by Nick Holt
The 1960s was the decade Italy established their reputation for defensive play, as sides sought to hold a line and counterattack down the flanks. Inter under Helenio Herreira won success with the system but no friends, and it became the prevailing style as Italian club chairmen demanded success. The catenaccio defence (sounds like a chess game opening) negated the skills of players like Rivera and Mazzola, as the football culture became risk averse and cynical. Italy, and their coach, Edmondo Fabbri, paid the price for their negativity at this World Cup, losing lazily to the Soviet Union and comically to North Korea. They returned home to the ritual bombardment with ripe foodstuffs (if they were lucky) – the four Bologna players were booed by their own fans at the start of the following season.
The Italians were ridiculed in newspapers across Europe and beyond; unsurprisingly I can find no record of how the result was received in North Korea, although it’s safe to say that it stood as proof of the glorious power of the people and a beacon in their fight against encroaching capitalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah – left-wing, right-wing, a cross is still a cross.
QUARTER-FINALS (all 23 July)
WORLD CUP CLASSIC No.5
23 July 1966, Goodison Park, Liverpool; 40,248
Referee: Menachem Ashkenazi (Isr)
Coaches: Manuel Afonso / Otto Glória (Portugal) & Mung Rye-hyun (North Korea)
Portugal (4–2–4): José Pereira (Belenenses); João Morais (Sporting), Vicente da Fonseca (Belenenses), Alexandre Baptista (Sporting), Hilário da Conceição (Sporting); Jaime Graça (Vitória Setúbal), Mário Coluna (Cpt, Benfica); José Augusto de Almeida (Benfica), Eusébio Ferreira (Benfica), José Torres (Benfica), António Simões (Benfica)
North Korea (4–4–2): Lee Chan-myung; Ha Jung-won, Oh Yoon-kyung, Shin Yung-kyoo, Lim Zoong-sun; Im Seung-hwi, Han Bong-jin, Park Seung-jin (Cpt), Lee Dong-woon; Park Doo-ik, Yang Sung-kook
Not actually a classic in terms of the football played – some of the defending was too risible for that – but a nailed-on classic if you want thrills, spills, shocks, shades of genius and a preposterous scoreline.
Portugal probably afforded themselves a little chuckle when North Korea beat Italy and secured second place in Group 4. Some later accounts assume they were complacent at the start of the quarter-final, but it is hard to believe they would have underestimated opponents who had just beaten one of the favourites. The truth lies more in the fact that Portugal didn’t expect the Koreans to come out quite so hard and fast, and the adrenaline created by that first goal led to a sustained assault that only petered out when Portugal got Eusébio into the game and made the Koreans go backwards. That and the fact that the Portuguese defence was a bit crap. Their selection was along the lines of the 1970 Brazilians: “We’ll have him, and him, and him . . . he’s good, oh and him . . . and oh, yes, we’d better have a defender or two – pick those Sporting chaps or they may get upset that we’ve picked the entire Benfica forward line . . .”
Park Seung-jin had shown he packed a punch against Chile, but that was nothing compared to the spectacular hit he unleashed in the first minute here as the ball rolled across the face of the penalty area.
The second goal, which sent the Goodison Park crowd into raptures after twenty minutes, was a mini-masterpiece. A Portuguese attack foundered and Lee Dong-woon picked the ball up in midfield, fed Park and went for the return. Lee picked out another good ball to Hang Bong-jin, and his long deep cross cleared the flailing Pereira and sailed all the way to the other winger, Yang Sung-kook, who returned it to the middle. Lee’s energy had carried him into the box and he was first to the ball – 2–0.
Five minutes later it was dreamland for North Korea, as another move found Park lurking on the edge of the area with room to fire in a shot. The ball hit a defender but again it was a Korean who anticipated better, and Yang had time to measure his shot and ram it in the corner for a third.
Sounds like one-way traffic but it wasn’t. Eusébio had gone close twice and José Augusto brought a fine, leaping save out of Lee Chan-myung. David Coleman was of the opinion that Korea erred in continuing to attack, as do most hindsight sources; Cris Freddi, by contrast, deems this a patronising explanation. They are both right, in a way. It is patronising, but it was also a valid observation. The Koreans were well coached – they held a disciplined line for all of the Italy game and for most of this – but they only knew one way to play. Kept in isolation in their training camp, they had no exposure to the cynical attitudes of the European teams – sitting back was alien to them. And might well have proved equally fatal against Eusébio.
