SCORERS
Rojas for Chile
HT 0/0
Final
Santiago
Brazil 3 Czechoslovakia 1
Gilmar; Santos, D., Schroiff; Tichy, Novak;
Mauro, Zozimo, Pluskal, Popluhar,
Santos, N.; Zito, Didì, Masopust; Pospichal,
Garrincha, Vavà, Scherer. Kvasniak,
Amarildo, Zagalo. Kadraba, Jelinek.
SCORERS
Amarildo, Zito, Vavà for Brazil
Masopust for Czechoslovakia
HT 1/1
ENGLAND
1966
Background to 1966
The 1966 World Cup was the first for thirty-two years to be won by the home side. To this extent England’s achievement was an unusual one, and indeed their form in the exciting, pleasing semi-final and Final made up for much of the tedium which had gone before.
It was a passionate and controversial World Cup; controversy persisting long after the dramatic Final was lost and won, thanks to the shot by Geoff Hurst of England which struck the underside of the bar and came down—or did not come down—behind the line. It was a World Cup distinguished by the enigmatic presence, and final triumph, of Alf Ramsey, the collapse of the Brazilians, the astonishing prowess of the North Koreans, the turbulence of the Argentinians, the absolute superiority of the Europeans over the South Americans—who cried conspiracy and threatened mass withdrawal, in consequence. It was a World Cup in which, for the second consecutive occasion, the fabled Pelé was laid low by injury, though this time in displeasing circumstances; in which Hurst scored the first hat-trick in a World Cup Final, and extra time was needed for the first time since 1934.
Whatever else may be said about the tournament’s quality, the merits of England’s win, there is no doubt that the Final was a glorious climax, the best there had been since 1954, and a great deal better than the one-sided Brazilian exhibition of 1970. Again, though England may not at any time have matched the technique and artistry of the Brazilian teams which won the two previous competitions, though they may have struggled all the way to the semi-final putting effort above creativity, hard work above joy in playing, the team had its undoubted stars. The commanding Bobby Moore, captain and left-half, was properly voted best player of the tournament, and this was followed by the immensely popular Bobby Charlton’s election as European Footballer of the Year. Then there was Gordon Banks, whose splendid displays excelled even those of the veteran Lev Yachine—playing in his last World Cup—not to mention Geoff Hurst and the indefatigable Alan Ball, the two true heroes of the World Cup Final.
Alf Ramsey
We have met Ramsey, in this World Cup saga, before; as England’s right-back in Brazil, when the United States so saucily and painfully twisted the lion’s tail. As though this were not trauma enough, he had also played in the team which was beaten 6–3 at Wembley by Hungary in November 1953.
Born to a poor family in Dagenham, the London ‘overspill’ town, in 1920, his early ambition was to become a successful grocer. As a footballer, he was a curiously late developer. Southampton discovered him during his Army service when he was an inside-forward, but eventually converted him to full-back where his strength, vision of play and somewhat deliberative approach put him more at his ease. By December 1948, he was good enough to play for England against Switzerland, but only as a second choice. In the summer of 1949 his career took a crucial turn when Arthur Rowe signed him for Tottenham Hotspur in a deal involving the Welsh international left-winger Ernie Jones, and which, overall, valued Ramsey at the surprisingly low figure of £21,000. It must have been the best bargain Tottenham ever made.
For Ramsey fitted instantly into the new, push-and-run, quick, wall-passing tactics devised by Rowe. Though he was not the captain of the team, his nickname at Spurs, ‘The General’, shows clearly enough who was in command. His moral influence over the side was immense. He may have lacked pace, but his positional sense was admirable, his tackling strong, and above all he made consistently fine use of the ball. It was long before the days of the overlapping full-back, but Ramsey was what one might call a constructive full-back, whose thoughtful, scientific play set the tone for the whole ebullient team. He was also a dab hand at penalty kicks, with one of which he would temporarily save England’s unbeaten home record, in October 1953 against FIFA at Wembley. When Hungary destroyed it a few weeks later, Ramsey again, to some degree, had the last word; or at least the last goal—from the penalty spot.
