That was the end of Brazil, whose two best chances went to and were missed by Peracio, standing in for Leonidas. Their one goal came, meaninglessly, from Romeo after eighty-seven minutes, at a time when the azzurri had relaxed. Brazil, incredibly, had ‘rested’ Leonidas and Tim.
Hungary v. Sweden
Sweden, christened ‘the team of steel’, now played Hungary at Colombes on the eightieth birthday of their monarch, Gustav v. It was of no help. Hungary, undeterred when Nyberg scored in a mere thirty-five seconds, majestically walked over them. By half-time Zsengeller had scored twice, Titkos once, and the Hungarians were so dominant that the second half was a formality. Sarosi headed a fourth, Zsengeller got the fifth; there could have been ten. ‘An excellent trainmatch for the Hungarians’, remarked Rudi Hiden, now keeping goal for the Racing Club de Paris.
Three days before the Final, Sweden, without the veteran draughtsplaying Keller, still held a 2–1 lead against Brazil at half-time in the third-place match at Bordeaux. In the second half Leonidas, appropriately captain for the day, scored twice, bringing his personal total to eight, the highest of the tournament. Patesko missed a penalty and Brazil won, 4–2.
The Final Italy v. Hungary
On June 19, fifteen days after the opening match, Italy defended their Cup against Hungary at Colombes. Pozzo had chosen a pleasant retreat in St Germain-en-Laye, where all passed placidly; the team was composed and confident.
The Hungarians were at Vesinst. It was agreed that Sarosi himself had still to show his true form; but if he showed it in the Final that would be good enough. On the other hand, his one failing was a lack of devil, a distaste for physical contact, which was hardly a quality to bring success against the ever-robust Italians. Still, half a dozen of the Hungarians had World Cup experience from 1934, Zsengeller had been scoring freely, and the level of individual skill was as always exceptionally high. The players were however, inclined, to be static; nor had they the tremendous finishing power of their successors in the fifties. In the event, it was Italy’s greater drive and commitment which would prevail.
Six minutes into the match, Serantoni cleared to the deep-lying Biavati, who raced almost the length of the field, employing his celebrated foot-over-the-ball feint, before finding Meazza, from whom the ball went swiftly on for Colaussi to dash in and score. There was a sweep and scope about the move which was beyond the powers of the Hungarians.
In less than a minute, however, Sarosi had touched Sas’s cross to the unmarked Titkos, and it was 1–1.
But Meazza and Ferrari, Italy’s inside-forwards, were still being given far too much leeway, and after fifteen minutes Meazza nonchalantly made the chance for Piola to restore Italy’s lead. From this point, the more dynamic, modern Italians never lost their hold. Ten minutes from half-time the balding Ferrari, with an imperious gesture, pointed out the unmarked Colaussi to Meazza. Straight to the winger went the ball, and Colaussi sped past Polgar to get his second goal.
Twenty minutes into the second half, after a goalmouth mêlée, Sarosi unexpectedly reduced the lead, but Vincze, Locatelli and Sarosi himself were well mastered by the Italian defence, and only the left-winger Titkos gave any real trouble. Meazza and Ferrari quickly recovered their grip on midfield, Colaussi, the master of Polgar, was given plenty of the ball, and the Hungarian right flank tottered.
It was from the Italian right, however, that the last goal came, ten minutes from the end, Biavati interpassing with Piola and finally backheeling him a pass which the centre-forward smashed into goal.
Italy, most deservedly, had kept the Cup. At the end of the game Meazza wept; Monzeglio, the reluctant reserve, wept; Biavati put his head in his hands; Andreolo went round embracing everybody; and Pozzo stood uncaring while water poured from the trainer’s bucket into his shoes.
There would be no more World Cups for a dozen years.
