For the rest of their stay in Mexico, the frustrated England players subsisted on a diet of fish fingers and chips as if they were adult versions of their five-year-old children. Ramsey’s meticulous preparations did not extend to the provision of a Spanish-speaking press officer, as a result of which the cultural divide between the stoic British and their allegedly excitable Latin American hosts widened still further. Ramsey’s fear and loathing of the British press was significantly increased when he was confronted by local journalists. Ramsey was a past master at alienating foreigners and the press. The combination of the two meant that England were as popular in Mexico City as Louis Napoleon’s troops had been a hundred years before when they tried to make the Habsburg prince Maximilian into the new Emperor of Mexico. They lost just as badly. Louis Napoleon ended his days in anonymity, living in a three-storey house in the village of Chislehurst in Kent; Ramsey faded away in a semi-detached in Ipswich.
More traumatic than the bad public relations or the unvarying diet were the events that had taken place in Bogotá at the end of May during England’s pre-tournament trip to Colombia and Ecuador. The purpose of the visit was to play two friendly matches to acclimatise the England squad to the high altitudes of Mexico, but things took an unfortunate turn when Bobby Moore was accused of stealing a bracelet from the gift shop in the hotel where the England party was staying. It seemed at first as if the incident was the result of a misunderstanding and would be quickly sorted out. Moore duly played in England’s victories over Colombia and Ecuador, but when the team returned from Quito to Bogotá he was arrested for theft. As the judicial procedure dragged on, the England party had to leave Colombia to fly back to Mexico in time for their first game against Romania, leaving Moore in Bogotá. Thanks to the efforts of the British Consul, Moore was allowed to remain under house arrest at the home of the Director of the Colombian FA rather than languishing in a Colombian prison.
At home Harold Wilson was in the middle of a general election campaign. The idea that the England captain would be dragged through a foreign court like a common criminal might have done untold damage to Britain’s prestige and the government’s popularity. Wilson remained in close contact with the President of the FA and even offered to telephone the president of Colombia. Moore, who never lost his dignity throughout the humiliating process, was eventually released because of a lack of evidence, although the case was not closed for some years, much to his silent fury. There was no more relieved man in Guadalajara than Alf Ramsey when the unflappable but mentally exhausted Moore walked into the Hilton hotel to rejoin the England party. But the affair of the ‘Bogotá bracelet’ meant that, despite four years of careful planning, England were going into the World Cup in 1970 in a highly disconcerted state.
Back home, Moore’s temporary incarceration only served to increase public interest in the World Cup, already fuelled by blanket coverage on television. This started with an hour-long breakfast show, an hour and a half of interviews, and then continued with discussions and highlights of the previous day’s games at lunchtime, a preview of the night’s matches during the children’s tea time and five hours of live transmission in the evening. On 15 November 1969 BBC1 and ITV television started to transmit in colour, but, because many still watched in black-and-white, audiences for Match of the Day and The Big Match were solemnly advised by commentators, ‘For those of you watching in monochrome, Spurs are in the dark shorts’. In 1970 ITV was beginning to offer real competition to the BBC as a football broadcaster. BBC Sport had existed for years in a state of complacency, with the rights to most of the prestigious sporting events sewn up thanks to the efforts of Paul Fox and Peter Dimmock in the 1950s. In the case of the FA Cup final, which was broadcast by both BBC and ITV, the corporation could simply point to the audience figures; the BBC consistently outstripped ITV’s ratings by more than 3:1. When it came to sport, the BBC sniffed, the public clearly preferred the BBC.
