the 54,000 crowd to stay home in front of the telly. But if I could be sure every time of seeing Bloomfield, sending out a stream of passes, I would endure Spitzbergen. The display from Bloomfield was nothing short of superb.
(By the way, Spitzbergen was the place in Norway where Italian polar explorers were famously stranded in 1928.)
He left Arsenal in 1960 and joined Birmingham City. Here he is in action against Blackpool a few months later. If the goal above is like Kenny Dalglish, here he does what Johan Cruyff did in the first minute of the 1974 World Cup Final - picking up the ball, striding gracefully past four opponents before being brought down in the box. Except the referee doesn't agree and waves play on. Jimmy's body language as he rises from the mud tells you what he thinks of the decision. (You'll have to do some work and click on this one as it's a video that can't be embedded):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvdkRXdxIbo&t=0m5s
(Speaking of Cruyff, it was after the 1974 World Cup that Bloomfield, so impressed with Holland's total football, tried to get Leicester to play the same way the following season. He very nearly became England manager that year after Ramsey's sacking).
He moved on to West Ham in 1965. On his home debut he scored with a diving header. No footage, but a great picture from the wonderful West Ham site 'theyflysohigh' (with Geoff Hurst looking on approvingly):
So there you are - scoring worldies, spraying passes all over the park, waltzing through opposition defences, diving headers - it seems he was the complete player. And it seems a mystery why he was never selected for England. He did win two Under-23 caps (playing alongside Brian Clough in 1956/57), and played once for the Football League XI, but never for the full team.
Well, I hope you have enough evidence there to show that the Leicester side of the 70s was very much built in his own image - attacking, skillful, stylish, entertaining - rather like the teams Dalglish and Cruyff built when they became managers.
So - did anyone actually see Jimmy in action?
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