by Nick Holt
8. Argentina 0 West Germany 1, Final, 1990
A terrible final and a terrible performance by Argentina. The Germans man-marked Maradona and there wasn’t the back-up of 1986; Argentina fell back on their usual Plan B, which was to kick anyone in sight and had two players rightly red-carded. The referee was criticised, but it’s tough to ref a game when no one is trying to play football. Two ugly sides, one ugly match.
7. Portugal 3 Brazil 1, group match, 1966
The game was a match-up supposedly of the two most exciting sides in the tournament, but, where Hungary had beaten Brazil with scintillating football, Portugal beat them by stamping their authority – very literally – on Pelé. Perhaps they were embarrassed by the manner of their victory here, because they were good as gold in their next two games, standing off England with almost excessive politeness in the semi-final.
6. Spain 1 Holland 0, Final, 2010
Popular opinion had it that if you got in Spain’s face they would quail, so Holland did just that, and how. Tackle after tackle thundered in, and the Spanish didn’t just stand by passively either. (And, like Barcelona, they exacerbated matters with a little roll-around or two.) Holland were convinced the referees were all pro-Spanish, but they gave Howard Webb no choice but to hand out cards like confetti; the Englishman was criticised for missing De Jong’s waist-high assault, but there was so much happening it was impossible to catch everything; he did a pretty good job.
5. Czechoslovakia 1 Brazil 1, quarter-final, 1938
Luis Monti had handed out some rough stuff in 1930 and 1934, but this was the first full-on pitched battle in the World Cup. The Czech playmaker Nejedly had his leg broken and their goalkeeper played on with a fractured arm. A replay passed off without incident but the Czechs were missing a number of senior players, all hors de combat after this encounter.
4. England 1 Argentina 0 & West Germany 4 v Uruguay 0, quarter-finals, 1966
I cover these in detail in the 1966 entry; South American skulduggery against European strength. There was some strong-arm “get your retaliation in first” tackling from England and Germany, but the response was unwarranted and unspeakable – and some of the revisionist accounts that would have the games seen as brave new world pioneers baulked by a conservative colonial conspiracy are, frankly, hogwash.
3. Hungary 4 Brazil 2, quarter-final, 1954
Two of the best footballing sides on the planet – ever – and they decide to kick lumps out of each other. A shocking penalty decision from Arthur Ellis seemed to fuel a sense of injustice in Brazil and the tackles flew in; Hungary had talent but also some big aggressive defenders who were happy to respond in kind – although it was odd to see suave talents like Bozsik and Didi going at it hammer and tongs. Three sent off, lots of bruises; there were fears for Hungary’s semi-final against the abrasive Uruguayans, but it passed off peacefully enough.
2. Portugal 1 Holland 0, second round match, 2006
Just unpleasant. Another example of Holland losing their rag, although with more justification this time; Portugal were a provocative team full of sly shirt-pullers and divers. There were sixteen cards and could have been more – no blame attached to the Russian referee who did his best to keep control in the face of some disgraceful behaviour. All the red cards were merited, even the mild-mannered van Bronckhorst got his marching orders in injury-time. The match-up in the centre of midfield between the sneaky little play-actor Deco and the dead-eyed Dutch enforcer van Bommel was spawned in some unspeakable footballing hell.
1. Chile 2 Italy 0, group match, 1962
The Battle of Santiago. A true bloodbath (see 1962 entry). Absolutely the most violent game in international football history, two teams with a preconceived plan to hurt and incapacitate as many of the opposition as possible. A truly bilious affair marked by offensive machismo and posturing and palpable racial hatred. Ghastly.
* Stewart Imlach was the subject of a book by his son Gary that won the William Hill Sports Prize in 2005. Entitled My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes, it serves as a useful counterpoint to the Hollywood lifestyles of the pampered modern stars. A worthy rather than thrilling book, it highlighted the fact that the Scottish FA only handed caps to players who played in Home Internationals prior to the 1970s, so players like Imlach, who played four times, twice in this tournament (ineffectually), never officially received a cap. The ruling was typically nonsensical, the reluctance to rectify the situation characteristically stubborn.