His approach to the game, his unfailingly thoughtful play, made it probable he would succeed as a manager, and so he did, taking Ipswich Town, a small East Anglian club which had entered the Football League only in 1937, from the Third Division to the Championship of the First, an extraordinary feat, achieved with a team of obscure and rehabilitated players.
When, after the 1962 World Cup, it was decided to appoint a full-time team manager with no other interests—Walter Winterbottom, disappointed in his ambitions for the Football Association secretaryship, had resigned—Ramsey was not the first choice. Indeed, he was probably no better than the third; Jimmy Adamson, the dedicated Burnley player who had coached the 1962 team, being first. He turned the job down.
Ramsey, who must have known he had got all he was ever likely to get out of his Ipswich side, poised on the verge of rapid disintegration, accepted the job, but on the specific understanding that he and he alone picked the team, that the Selection Committee which had for so many years theoretically held sway over the team manager would disappear. Ramsey never pretended to have much time for selectors and their ilk.
Ramsey built his success and his managerial reputation on the fact of being a player’s man, and there is no doubt that it was his strength during the years which led to his success in 1966. Winterbottom, by contrast, had been, for all his virtues and his charm—a quality which scarcely distinguished Ramsey—an ‘Establishment’ man. He had been Sir Stanley Rous’ choice, Sir Stanley’s protégé, a theorist and an idealist whose chief concern, by his own admission, was the development of coaching. The players, who gave him a hard time when he first took over, came to like and accept him, but for all his own career in professional football, he did not move on their level, live in their world, talk in their terms. Ramsey did. Indeed, he seemed uncomfortable in any other world, afflicted by a feeling of social and cultural inadequacy reflected in a suspicion of the unfamiliar, a deep mistrust of the Press, a lurking xenophobia. But however tense and taut he might be with the world at large, Ramsey with his players was generally relaxed, friendly, avuncular, even humorous, cheerfully joining in their training games, never losing his authority but never wielding it in the paternalist manner of a Vittorio Pozzo.
The Contenders England
Ramsey’s first international fixture, against France, was held in Paris in the Nations Cup early in 1963, and was a disaster; England were thrashed 5–2, though goalkeeping errors made the defeat look worse than it should have been. Having taken stock, Ramsey then quickly rebuilt the side, and by the European tour of the summer of 1963 it was a very good one; well balanced, incisive, well ‘motivated’. Ramsey had also made it his business to do something which Winterbottom had not done over his sixteen years; he appointed a team doctor. As we have seen, it was only when Peter Swan, given dangerously mistaken treatment, almost died in Viña del Mar during the 1962 World Cup, that the FA woke up to the need for a regular medical adviser.
They were especially fortunate in the man they chose, a gifted Harley Street consultant called Dr Alan Bass, Arsenal’s team doctor, a native of Leeds, who carried his knowledge lightly, got on splendidly with the enigmatic Ramsey and his trainer, Harold Shepherdson, and just as well with all the players.
On that 1963 tour, Ramsey’s relations with the Press were for once as good as they were with the players. He conceived and patiently explained successful tactics, in which wingers were of the essence; vital in their role of getting round the back of a packed defence and pulling the b
all back into the goalmouth.
Gradually, as we shall see, he abandoned this tactical conception in favour of a 4–3–3 system, modulating at times into a 4-4-2, which eschewed orthodox wingers, putting its emphasis on hard work and hard running.
That his strategic grasp was less than impeccable was shown the following summer, when he took England to play in an international tournament organised by Brazil. England lost the opening match in Rio against Brazil 5–1, and did not win either of their two subsequent games in the competition, against Argentina and Portugal. Before the Brazilian match, moreover, Ramsey had a taste of the gamesmanship he was likely to meet in major international football. The Brazilians, having fixed the kick-off time, blithely arrived over an hour late, while the English players sat and fretted in their dressing-room. Shades of Pozzo’s foresight before the 1938 World Cup Final. Ramsey would see that nothing like this happened again.