RESULTS: France 1938
First round
Switzerland 1, Germany 1 (HT 1/1, 1/1) after extra time
Switzerland 4, Germany 2 (HT 0/2) replay
Cuba 3, Romania 3 (HT 0/1, 3/3) after extra time
Cuba 2, Romania 1 (HT 0/1) replay
Hungary 6, Dutch East Indies 0 (HT 4/0)
France 3, Belgium 1 (HT 2/1)
Czechoslovakia 3, Holland 0 (HT 0/0, 0/0) after extra time
Brazil 6, Poland 5 (HT 3/1, 4/4) after extra time
Italy 2, Norway 1 (HT 1/0, 1/1) after extra time
Second round
Sweden 8, Cuba 0 (HT 4/0)
Hungary 2, Switzerland 0 (HT 1/0)
Italy 3, France 1 (HT 1/1)
Brazil 1, Czechoslovakia 1 (HT 1/1, 1/1) after extra time
Brazil 2, Czechoslovakia 1 (HT 0/1) replay
Semi-finals
Marseilles
Italy 2 Brazil 1
Olivieri; Foni, Rava; Walter; Domingas
Serantoni, Andreolo, Da Guia, Machados;
Locatelli; Biavati, Zeze, Martin (capt.),
Meazza (capt.), Piola, Alfonsinho; Lopez,
Ferrari, Colaussi. Luisinho, Peracio,
Romeo, Patesko.
SCORERS
Colaussi, Meazza (penalty) for Italy Romeo for Brazil
HT 2/0
Paris
Hungary 5 Sweden 1
Szabo; Koranyi, Biro; Abrahamson;
Szalay, Turai, Lazar; Eriksson, Kjellgren;
Sas, Zsengeller, Almgren, Jacobsson,
Sarosi (capt.), Svanstroem,
Toldi, Titkos. Wetterstroem, Keller
(capt.), Andersson, H.,
Jonasson, Nyberg.
SCORERS
Zsengeller (3), Titkos, Sarosi for Hungary Nyberg for Sweden
HT 3/1
Third place match
Bordeaux
Brazil 4 Sweden 2
Batatoes; Domingas Abrahamson;
Da Guia, Machados; Eriksson, Nilssen;
Zeze, Brandao, Almgren, Linderholm,
Alfonsinho; Roberto, Svanstroem (capt.),
Romeo, Leonidas Berssen, Andersson,
(capt.), Peracio, H., Jonasson,
Patesko. Andersson, A.,
Nyberg.
SCORERS
Romeo, Leonidas (2), Peracio for Brazil
Jonasson, Nyberg for Sweden
HT 1/2
Final
Paris
Italy 4 Hungary 2
Olivieri; Foni, Rava, Szabo; Polgar, Biro;
Serantoni, Andreolo, Szalay, Szucs, Lazar;
Locatelli; Biavati, Sas, Vincze, Sarosi
Meazza (capt.), Piola, (capt.), Zsengeller,
Ferrari, Colaussi. Titkos.
SCORERS
Colaussi (2), Piola (2) for Italy Titkos, Sarosi for Hungary
HT 3/1
BRAZIL
1950
Background to Rio
The 1950 World Cup, now known officially as the Jules Rimet Trophy, was dubiously organised, ludicrously unbalanced, and produced one of the finest climaxes, as well as one of the greatest shocks, of any World Cup yet.
Hurdling the world war, it took place for the second time in South America, and for the second time there were defections and withdrawals. England at last competed.
Brazil had approached the competition with great ambitions, buoyant zeal and intensive effort—even if this was not quite intensive enough to complete in time the building of the immense three-tiered Maracanà Stadium by the banks of the little Maracanà river. This colossal edifice, with room for 200,000 spectators—the largest in the world—was still in the process of completion when the teams arrived. The very soldiers were called in, in a desperate attempt to finish it in time, but on the day of the Final itself, when 200,000 people did throng the Maracanà, its approaches still resembled a vast builder’s yard.
Enthusiasm for the game in Brazil, already huge before a war in which they had been only tangentially concerned, was by now fanatical. For the poor, it was the way out of the dreadful slums of the favelhas which tumbled down the hills of Rio, of the remo
te hovels of a vast state-like Minas Gerais. Black players had long since transformed and dominated Brazilian football. Their extraordinary reflexes, at once balletic and gymnastic, their conception of the game, so radically new, so explosively effective, at one point in the tournament caused a Roman newspaper to cry: ‘Come resistere?’—How to resist?
The four British Associations had returned to FIFA in 1946, and the World Cup Committee had indulgently designated the British Championship a qualifying zone—for two teams. Scotland rewarded their courtesy by sullenly and indefensibly announcing that unless they won the British title they would not compete. All thus turned on their traditional meeting with England at Hampden Park in April. England won streakily with a goal by Chelsea’s Roy Bentley. Bauld’s shot hit the English bar, and the Scottish FA refused to change its mind. Billy Wright, the England captain, pleaded with the Scottish captain, George Young, to appeal, insisting that Scotland’s presence in Brazil would make a great difference to England, but Young got nowhere.
