Search: ' World Cup 1962'

An extract from a new book about the 1966 World Cup looks at how exotic visitors to that tournament inspired England’s own fans to travel abroad

29 June ~ The England squad that travelled to the 1962 World Cup in Chile had to endure a flight with two separate changes to Lima where they played a warm-up game against Peru before moving on to Santiago, then Rancagua where they would play their group games and then bus to their base at the Braden Copper Company staff house in Coya, some 2,500 feet up in the Andes. The journey of over 7,500 miles would have taken them more than twenty four hours. Hardly an ideal preparation for the tournament.

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Vulgar commercialism aside, the European Cup’s lustre is built on a monopoly

1 June ~ Liverpool v Milan in 2005 then 2007; Manchester United v Barcelona in 2009 and 2011; then, on Saturday, Real Madrid defeated Atlético Madrid in the Champions League final for the second time in three years. UEFA competition has become a boring fait accompli, yet I still love the European Cup final. A marathon of cynical commercial tat, including some of the preening participants, it remains the most genuinely heavyweight fixture in club football – and an unmissable date with the television.

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The man who said no to England
by Dave Thomas
Pitch Publishing, £17.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 335 January 2015

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Jimmy Adamson was born in Laburnum Terrace, Ashington, a few doors along from Bobby and Jack Charlton. All three would be Footballers of the Year. They shared character traits too; Adamson had Big Jack’s abrasiveness and Bobby’s tendency to aloofness. Unfortunately he didn’t have the charm of the former, or the diplomatic skills of the latter. The result, as lifelong Burnley fan Dave Thomas relates, in this illuminating and well told biography, was a career that promised much but ended in frustration.

Adamson’s childhood was brutally hard. His father abandoned the family at an early stage; his mother’s struggle to raise her children on her own ended in depression and suicide. Later he would suffer the horror of having his two children predecease him.

Whisked away to Burnley as a teenager after the north-east clubs took their traditional path of rejecting a local star, Adamson started as a winger but soon switched to half-back. Intelligent, tough, with a rare ability to pick a pass, he quickly became one of the stars of the team that took the League title in 1960.

As a coach Adamson was ahead of his time, a thinker and a tactician. After serving as assistant to Walter Winterbottom at the 1962 World Cup, he was offered the England manager’s job but turned it down to stay on at Turf Moor as player and eventually – after some backstage shenanigans to oust incumbent Harry Potts – the manager.

From Potts, Adamson inherited a side rich in young talent, labelling it “the team of the Seventies”. Unfortunately the economics of football had changed since his playing days and small-town clubs such as Burnley now struggled to compete with the big-city sides. The resulting financial pressures brought Adamson into conflict with Burnley chairman Bob Lord. Sitting in the head office of his butchery business in front of a large portrait of Winston Churchill, the man Arthur Hopcraft called “the Khrushchev of Burnley” was a self-made autocrat straight out of satire. (Indeed, one of the many entertaining nuggets the author has dug out is the fact that Brian Glanville wrote a sketch about Lord for That Was The Week That Was. Sadly it was never performed.)

As “the team of the Seventies” were dismantled to pay for ground improvements and fend off debt (and to line Lord’s pockets, it is alleged) the once close relationship between the two men descended into acrimony. “I wanted to build a team, the chairman wanted to build a stadium,” Adamson famously remarked after the split finally came.

Away from Turf Moor, Adamson never really settled. A spell at the side he had wanted to play for as a boy, Sunderland, ended after a couple of inconclusive seasons, the appointment at Elland Road in 1978 was fraught with problems from the off. By then alcohol seems to have blunted Adamson’s talent and exacerbated his prickliness. After Leeds he did not work in football again.

Adamson continued to live in Burnley, but was so bitter about his treatment by Lord he refused to go and watch even after his nemesis had departed. Thankfully he eventually made his peace with the club he had served so well. He received a warm and heartfelt ovation from Clarets fans on his return to Turf Moor. It gave some semblance of a happy ending to a life marred by rancour and loss.

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by James Ruppert
Foresight Publications, £9.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 329 July 2014

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In 1970 the Ford Motor Company loaned every member of the England World Cup squad a car ahead of the forthcoming Mexico World Cup. With the exception of Jack Charlton – who requested a Ford Zodiac because he needed a bigger boot for his fishing tackle – they each received a Cortina 1600E. This is the story of how motoring journalist James Ruppert sets out to track down the 24 original “World Cup Cortinas”.