* The games at the World Cup took Wright to ninety-six caps; he added three more in the autumn and became the first England player to pass 100 in a friendly against Italy before signing off on a tour of the Americas in May 1959 with 105. The next 100-club men were Charlton, a fixture in the side the season after the World Cup, and Wright’s successor as the central defender and hub of the team, Bobby Moore.
* An unused squad member, Sunderland captain Anderson made his debut just before the tournament. A year later he moved to Newcastle after 400 games for Sunderland and later captained Middlesbrough for a season, becoming the only man to skipper all three big north-east sides.
* Universidad de Chile – nicknamed the Blue Ballet – were the dominant team in Chile at the time, and arguably the best in South America. They had eight players in the Chile squad, including Carlos Campos, who formed a deadly partnership with Sanchez at club level but was only used in the third place game in the finals.
† No, silly, not that one. This team was formed in 1909 after a tour of South America by the Liverpudlian version.
‡ Chile’s most-capped player, with eighty-four, and leading goalscorer on his retirement, with twenty-three (since passed by Caszely, Zamorano and Salas).
BACK HOME
4.1 WORLD CUP 1966
Not that England fans cared much, but the fare that was offered up before the memorable final in 1966 wasn’t always the best. It was a dirty tournament and one spoiled by the wave of negative tactics that had global football in its grip at the time. The stronger sides were flawed or more about perspiration than inspiration, and the hard men that prevailed in the 1960s and into the ’70s football spoiled many of the games with their unlovely brand of defending.
England had known they were hosting the event since 1960, and the country was ripe for such a jamboree. The first four years of the decade had seen relative prosperity and growth. The shadows of the Second World War started to recede and rationing and National Service were abolished. Two years previously thirteen years of Conservative dominance in Westminster had ended when the Labour Party gained power with a tiny majority; in March, three months before the World Cup, Prime Minister Harold Wilson surprised the new Leader of the Opposition, Edward Heath, and won a much larger majority in a snap election. Britain was embracing a little of the new liberalism – The Beatles were no longer long-haired layabouts to many, but a prime British export of which the country could be proud. Even footballers were seen sporting long hair, as George Best led the vanguard of Beatnik mavericks that gave a drab game some colour throughout the next decade. Not that the England manager would countenance any such nonsense.
Alf Ramsey wasn’t appointed immediately after England’s exit from the 1962 World Cup as some sources lazily claim – he was offered the job after only Burnley’s Jimmy Adamson turned it down – but in October that year it was announced he would take control of the team at the end of the current season. He had enjoyed great success with his Ipswich Town team, taking them from the Third Division South to the 1962 league title in the space of six years. Ramsey was a manager who believed in developing a style and system and picking players to fit the system; it worked a treat at Ipswich where a team of far from stellar players stuck to Ramsey’s game plan and caught the opposition on the hop. With Ramsey distracted by the England appointment – he was involved in the games that took place between the announcement of his appointment and its enactment – the same group of Ipswich players finished seventeenth the following season and were relegated
the year after he left.
ENGLAND
Seven English cities hosted the 1966 World Cup and eight stadia were used. This was a well-attended competition, setting new records, partly due to a high interest among a dense population, but also because the country was one of the few that could offer eight stadia with a capacity in excess of 40,000.
London: Wembley Stadium
The famous old stadium, opened in 1923 for the FA Cup Final, had a capacity of 100,000. The Twin Towers saw their last game in 2000, with the new Wembley opening three years later. The stadium was originally built as part of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition.