The 1964 tour was also significant for his collision with Bobby Moore. The tour, ill-planned, began with a meaningless game against the United States in New York, followed by the long haul down to Rio and inadequate time to prepare. In New York, certain English players broke curfew, but more serious was the stand made by several, Moore among them, against a training session organised on the tour by Ramsey. The ‘revolution’ quickly petered out, but had its strange, though not uncharacteristic, sequel in Ramsey’s refusal to confirm Moore as England’s captain till the very eve of the subsequent match against Northern Ireland in Belfast the following October.
Ramsey has a long memory, and it was some while before he and Moore achieved a reconciliation. Indeed, before the 1966 World Cup there seemed a real possibility that Moore would be replaced by the infinitely less commanding, but considerably more aggressive, Norman Hunter of Leeds United. It was perhaps not entirely fortuitous that during the pre-World Cup tour Moore’s closest companion should be another East Londoner, another player never truly persona grata with Ramsey, Tottenham’s Jimmy Greaves.
Players like Greaves, whose immense natural talent allowed them to do in a flash what other players could not achieve with endless effort, clearly worried Ramsey. Greaves, a goal-scoring prodigy in his teens, manifestly worried him. Ramsey was not at bottom without his own particular humour, but Greaves’s irreverence was not something he could easily accept or understand. Indeed, his first real fracas with the Press had come a year before, on tour in Gothenburg, when he omitted Greaves from the team, said there were no injured players, then was incensed when newspapers reported that Greaves had been dropped. It was, however, equally characteristic of the man that he should in due course cool down and have the generosity to apologise.
Greaves, on the summer tour, looked fit and sharp again after long months fighting the effects of jaundice. He scored four splendid goals in Norway but did much less well in Denmark, where on a dreadful pitch England won crudely, 2–0.
Since Ramsey’s accession, and since the 1962 World Cup, the team had been greatly modified. Gordon Banks, making his debut in May 1963 at home to Brazil, and letting in, to Ramsey’s displeasure, a wildly swerving free kick by Pepe, had confirmed himself as the best goalkeeper since Bert Williams; perhaps since Frank Swift.
A Sheffield man who played for Leicester City, he combined physical strength and courage with astounding agility. His high cheekbones, his narrow eyes, gave his face an almost Red Indian, rather than a Yorkshire, look. He was modest, quiet and diligent. Ramsey, he said, on the day before the World Cup Final, had convinced him that ‘my mind’s got not to wander’. Nor did it.
To partner the still excellent Ray Wilson at full-back Ramsey had chosen George Cohen, an immensely amiable Londoner who had played all his professional football with Fulham, a strong, fast, endlessly determined player with a penchant for overlapping and a bottomless good humour.
At right-half there was … Nobby Stiles, the players’ player, bête noire of the purists, a tiny, toothless, urban, gesticulating figure, perenially in the bad books of referees and opponents, forever urging on, castigating, his own defenders, a player with no obvious physical or technical gifts, a poor passer of the ball, but a formidable marker and an extraordinary competitor. By the end of this World Cup he would be the player whom most of the footballing world loved to hate, yet his was the satisfaction of nullifying Eusebio, the tournament’s leading scorer and, till then, most dangerous forward.
The attack was clearly more of a problem than the defence. Bobby Charlton had been transformed, by Ramsey and by Manchester United, from a flowing, accelerating left-winger with a terrific shot in either foot into the general of the team, the role that he preferred. ‘You’re active all the time, you’re in the game,’ he declared. He exercised this role, however, in a very different manner from Johnny Haynes. A naturally more gifted player in terms of technique—though Haynes’s ball control was often undervalued—he had none of Haynes’s vision of play, eye for an opening, great strategic sense. His long, powerful crossfield passes were usually cause for a delighted roar at Wembley, but often they were merely lateral and spectacular, making no real impact. Yet his sinuous ability to beat a man with a lovely swerve could set problems to a defence which then found itself obliged to commit another defender, while his glorious shooting when he did come forward was a harbinger of goals.
His brother Jack, of Leeds United, had become the regular centre-half. A veteran by now, his spectacular improvement had much to do with the new spirit at Leeds inculcated by its manager, Don Revie. Charlton, a tall, tough, laconic man from a miner’s family, with a miner’s robust attitudes, could scarcely have been more of a contrast to his gentler brother, whom he so admired. As children, it appeared, they had never been close. There was none of Bobby’s Prince Myshkin-like quality about Jack who, immeasurably less gifted, relied on strength, experience and intelligence.