Except it isn’t. That element takes up a single chapter. The rest of the book involves something far more remarkable: someone who confesses to knowing very little about football writing quite a long book about football. Alarm bells begin to ring as early as the contents page (“it’s end-to-end stuff!”) while by the introduction the author appears to be having a full-blown crisis of confidence, admitting: “If you like football, there isn’t nearly enough detail, informed comment, or analysis about the game. If you like cars, well there is far too much football not nearly enough nitty gritty about camshafts… I’m not sure who will enjoy it really.”

The problem is that while Ruppert’s quest is a perfectly good idea for an article or photo essay there is nowhere near enough material for a book. His solution is a 200-page digression – a “social history” of football viewed through the cars that players drive. His conclusion? As footballers became better paid they could afford more expensive cars.

This might not be such an issue if the book was engagingly written but the prose is pitched awkwardly between lads’-mag insouciance and the nostalgic banality of a Saint & Greavsie annual. So while readers will be unsurprised to discover that George Best had “brooding good looks” but was “deeply flawed”, some bits simply make no sense at all. “Mark Hughes was a great leader on the pitch and he certainly needed a commanding one off it, hence the Range Rover Vogue SE.” Eh? At one point he questions the reliability of a source because they spell Nobby Stiles’s name incorrectly. In a book that introduces us to “Cristano Renaldo” that takes a certain amount of nerve.

Occasionally the author moves disastrously into the world of opinion. So we learn that “if fate had not intervened it is more than likely that Duncan Edwards would have been part of an England victory in the 1962 World Cup, led them to the title again in 1966 and made it a hat-trick in 1970”. Even this starts to sound like a trenchant insight compared to his baffling description of the “supremely talented” Jody Morris.

As if to reinforce the lightweight nature of the concept, Ruppert manages to sell it to The One Show as a five-minute TV feature. In the big finale, Franny Lee is reunited with his restored car in front of an expectant camera crew, before spoiling things by admitting that it was actually his wife who drove the Cortina because he had a Jag. It’s a fitting end to a book that is fatally underpowered from start to finish.

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The father of modern English football
by Graham Morse
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 317 July 2013

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My earliest memory of Walter Winterbottom, manager of England from 1946 to 1962, is from a second-hand copy of the FA Book For Boys. His name spoke to my infant sense of humour, though I assumed he harked from a more didactic, purposeful age when no one had time to find the word “bottom” amusing. I also heard him providing co-commentary for the 1966 World Cup final, his vowels a strange mix of received English and suppressed Lancastrian. Like his successor, Alf Ramsey, Winterbottom had felt obliged to brush up on his elocution if he was to be taken seriously. Such class considerations abounded in his era, in all their absurdity – author Graham Morse recounts how FA secretary Stanley Rous had been reprimanded by the FA chairman for wearing plus fours when his predecessor, Sir Frederick Wall, had worn a top hat and frock coat to games.

Winterbottom himself was quite the modern man – an Oldham lad who had made his way in the world on academic merit, who understood the value of tactics, technique and advanced coaching skills. He gained a reputation as a “pedagogue” for trying to impose these methods on often-reluctant players, Stanley Matthews in particular, who thought the best way to play was to bloody well get on playing, and that skill was something you were born with. Winterbottom understood what he was up against – that in England the game had deep-rooted, violent beginnings which encouraged a crude approach, whereas in Europe and South America the game had been taken up at more middle-class levels, and was more open to theory-based technically sophisticated methods.

Winterbottom was England manager when the team lost 1-0 to the US at the 1950 World Cup. However, his hands were tied. He was never allowed to pick the team – a dubious panel of selectors did this job, whose whims once led them to grant 38-year-old Leslie Compton his first cap. He also had to put up with Matthews being ordered on a goodwill tour of Canada during the tournament. As for the 1953 defeat to Hungary, he was almost alone in understanding that the Magyars would be formidable opponents. Contemporaries such as Chelsea manager Ted Drake, however, continued to insist that England’s problem had been physical fitness rather than formation and tactics.

Morse is the son-in-law of Winterbottom, who would have been 100 this year, and his account is naturally sympathetic. It’s deservingly fulsome as well as being engagingly redolent of his era, in which Winterbottom was paid just over £1,000 a year, of players arriving at games by tram, laced balls carried around in nets, and courtships shyly conducting on hills overlooking mill chimneys. The title isn’t an overstatement – Ron Greenwood, Bobby Robson and Trevor Brooking all took on board Winterbottom’s philosophy. That England continue to fail is more to do with the institutional obtuseness Winterbottom himself never managed to break down, as opposed to his enlightened approach, whose time may not yet properly have come.

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