London: White City
This old ramshackle stadium was built for the 1908 Olympics. It held over 75,000 people, but it was an odd choice ahead of White Hart Lane or Highbury and hosted only a low-key fixture between Uruguay and France. By the time it was demolished in 1985 White City was little more than a dog track (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Ironically, White City got its one game because the Wembley authorities refused to cancel their own greyhound racing fixture for the World Cup – not sure that would happen now.
Birmingham: Villa Park
Aston Villa’s 55,000 home shared a group with Hillsborough. The stadium remains on the same site it occupied on opening in 1897 with a reduced capacity of 42,700.
Sheffield: Hillsborough
The home of Sheffield Wednesday and holding 42,730, Hillsborough Stadium will sadly be associated forever with the 1989 disaster, which saw ninety-six fans crushed to death. It still stands, holding slightly fewer people, all seated; in 1966 it hosted the quarterfinal between West Germany and Uruguay.
Manchester: Old Trafford
Manchester United’s Theatre of Dreams, as it is preposterously labelled these days, held around 45,000 compared to the current 75,700, which makes it one of the few stadia to have a larger capacity as an all-seater than it did when it sported terraces. Old Trafford shared Group 3 with Goodison Park, but the Liverpool venue got all the Brazil games.
Liverpool: Goodison Park
Chosen in preference to Anfield, Everton’s 40,000-plus ground hosted all the Brazil games as well as Portugal’s extraordinary game against North Korea and a semi-final. The local crowd cheering on the Koreans in that classic game was one of the features of the tournament.
Middlesbrough: Ayresome Park
Replaced by the Riverside Stadium in 1995, the old (1904) ground was chosen ahead of St James’s Park Newcastle as a World Cup venue. The games in the North-East were the least well-attended.
Sunderland: Roker Park
Another defunct north-east ground, Roker Park has been replaced by the Stadium of Light, opened in 1998. The ground, famous for the ‘Roker Roar’, boasted a record attendance of 75,000, but only about a third of that number came to watch the World Cup games (even the quarterfinal between the Soviet Union and an attractive Hungary side). It was one of the earliest instances of the working-classes being priced out of attendance at an English football match.
Convinced he was ahead of the game tactically and looking forward to the prospect of harnessing better players to his system, Ramsey boldly predicted England would win the 1966 World Cup. Most pundits sneered, but Ramsey knew he had a high-quality squad if he could only get more out of them and devise a system that played to their strengths and didn’t leave them languishing in the wake of more tactically astute opponents.
Success wasn’t immediate, and come 1966 Ramsey was still tinkering with his line-up. He had the basic shape in place. The defence was established; the excellent 1962 left-back Ray Wilson was still there, but his compadre in Chile was now a back-up player, with Fulham’s George Cohen established as a regular at right-back – he got his chance after a serious groin injury to Jimmy Armfield, and the former captain picked up another injury on the eve of the tournament, securing Cohen’s place. In late 1965 Ramsey stumbled across an important piece of the jigsaw when he picked the thirty-year-old Leeds centre-half Jack Charlton, brother of Manchester United’s Bobby. Another Bobby – Moore – was first choice at the heart of the defence, where his passing ability and anticipation was vital to retention of the ball. Jimmy Greaves was another survivor from 1962, and his preferred partner up front now seemed to be the prolific Liverpool striker Roger Hunt. Charlton (Bobby) attacked from the left side, but he played a freer, more central role now, with licence to look for space from which to unleash his explosive shooting. Inside him Nobby Stiles was a typical Ramsey selection. Stiles was a player of his time, limited, even awkward, on the ball but an uncompromising tackler and man-marker.
Two slots were definitely still up for grabs going into the tournament. One of them would probably go to the feisty young Blackpool player Alan Ball, who Ramsey introduced to the side a year earlier. Ball combined energy and desire with decent ball skills and a good team ethic – all attributes Ramsey admired. Many pundits still thought him a little young and callow for a major tournament. The biggest conundrum was whether to play a winger. Ramsey was no fan of the old-fashioned wide player, who he (rightly) believed to be an anachronism, especially as England hadn’t found one of genuine international quality since Matthews and Finney retired. There were three in the squad: John Connelly of Manchester United, Terry Paine of Southampton and the untested Ian Callaghan of Liverpool (one cap against Finland during the pre-tournament tour of Scandinavia).