Not that Scotland were the only team to withdraw. The Argentinians, having squabbled with the Brazilian Federation, repeated their peevish behaviour of 1938 and sourly pulled out of a tournament that this time took place on their doorstep. Czechoslovakia, too, who took a long time after the war to regain their powers, opted out in a flurry of spiteful criticism.
The case of France was rather more complex. They did not qualify, for Yugoslavia won their group, but when Turkey refused to come, after beating Syria 7–0 to gain a place, the French were invited. After all, the idea of the World Cup had been nurtured in Paris, where Jules Rimet had kept the trophy under his bed throughout the war; even if no less a pioneer than Henri Delaunay had resigned from the World Cup Committee in protest against the decision to play the tournament in pools rather than on the previous knock-out basis which had been intended.
Delaunay, as we shall see, did have a point.
France at first agreed to come, then sent an experimental team to Belgium which was whipped 4–1, lost at home to Scotland, and had second thoughts. These were exacerbated when they heard what their programme would be. Drawn in the same group as Uruguay and Bolivia, they would have to play one game at Porto Alegre, the next two thousand miles away at Recife. They sent a cable threatening to stay at home if the arrangements were not changed. The Brazilian Federation refused and, to their immense chagrin, France withdrew.
There is no doubt that the arrangement of the tournament greatly and grossly favoured Brazil, who played every one of their six matches but the second in Rio, while the other teams were obliged to traipse exhaustingly around the whole of this huge country. The idea seems to have escaped everybody that if there were groups, these should logically be centred on one place. Moreover, the muggy, humid, debilitating climate of Rio was certainly a handicap to visiting teams.
Since Portugal refused to take Scotland’s place, the World Cup was left with a miserable complement of only thirteen teams; leaving the Uruguayans with merely feeble Bolivia to beat. It was extraordinary that another team could not have been moved into their pool from one of the two pools which had four; the more so as the groups had no geographical basis.
There were other, distinguished, absentees. Germany were still excluded from FIFA as a result of the war. Austria, beaten 3–0 by Sweden in the first round of the 1948 Olympiad, had limply decided that their team was too young; though it gave them the lie by beating Italy on Prater just before the competition started. By 1954, it would be too old.
Hungary, like Russia, was for the moment lurking behind the Iron Curtain.
The Contenders Italy
Italy, the holders of the Cup, would compete even though the terrible disaster of the Superga air crash in May 1949 had largely destroyed their chances. That day the aeroplane carrying the brilliant Torino team, returning from a friendly in Lisbon on their way to a fifth consecutive Championship, crashed into the wall of a hillside monastery. Every player was killed, including eight of the current Italian national side. Among them was the splendid captain and inside-left Valentino Mazzola, whose son would be a star in the 1970 World Cup Final.
Pozzo had gone that very year, disappointed by the flight to sistema, the third back game, from his beloved metodo tactics, and disgusted by the galloping commercialisation of Italian football. In his place reigned Ferruccio Novo, the President of Torino; and, surprisingly, a Tuscan journalist, Aldo Bardelli. Bardelli, together with a number of the Italian players, refused to travel by air, and the protracted sea voyage played havoc with the condition of a team which had insufficient time to get fit again. Moreover, Bardelli and Novo quarrelled like cat and dog, and before the competition even began Bardelli had been relieved of his powers. There was talent in the team, but the auguries were bad.
Sweden
Italy played in the same group as Paraguay and Sweden. The Swedish team had been pillaged by Italian clubs after its fine Olympic victory in 1948, when four of the splendid forward-line had decamped. The team manager, an ebullient little Yorkshireman called George Raynor, had put together, with astonishing speed, a new side good enough to qualify for Brazil. A splendid guerrilla-general of a tactician—whose 1953 Swedish team, depleted again, was good enough to draw 2–2 with Hungary in Budapest mere weeks before they thrashed England at Wembley—Raynor was also much loved by his men. He had been a moderate outside-right with clubs like Rotherham and Aldershot, but the war had dramatically changed his career. Posted as a physical training instructor to the Staff College at Baghdad, he had organised an international football team with such rapid success that Stanley Rous, the progressive and internationally-minded Secretary of the English FA, had taken notice. Like good fairies, the FA whisked him in 1946 from reserve team trainer of Aldershot to the team managership of Sweden.
