It isn’t World Cup fever, but Tuesday night’s win over Poland has left England gripped by what I would diagnose as a mild case of World Cup euphoria.
More than 15,000 fans were said to have registered their interest in going to Brazil; bookies predicted a £100 million betting bonanza; and a much-publicised tabloid story about manager Roy Hodgson’s half-time team-talk seems only to have redoubled the country’s determination to get behind the team.
Let’s just hope things go better than last time.
More than 63 years ago, in June 1950, an England football team including all-time greats such as Alf Ramsey, Tom Finney and Stan Mortensen arrived in Rio for the country’s first FIFA World Cup campaign.
So strong was the squad that it was widely seen as joint favourite to lift the handsome gold Jules Rimet Cup, along with hosts Brazil.
And yet, disaster ensued, with England losing 1-0 in Belo Horizonte to a little-regarded United States side, in what remains one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history.
“Probably never before has an England team played so badly,” lamented The Times, no less, adding: “The small ground and the close marking of the United States defenders seemed to upset the English players in their close passing game.”
A fascinating first-hand account of the campaign is contained in an autobiography written by Charles Buchan, a former England international turned journalist.
The book was first published in 1955, but a new edition appeared in 2010.*
Among the ex-Sunderland and Arsenal man’s most intriguing disclosures are the following:
● A ditty called ‘Barrer Boys’ was the players’ favourite song, which they sang on the flight over;
● The giant (200,000-capacity), saucer-shaped “Rio Stadium” was still uncompleted when the players visited. “Much work had still to be done to the stadium dressing rooms”;
● The Brazil team was ensconced in an “amazing training camp”. Seldom, Buchan writes, can a “national soccer side have trained in such luxurious surroundings… It made me wonder whether, in the future, England would tackle a competition with the same earnestness.” He added: “I doubt it”;
● Copacabana beach was eventually placed out of bounds to England because of “the tiring effects of the sun’s rays”. Manager Walter Winterbottom also had a word with the chef at the hotel where England were staying, “pointing out that the excessive use of garlic would not suit his men”.
As for the football, the first match against Chile was won comfortably enough, though Buchan reports that conditions were favourable: “In the rainy atmosphere we might just as well have been in Manchester.”
The team then set off for Belo Horizonte, for what was thought to be the formality of a gentle leg-stretch against US whipping boys, before the serious business of a probable group decider, back in Rio, versus Spain.
England stayed before the match that would demonstrate beyond all doubt that they were no longer monarchs of the sport they had exported to the world at a village called Morro Velho, where they were guests of a British gold-mining company.
“It was a British colony, a home from home, with British food and a whiff of home atmosphere,” Buchan recounts. He also says that on visiting the mine, he was told that he could carry away “as much as I could lift”.
In spite of the subsequent humiliation, wrought by a first-half goal by Joe Gaetjens, the US team’s Haitian-born forward, Buchan rated England’s conquerors “on a par with one of our Third Division teams, like Rochdale”.
And yet: “By sheer guts and enthusiasm they humbled mighty England.”
In a detail that underlines how utterly the sports media world has been transformed in two generations, Buchan relates that reporters present at the debacle had to file their copy via one of two telephone-lines.
“By the time the last message was through, the pitch was in darkness,” he says. “When no one could find an electric torch there was the strange spectacle of half a dozen reporters grouped around the phone on an otherwise deserted ground, frantically making bonfires of newspapers so that the copy could be read to the cable office in Rio and thence transmitted to faraway Fleet Street.”
England might still theoretically have progressed had they won their final group match, but Spain prevailed 1-0 to record their third straight victory.
Buchan writes that he will long remember “the sight of the tired, sad English players” as they left the field against a backdrop of waving white handkerchiefs, “knocked out of a tournament they quietly believed they would win”.
That would not happen for a further 16 years, after Ramsey’s move to the dug-out.
Having fought their way through with some aplomb, it is not inconceivable that England could at some point come up against the same three countries at next year’s tournament.
* A Lifetime in Football by Charles Buchan, published by Mainstream Publishing, 7 Albany Street, Edinburgh. Price £9.99.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938