It was a squad good enough to be one of the favourites for the tournament – they had suffered few defeats in the last two years and learned from all of them – but not good enough to be an obvious winner.
Qualifying
And what of the opposition? There would be sixteen teams again, in the same format as the last two tournaments: four groups of four then the last eight to play a knockout. All the African teams withdrew in protest at the decision to award only one place to Africa and Asia combined – this would be the last tournament where these continents didn’t get at least one automatic place. The withdrawals left the qualification for this place as a farce, even more so when the final Asian group was reduced to two because South Africa were banned from international competition and South Korea refused to play when the games were moved from Japan to Cambodia, where the former monarch, now Presidential-style Head of State, Norodom Sihanouk was sympathetic to the Communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. This left two teams to play a two-leg match (both in Phnom Penh) for a World Cup place. The Koreans easily beat Australia to qualify for the first time.
Nine European teams joined England in the Finals, while three other South American sides joined holders Brazil. The last place was allocated to CONCACAF, the usual freebie for Mexico who breezed through without losing a game.
In South America the old order was observed, with Uruguay and Argentina qualifying easily and Chile joining them after beating Ecuador in a play-off. All four South American sides looked tough opponents without appearing irresistible, but the presence of Pelé put Brazil amongst the favourites, along with Argentina, who had just beaten the Brazilians 3–0.
The other home nations were very keen to get to the Finals and spoil the party for the English, but none quite made it. Wales found themselves in a tough group with the Soviet Union; they did manage to beat the Soviets in Cardiff but it was a dead rubber as Wales could no longer qualify. The Republic of Ireland had it easier, with only a poor Spain team in their group after Syria withdrew in solidarity with the African nations. The Irish won in Dublin but were well beaten in the return and beaten again in a decider in Paris.
Northern Ireland blew it. This should have been the tournament where the brilliant new star George Best paraded his talents, and a kind draw that saw them grouped with Switzerland, Holland and Albania gave them a genuine chance. All the games between the three better teams were tight; Northern Ireland traded home wins with Switzerland and took three points off the Dutch after a disciplined defensive performance in Rotterdam. The Swiss also took three points off Holland, leaving Northern Irela
nd to match them and force a play-off by beating the group fall-guys, Albania, in Tirana. Johnny Crossan’s hat-trick had helped them see off Albania 4–1 in Belfast, and this return fixture should have been a banker – no one in the group had annihilated Albania, but they had lost every game. Except this one, of course. You know the script – Northern Ireland took the lead and everything seemed rosy until a rare Albania attack brought an equaliser thirteen minutes from time. There is no guarantee Northern Ireland would have beaten Switzerland in the play-off, but surely Best – so rarely at his most potent for his country – would have raised his game for such a monumental fixture.
It was a similar story for Scotland. In a tricky group with Italy and improving Poland, they let themselves down by conceding twice at the end of a home fixture they largely dominated against the Poles. Partial redemption came with a fine win over Italy at Hampden Park. Faced with the predictable wall of blue shirts – Italy needed only a draw to qualify – Scotland were frustrated until two minutes from time when Rangers’ John Greig advanced from right-back, played a one-two with Jim Baxter and slotted home past a limping goalkeeper with his wrong foot. Scotland needed a win in Naples, Italy, to go through or a draw to force a play-off despite a vastly inferior goal difference. The Scots were missing the injured Billy McNeill, while Denis Law and Jim Baxter were not released by their clubs, but they might not have helped. Scotland got hammered – the game was a horror story for Burnley goalkeeper Adam Blacklaw – and were left to rue the careless two minutes against Poland.