With his coaches’ conventions—‘a stewpot of brains’—his camps for ‘tomorrow’s men’ and his devoted coaching of individual players, he made Sweden into a real power. Hans Jeppson, the imminent scourge of the Italians, was one of his protégés; Raynor had marked him early on as a potential international centre-forward and had spent hours in pressure-training on his kicking.
‘Nacka’ Skoglund, a Stockholmer, only just twenty years old, had emerged propitiously just in time for the World Cup. He joined AIK Stockholm from a Third Division club, playing splendidly on their tour of England; little, very blond, he was a delightful ball player with a very good left foot. Kalle Palmer, whose shooting, unexpectedly strong for one so slight, had toppled Eire in Dublin, complemented him well.
England
England’s team manager, the first they had ever appointed on a full-time contract, was a very different figure. Walter Winterbottom, who took office in 1946, was a Lancashire man from Oldham; a tall, pleasant, pedagogic figure who had paid his way through Carnegie College of Physical Education by playing centre-half for Manchester United, and had reached high rank in the Royal Air Force during the war.
Fluent and dedicated, he combined with his managership the job of director of coaching, which he pursued with almost religious application, never disguising the significant fact that he considered it the more important of his tasks. Perhaps it was, for he and his followers ultimately changed the reactionary face of British football, but this was not really an attitude to go with winning World Cups. The hardened England professionals at first received Winterbottom with immense scepticism, insisting, as Stanley Matthews did in print, that an international player should be let alone to play his own game. In fact one of the chief charges against Winterbottom is precisely that he did not impose and apply sufficiently stringent tactics. But with all his virtues, he was never a players’ man, could never bridge the gap left by his complete lack of experience of club management. Moreover, as a team manager he was responsible to a bumbling selection committee of club directors, and in a position paralleling that of a permanent civil servant who stays in office while governments fall. Sir Stanley Rous was unquestionably his mentor, and there was something a litt
le hierarchical about the situation, a sort of officers-and-men, gentlemen-and-players, aspect which would change radically with the appointment of Alf Ramsey.
The England team he brought to Brazil was among the favourites, and was full of talent. There were Wright and Ramsey, Finney and Mortensen, Mannion and Matthews. Yes, Matthews; held in deep suspicion by the English selectors as too brilliant, too agelessly indestructible an outside-right to trust. He had been playing for England since 1934, was now thirty-five years old and as embarrassingly effective as ever. The marvellous swerve which, as he said, ‘came out of him under pressure’, was intact. Tom Finney, a wonderful two-footed winger in his own right, had provided the excuse for dropping him, but when Finney was chosen on the left and Matthews on the right there had been ten goals in Lisbon, four in Turin. Now grudgingly and belatedly, Matthews was recalled from the Football Association eleven’s tour of North America, where they had played and beaten the USA World Cup eleven despite an exhausting train journey.
Bert Williams, the Wolverhampton goalkeeper, blond and resilient, was a splendid athlete who had ably succeeded the famous Frank Swift. Billy Wright, the fair-haired wing-half and captain, had a boyishly loyal personality that made him a perfect third man in the chain of command which devolved from Rous to Winterbottom. Ultimately winner of 105 international caps, he was not a great player but he was a very fine one, above all in defence, where he would eventually settle down as a centre-half despite his lack of height.
The inside-forwards, Stanley Mortensen and Wilf Mannion, were both possibly a little past their peak, but still players of exceptional quality. Mortensen, a north-easterner who had turned himself from a slow player into a thrillingly fast one and had survived an aeroplane crash during the war, was a fearless and prolific scorer and Matthews’ partner at Blackpool. Mannion, from Middlesbrough, spanned the war with his career; a quick, inventive player who had been the best man on the field when Britain beat ‘The Rest of Europe’ team 6–1 in Glasgow three years earlier in the match which celebrated Britain’s return to FIFA. At centre-half the big, young Laurie Hughes of Liverpool succeeded Franklin.
The Story of the World Cup Page 4