Geoff Hurst had been something of a marginal choice for the party. When a journalist in Oslo expressed surprise that the brilliant young Chelsea forward Peter Osgood had not been chosen, Hurst replied, with uncharacteristic bitterness, ‘Instead of me, I suppose’. Like Bobby Moore, he owed much to the coaching and percipience of West Ham’s manager, Ron Greenwood. He was superbly built, tall, with immensely muscular thighs, a fine jumper, shot and header, but he had originally been no more than a moderate wing-half, and Greenwood had countermanded a decision to sell him to a Second Division team. The son of an Oldham Athletic half-back, Hurst had moved early to Essex, for whom he had played cricket. He was marvellously philosophical about the harsh treatment he often got from opponents, superbly unselfish and intelligent in his movement ‘off ’ the ball, especially to the left wing.
Martin Peters was a third West Ham player in the party, a quiet, almost withdrawn, Londoner whom Ramsey had described as ‘ten years ahead of his time’, technically exceptional, a right-half by preference and position, who had just ‘made’ the England team in time the previous May. Ramsey had chosen him against Yugoslavia at Wembley and he had done well; many had felt his choice long overdue. Now he would blossom in a new role as a midfield player exploiting his flair for the unexpected, Panglossian appearance in the penalty area.
The little, red-haired, twenty-one-year-old Alan Ball, Blackpool’s inside-forward, was quintessentially the kind of player Alf Ramsey wanted. He had first capped him on his twentieth birthday the previous year against Yugoslavia in Belgrade. The son of a former professional inside-forward, whom physically he closely resembled and who had been the Svengali of his career, Ball was a passionate enthusiast. Some felt he was neither fish nor fowl, that he lacked the subtlety of a great midfield player, the power and acceleration of a great goal-scorer; but in the Final none would play better or contribute more than he.
Roger Hunt, the Liverpool inside-forward, was another Ramsey player par excellence, fair-haired, sturdily built, as quiet as Martin Peters but much less talented, a doer of good by stealth, but essentially a workhorse.
England were drawn in Group I, which would play all i
ts matches but one at Wembley; Uruguay and France were scheduled to play at the White City, a gesture towards the owners, who had allowed it to be used as World Cup headquarters. The fourth team in the group was Mexico, and England’s passage to the quarter-finals seemed pretty secure. It was unfortunate that a Football Association booklet on the competition should give the impression that should England win the group they would play the quarter-final at Wembley but the semi-final at Everton. In fact, no such decision had been taken, as FIFA’S own rules made clear. Nor, as some supposed, had it been decided that the winners of Group I would, if they cleared the quarter-finals, automatically play the semi-finals at Wembley. Instead, it was left to the World Cup committee to choose the respective venues, and it was not without considerable discussion and disagreement that it did so.
Indeed, given the nature of the discussion, it is especially ironical that certain European and South American journalists, pursuing what one might perhaps call the Conspiracy Theory of football, should darkly have blamed Sir Stanley Rous for loading the dice in favour of England.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. What in fact happened was that a strong group urged that England play their semifinal at Wembley, on purely—or pragmatically—economic grounds. This group argued that if England played at Wembley, it would be in front of a 90,000 crowd, whereas if Russia and West Germany played there, probably the crowd would be no bigger than 50,000. At Liverpool, the crowd would probably be a ‘capacity’ one, whoever played there. Rous argued strongly against this, but was finally persuaded to accept the majority’s view.
Brazil
Brazil were in the Liverpool-Manchester Group iii, though all their matches would be on Everton’s ground. Once again the ‘draw’ had been a somewhat premeditated affair, the admirable Dr Hilton Gosling having long since picked out the pleasant Lymm for his team’s headquarters. Vicente Feola was back again as team manager. In the event the selection would display a reverence for the past bordering on gerontophilia, but in prospect Brazil seemed well equipped to defend their title and even to win it a third consecutive time. Amazingly, they had not only stayed faithful to most of the old guard of 1962, they had even recalled Bellini and Orlando, their two centre-backs of 1958.
The Story of the World Cup Page 15