Not in 1970 they didn’t. In 1968 Charles Hill at the IBA created a revolution when he restructured the ITV system. ATV lost the franchise for London at weekends to the new London Weekend Television and instead became a seven-day-a-week operation in the Midlands. Associated Rediffusion merged with ABC, who had lost their weekend franchise for the north of England to Granada in the north west and Yorkshire Television across the Pennines, to create Thames Television, which broadcast to the London area on weekdays. Out of the confusion emerged a much stronger ITV Sport under the aegis of the widely popular former Daily Mirror sports journalist John Bromley. It was Bromley who invented the World Cup panel which was the innovation of the 1970 World Cup. The often heated studio debates were chaired by Jimmy Hill, displaying a natural ease in front of the cameras. The key panellists were the Manchester City coach and assistant manager Malcolm Allison, the voluble Northern Irishman Derek Dougan, Pat Crerand – whose Manchester United career was ending – and the rather more reticent Bob McNab of Arsenal who had been one of the six men left out when the original England squad of twenty-eight had been reduced to twenty-two just before the tournament started. Allison, who wanted Ramsey’s job, launched into a diatribe at almost every session, criticising his tactics and demanding that Colin Bell replace Alan Mullery, whom he thought ineffective. Allison’s obsession with Mullery and Bell became a modern version of Cato the Elder’s repeated advocacy of the destruction of Carthage, in which ‘Play Bell not Mullery’ became the new ‘Carthago delenda est’. Bell didn’t actually need Allison’s support: he was a good enough player for Ramsey to select him on his own merits. The debates did exactly what Bromley wanted – they absorbed the country and boosted ITV’s ratings above those of the despised establishment BBC.
The 1970 World Cup was another staging-post in the developing relationship between sport and the broadcast media, and in particular between football and television. Mexico had benefited from a rehearsal in 1968 of transmitting black-and-white pictures of the Olympics. In the meantime, transcontinental satellite broadcasting had improved considerably and England supporters settled back after dinner to watch what they fondly imagined would be a successful defence of their title. It was still a World Cup with global audiences estimated at approaching 600 million but the commercial power of television in Western Europe had persuaded FIFA to schedule its matches with maximum convenience to those audiences. It was a sure sign that power was starting to shift away from the football authorities and towards the television companies.
World Cup coverage fought for exposure in newspapers and on radio and television with news of the general election. There seemed to be a symbiotic relationship, encouraged no doubt by Harold Wilson, between the holders of the World Cup and the government, both of whom were looking to repeat the success of 1966. In the consistently warm weather of early summer, Wilson displayed the same unflappability that Ramsey constantly strove for. The election was certainly not being fought on issues as Wilson took off his jacket, literally rolled up his sleeves and went on walkabouts through the friendly crowds, shaking hands with all and sundry and chatting happily. The issues that had led to Barbara Castle’s White Paper In Place of Strife, an attempt to control the power of the unions which had been voted down the previous year, were never mentioned. Devaluation and inflation seemed a distant memory as Moore was released from custody. England laboured to a hard-fought 1–0 victory over a tetchy, negative Romania in the first group game with a goal by Hurst, and in the opinion polls the Labour lead over the desperate Tories continued to rise as Ted Heath struggled to make an impact. One pressman commented that covering Heath’s campaign was the equivalent of being sent out to Mexico to report on El Salvador. The Central American state was playing in the World Cup finals for the first time in its history. It exited at the group stage having lost all three games, secured no points, scored no goals and conceded nine. As election day approached, Ted Heath’s Tories appeared to be heading in the same direction.
After the Romania game, England were scheduled to face their sternest test since the Worl
d Cup final in 1966 – a group stage encounter with the feared Brazilians. Brazil had demolished Czechoslovakia 4–1 in their first match and in Pelé, Jairzinho, Tostão, Gérson, Rivellino and Carlos Alberto appeared to have a core of players who successfully combined the virtues of hard work and application associated with European teams with the equally stereotypical South American skill and flair. The highly anticipated game kicked off on Sunday 7 June in scorching midday heat. England, playing in utterly alien conditions and beset by the seemingly unending travails that had plagued them since they had left Heathrow – and despite enjoying little sleep the night before the game thanks to a concerted attack of noise deliberately orchestrated by the locals – produced arguably their finest performance for many years. They demonstrated that they had learned the value of keeping the ball and not expending pointless energy under the merciless sun. Considerable pressure was placed on the full-backs Tommy Wright, replacing the injured Keith Newton, and Terry Cooper to get down the wings, but in the event they were mostly involved with stemming the relentless tide of Brazilian attacks. Cooper was left for dead by Jairzinho as he hurtled down the right flank and pulled the ball back from the dead-ball line for Pelé to head it down towards the left-hand side of England’s goal. Banks had been covering the near post as Jairzinho crossed the ball and it seemed impossible to Pelé that he could scramble back to get a hand to the header. Pelé yelled ‘Golo!’, expecting to see the ball bounce up into the roof of the net. Instead, Banks made what became known as ‘the save of the century’, somehow turning the ball over the bar for a corner.