Portugal desperately needed respite, their defence was creaking and groaning like an over-laden pirate ship. It came out of nowhere and at a good time, only three minutes after Korea’s third goal. A pushed pass from José Augusto looked unthreatening until two defenders left it to each other and Eusébio nipped between them and toe-poked it past the goalkeeper. I say toe-poked, Eusébio could toe-poke harder than most players could hit the ball on the full – it flew past Lee’s shoulder.
The attacks came in waves and two minutes from half-time Torres burst between two defenders and was hauled down from behind for a blatant penalty. Eusébio, the biggest boy in the playground who took all the free-kicks and penalties, banged it home. The equaliser came just before the hour; it was a replica of the first Portuguese goal, only on the right-hand side and it was a pass from Simões that the great one scooped into the goal past Lee.
There was only team winning this now and Portugal were ahead on the hour. This one really was all about Eusébio. He received wide right surrounded by defenders but backed his pace and power to get past, sprinting down the line past one and beating another as he cut into the area. The last man, Lim Zoong-sun, came crashing through him – another penalty. Eusébio had a little sit down on the pretext his knee was sore – it certainly didn’t stop him taking the spot-kick. That was the end of the genuine excitement, although there was time for one more when Eusébio’s corner was headed back by Torres and finished off by an unmarked José Augusto.
It was a fun game, played in an excellent spirit – for which Portugal deserve credit, they just kept playing instead of getting tetchy (compare and contrast with 2002 and their game against South Korea), and there was none of the rough stuff that characterised their performance against Brazil. Eusébio was Man of the Match, the other lot had eleven heroes who made those who billed them as the tournament’s joke team look a little foolish.
Next to nothing was seen of the North Koreans until Daniel Gordon’s 2002 documentary (see World Cup Movies); the squad returned to the secrecy of the bosom of that odd nation. If they were from any other country, then offers would have poured in for the excellent Park Seung-jin, the wrigglesome forward Park Doo-ik, and the splendidly agile (if diminutive) goalkeeper Lee Chan-myung. Their next appearance in the Finals was in 2010 and their reunion with Portugal was altogether less glorious.
The only all-European quarter-final saw the artistes of Hungary take on the juggernaut of the Soviet Union. The USSR did what was expected and marked the Hungarian ball-players Albert and Bene tightly, relying on their fitness to get their defence forward when they were in possession. They were helped by Gelei – swap the teams’ goalkeepers and Hungary might have gone all the way in this tournament – who clutched a shot from Porkujan to his chest then let it squirm from his grasp so Chislenko could jab it into the net.
From there on the Hungarians strained and stretched to get back in the game but created little as the Soviets thundered into tackles and cramped the room in the middle of the field the Hungarians needed to express themselves – it was a surprisingly modern, if overly functional style. Most pundits thought the USSR too limited at the beginning of the tournament, but this was a competition of limited teams, and they looked mightily powerful.
The man-to-man marking worked a treat, as the outstanding captain Albert Shesternev put the shackles on the Hungarian genius Flórián Albert, and put in some powerhouse tackle
s.
Hollow-cheeked, handsome and personable, married to a notable figure skater, Shesternev was the darling of the Soviet bureaucracy; loyal to the state and hardly ever injured, he went on to make ninety appearances for the USSR, sixty-two of them as captain, a record until the Ukrainian Blokhin became the first to pass 100. One or two reports suggest the Soviets kicked Hungary off their game, but in comparison to some games in this tournament this was above-the-line stuff; the USSR were just a big, intimidating side.
The game looked safe when Porkujan was left unmarked at the far post and headed home early in the second half, but Hungary scored a good goal when Mészöly put Bene in on the right and the winger kept up his record of scoring in every match. Briefly Hungary stirred, but Albert still couldn’t get in the game and the revival petered out after Yashin saved a rasping free-kick from Sipos.
