Negative mood around World Cup feels like before 1966 tournament
JEFF POWELL: The negative mood around England’s World Cup campaign feels just like before the 1966 tournament – but that’s where the similarities end… I’m yet to see one taxi flying the St George’s flag
- Negative mood around the World Cup feels like it did before 1966 tournament
- There is also feeling that this England team are no longer cutting the mustard
- Sir Alf Ramsey would not have bowed to public pressure like Gareth Southgate
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Ten minutes before kick-of on the sultry Saturday afternoon of July 11, 1966 England supporters were still paying at the turnstiles for admission to see the lads play Uruguay in the opening match of the World Cup Finals.
Others had purchased tickets at their local newsagent as they picked up the morning paper. Maximum allowance ten per person!
The late walk-up along Wembley Way buoyed attendance to a respectable 87,148 but that was still more than ten thousand below the old Empire Stadium’s capacity at the time of 98,600.
Like in 1966 when England won the World Cup, there’s only a lukewarm sense of anticipation ahead of the tournament
There is also a feeling that Gareth Southgate’s side are no longer as good as they were
The shortfall reflected somewhat lukewarm anticipation in this nation where football was born but where the FA’s pompous, stuffed-shirt refusal to enter the first three World Cups had been followed by as many hapless failures once they finally deigned to take part.
To be honest the enthusiasm does not feel that much more animated as England approach their first match in Qatar. At the time of writing I have yet to see a black London taxi flying the red and white cross of St George in the streets of London.
No doubt the pubs will be busy come kick off but the venue – who really wants to travel to a desert as culturally repressive as it climatically oppressive? – and the obscure first opponents – would you recognise one Iranian footballer in the street? – seem to have taken the edge off it all.
Perhaps, too, a sense that this new England are no longer cutting the mustard. The same negative mood was just as pervasive all those 56 years ago. But that is where the similarities end.
When the manager back then, Alf Ramsey, was asked for his prediction on the eve of the Finals, he said: ‘England will win the World Cup.’
No shilly-shallying. No prevaricating. None of today’s yawning waffle about how ‘we really hope we can go deep in this tournament.’ Or how ‘it would be a greater achievement to reach this semi-final than when we got to the final of the Euros.’ Or how about ‘let’s not tempt fate.’
Certainly no bowing to public opinion. No concession to the kind of media pressure which urged Gareth Southgate into his choice for filling the last seat on the plane to Qatar. If Ramsey had not fancied the James Maddison of his day, that young man would have stayed at home in Leicester.
Sir Alf Ramsey said before the 1966 tournament that England were going to win the World Cup
Our 60s generation were clamouring for Jimmy Greaves, the greatest of all English goal-scorers, to play in the World Cup Final even if not quite fully recovered from injury sustained earlier in the tournament.
To which Ramsey responded thus: ‘Mister Greaves is not fit.’ Step forward Geoff Hurst to score the World Cup’s one and only Final hat-trick. And with it the winning of England’s solitary World Cup.
As for the political correctness which Gareth Southgate wears even more ostentatiously than his waistcoat, Ramsey was about as woke as Donald Trump.
Were he still alive, Sir Alf as he became would have been asking the present England squad what the hell they think they are up to in Doha.
Ramsey would have had no truck with captains in rainbow armbands, his squad counselling underpaid stadium construction workers traumatised by the industrial-scale deaths of their colleagues, his players spending hours protesting against human rights abuses or agonising over whether to carry on taking the knee in reverence of an American who although subjected to an horrifically illegal death was after all a convicted criminal.
All worthy causes, for sure.
But just as certainly, nothing to do with the job at hand. Nor, by the way, is all that madcap posing for photographs which make them look like loonies. No wonder our great white hope Harry Kane is exhausted.
As for the banning of alcohol in the stadiums, who would seriously object to that following the booze inflamed hooliganism at the last Euros Final?
Southgate had complained about how the mid-season timing of this first winter World Cup had left him little or no time for re- focussing minds on Qatar 2022. So shouldn’t he have devoted every waking minute since last week’s arrival in the Middle East thinking about the first game?
Apparently not, since the England manager’s reaction to FIFA’s request for all the teams to concentrate solely on the sport was to say: ‘We are not here only for the football.’
He spoke, of course, through that late-sprouting Che Guevara beard which is for intellectual activists. So may I presume to allow the spirit of he who became Sir Alf Ramsey to speak through me: ‘We are here to win football matches.’
And so say most of us. If not so much the footballers who are so busy brandishing their self-righteous credentials. Perhaps in an effort to assuage feelings of guilt, since if they feel so strongly about tyrannical repression in the Middle East the only statement of real impact would have been not to go.
The proof of that was in the sporting boycotts of South Africa which helped bring about the fall of apartheid. In that, the handful of English cricketers who put cash before conscience became pariahs. A thought which might prey on Messrs Beckham, Lineker and Neville as they take the Sheikh’s shilling.
Not that Sir Alf would have concerned himself with the political niceties. Ramsey’s take on diplomacy was evident when asked his opinion of the Argentinians after England narrowly won a bruising ’66 quarter final in which opposing captain Antonio Rattin was sent off: ‘They are animals.’
The New Argentina – as it was proclaimed by Eva Peron long before Lionel Messi was born – are virtually joint favourites with Neymar Junior’s Brazil in Qatar.
No wonder, with Saint Gareth’s thoughts so preoccupied with the controversies, that less than 5,000 England fans are expected to pay the price of going to Doha. The last Spartan hotel rooms there are up for grabs at more than £4,000, for only so far as the end of the group stage.
The cost for World Cup followers has changed out of all economic proportion since England’s only glory. Standing admission for the opening match of ’66 was priced at seven shillings and sixpence in old money.
That would have been 38 pence in decimal conversation then, £8.36 today. That went up to ten shillings for the final against West Germany, equivalent now to the £11 a Budweiser will cost punters in Qatar…..if they can their get their hands on one.
Ramsey resisted calls from supporters for Jimmy Greaves to start in the 1966 World Cup final
Tickets for the first three England matches of 2022 are in the hundreds of pounds. For the final, they rise to between £1,300 and £16,000. Yes, say it slowly, sixteen thousand pounds.
Not many English supporters seem convinced that they will be confronted by that dilemma. Me neither.
But if Southgate’s bleeding hearts brigade are held to a draw by Iran in suffocating temperatures, there might be one last straw of similarity to grasp from the midst of all the pessimism.
The clammy warmth of July 11, 1966 produced a goalless game of such laborious tedium that when Ramsey was questioned about the post-match mood in the dressing room he lapsed into one of his famous malapropisms: ‘It’s so hot in there that the compensation is running down the walls.’
Come the Final of extra-time drama and rampant jubilation, all the cabs were decked out in full patriotic livery. It’s a long shot, but dare we hope that history might repeat itself?
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