Francis Lee threw himself into the attack but Geoff Hurst, his partner up front, seemed unaccountably lacklustre and the memories England supporters took from the game were mostly of resolute English defence. Apart from the Banks save, the dominant image was that of the captain who, having undergone the most traumatic week of his life, displayed a preternatural calm at the centre of the defence. Above all, there was one tackle on the flying Jairzinho that is forever exhumed and exhibited to demonstrate the magnificence of Moore. Jairzinho was running at the defender who was back-pedalling desperately towards his own penalty area when he saw the perfect moment to pounce. His right leg extended and trapped the ball against his opponent’s foot as he went down on his left knee. The Brazilian winger went over the body of the England captain who rose calmly to his feet, the ball under perfect control, as he looked up, just as Malcolm Allison had taught him to do fifteen years earlier, and set up another attack.
Jairzinho eventually got the better of him after an hour when Pelé rolled the ball sideways for the winger to drive the only goal of the game across Banks and into the far corner of the net, but England were by no means out of it. Surprisingly, instead of the ineffectual Hurst, Ramsey took off the ever-dangerous Lee and replaced him with Jeff Astle who caused considerable trouble for the Brazilian defenders by winning everything in the air. Unfortunately his control on the ground was less impressive and what everyone subsequently remembered, apart from the Banks save and the Moore tackle, was the Astle miss. It was a sitter which it seemed unlikely that any other of the England strikers would have failed to put away, but Astle missed it.
England’s World Cup was not over on 7 June despite the defeat. It was popularly believed that Moore had said to Pelé ‘See you in the final’ as they memorably exchanged sweat-soaked shirts. In the light of England’s impressive display, supporters believed even more strongly that their team had the potential to be World Cup finalists for a second successive tournament. Four days later they scraped past Czechoslovakia thanks to an Allan Clarke penalty. He and Astle started the game instead of Lee and Hurst, Bell took Ball’s place in midfield and Jack Charlton, looking far from the dominant defender he had been in 1966, gave Brian Labone a rest before the coming encounter with Gerd Müller. A draw would have been enough to have seen England into the quarter-final so, although the performance was a comedown after the previous Sunday’s heroics against Brazil, everyone back home was perfectly happy to accept that the result was, in the usual managerial doublespeak, more important than the performance.
Bobby Moore swaps shirts with Pelé after Brazil beat England 1–0 in a group game at the World Cup in Mexico, 1970 (Mirrorpix).
Harold Wilson continued to beam benignly on the team from his lofty position in the polls. On Thursday 11 June, a week before election day, as England qualified from the group stage, two opinion polls put Labour 7 per cent clear of the Conservatives, which suggested a Labour majority at least as large as the ninety-eight seats they had acquired in 1966. On Saturday 13 June NOP published a poll that gave Labour an astonishing 12.5 per cent lead over the rapidly wilting Tories. Wilson could sit down and watch the West Germany quarter-final knowing that his pre-election nightmare would not be realised. Richard Crossman’s diaries reveal clearly that when the cabinet discussed the timing of the 1970 election, Wilson was very conscious of the fact that a bad World Cup for the England side might well impact adversely on the government’s campaign for re-election. He thought that to go to the country in June 1970 was taking an unnecessary risk, but the cabinet convinced him it was the right time and that the result of a football match couldn’t possibly matter that much. As election day approached, polls unanimously proclaimed the certainty of a third consecutive Labour victory.
In Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the 1973 BBC sitcom written by Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais (both football supporters), Terry Collier, played by James Bolam, returns to Newcastle after five years in the British Army on the Rhine and a failed marriage to Jutta, a German woman. When his best friend Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes) asks him why the marriage disintegrated he is told that it had all been going so well until 14 June 1970. Bob is puzzled. What could have happened on 14 June, he wonders. Terry is astonished that the date isn’t seared into Bob’s brain the way it is in his:
Terry: What happened? I would have thought the date was printed indelibly in the mind of every Englishman worthy of the name. England two, West Germany three! That’s what happened!
Bob: Oh my God, of course!
Terry: Have you any idea what it was like to be in West Germany that night? Especially after being two up. After the second I was standing on the sideboard singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Their faces! And then… The shame! The humiliation! To have them all leaping up and down, eyes glazed with national socialist fervour… I thought they were going to rush out and invade Poland again… I just got up quite unnoticed and left… Just got my bag and walked out of her life for ever.
Bob: I would have done the same. It was bad enough here. I can’t say I blame you, mate. I had to go to bed and lie down. For two weeks. Mind you, I think Chivers has made a difference.
It wasn’t just Bob who instantly understood how Terry had felt: the ten million viewers who watched Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? would have felt exactly the same way.
Maybe if England hadn’t gone two-nil up after fifty minutes and played the Germans off the park it wouldn’t have felt so shocking. Maybe if England had been three-nil down after twenty minutes and scored two scrappy goals in the last few minutes to offer a late burst of vain hope it would have been easier to have accepted that defeat. Maybe if Ramsey had left Charlton on the pitch, Beckenbauer would not have felt able to go on his marauding forward runs, but then the substitution of Bell for Charlton happened after the Beckenbauer goal. Charlton himself always said that Ramsey had done the right thing in the belief that no England team gave away three goals in twenty minutes and there was a semi-final to be played in three days’ time. Bell, in fact, was brought down in the penalty area by Beckenbauer, but the referee refused to award what looked like a certain penalty. All the luck that had accompanied England in 1966 deserted them with a vengeance in 1970.
In the end it probably came down to whatever Gordon Banks ate or drank that gave him food poisoning and kept him out of the game. His replacement, Chelsea’s Peter Bonetti, had played two pulsa
ting Cup finals against Leeds United at the end of April so he wasn’t short of big-match experience, but on the day he seemed to freeze. Unlike Banks, who gave extra comfort to his defenders, Bonetti’s nerves caused Moore and Labone to be forever casting anxious backwards glances. After sixty-nine minutes, he allowed Beckenbauer’s weak shot to slip under his falling body and thirteen minutes later, when Seeler stumbled but managed a back header, Bonetti remained flat-footed as the ball looped into the net. The third German goal, in extra-time, was a foregone conclusion. England were out on their feet by then and the Germans were rampant. Even before Müller volleyed home to clinch victory every England supporter could see that defeat was looming.
For Harold Wilson the defeat must have caused some tremors, but he picked up the telephone and called Ramsey in León to congratulate the stunned manager on England’s magnificent if unlucky performance. He certainly remembered the general election of 1945, when the newspapers had all predicted a Churchill victory. He must, too, have remembered the 1948 US presidential election when the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey was mistakenly proclaimed President of the United States by the Chicago Daily Tribune in the notorious headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. The day after the calamity in León, the Board of Trade released the latest trade figures. The visible trade balance for May showed a deficit of more than £31 million. In the election post-mortem those figures were credited with turning the tide against Labour although, like England supporters after the first German goal went in, it was still believed that the lead could not be overturned. Just as England might have had to settle for a 2–1 rather than a 2–0 victory, Labour might have to settle for a fifty-seat, rather than a hundred-seat, majority.
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