The English commentators still referred to the Soviet team as “Russians”, as was the norm in the 1960s. Just as in 1962, not all of them were Russian: one of their best players, Dynamo Kyiv’s Josip Sabo, was born József Szabo in Hungary – he would later coach both Kyiv and the Ukrainian national team after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Left-winger Porkujan was one of four Ukrainians in the squad, centre-forward Banishevsky was an Azerbaijani and there were two Georgians, Metreveli and Khurtsilava, both with the strong Dynamo Tbilisi team, and both of whom won more than forty caps for the USSR. Malofeyev, the clever inside-forward, was born in Russia but played over 300 games for Dynamo Minsk in Belarus and later coached the team to their only Soviet title in 1982. More of him later.
The two Europe v South America ties saw West Germany play Uruguay at Hillsborough while England and Argentina met at Wembley. Both games were billed as muscle against malevolence and both games lived up to the billing.
Opinions diverge wildly as to where the blame lies for the violent nature of both these encounters. Better refereeing would have helped, as would better direction from FIFA to clamp down on foul play, but this was nearly two decades away. Much was made in the South American press that West Germany got an English referee and England got a German referee, but if Uruguay or Argentina had a problem with this they were allowed to raise an objection before the game, and neither did. There was certainly a divergence in interpretation of foul play between the two continents; perhaps in Europe it was right that European rules apply. In Europe hard tackling was the norm – the tackle from behind was not yet outlawed and if the tackler played the ball first any consequent damage was deemed accidental. Players like Stiles and Schnellinger exploited this rule to intimidate opponents by following through with hard, ostensibly fair tackles. In South America this was deemed foul play. But in South America shirt-pulling and jabbing and pinching were all part and parcel of the marker’s job, so the likes of Albrecht and Troche thought nothing of a bit of hair-pulling or gouging, whereas European players objected to this kind of stuff as unsporting. The same culture clash – exacerbated by these two games – manifested itself in a series of Intercontinental Club Cup matches during the next decade. The two-leg contest between the champion clubs of Europe and South America, especially when the latter came from Argentina, was constantly marred by outbursts of violence and fighting.
There was no middle ground. Throw in European distrust of the New World and a wedge of reciprocal anti-colonial resentment, and there was a ready-made recipe for animosity.
Both games saw excessively hard tackling from the European side; England totted up almost twice as many fouls as Argentina, same for West Germany against Uruguay. That this was a deliberate policy from both sides to show they were not intimidated by their opponents’ tough reputations was undoubtedly the case. So the South American sides had some cause for grievance. What was not forgivable was the intensity of the reaction and the complete lack of regard for the match officials of both South American sides. This is the dark side of the South American game, and in Uruguay for twenty years it became the nature of their game, the passion and pride spilling over into near-psychotic anger. Conclusion? England and West Germany were not blameless, but the two South American sides were beyond the pale.
At Hillsborough the tone was set early. As the Uruguayans probed the defence, in their first foray forward, a couple of bone-jarring tackles came their way. The ball came out to Cortes who beat Tilkowski all ends up only for the ball to rebound to the goalkeeper from a post. Schulz was shielding Tilkowski in the time-honoured fashion, so Silva tried to kick him out of the way. With both Germans on the ground Silva thought it would be a good idea to try to kick the ball out of Tilkowski’s hands, inevitably kicking the ’keeper instead.
This was before referee Jim Finney gave the Uruguayans cause for complaint by failing to spot Schnellinger’s handball on the line to stop a certain goal from Rocha’s header. Their sense of grievance was exacerbated by West Germany’s opening goal – nothing untoward, just a big slice of luck as Haller deflected Held’s miscued shot past Mazurkiewicz. The rest of the first half passed relatively peaceably, with both sides restricted mainly to long shots, which two useful goalkeepers gobbled up – the best was Beckenbauer’s thirty-five-yard free-kick, which Mazurkiewicz tipped brilliantly round the post.
It all kicked off – literally – five minutes into the second half when Troche, the Uruguayan captain, was sent off for kicking Emmerich off the ball. When Seeler offered an opinion Troche slapped him around the face and at one point it looked as though he might give Jim Finney a slice as the referee ushered him from the field. Troche wasn’t picked for the national team again. Five minutes later Silva added to his first half mischief with a scythe at Haller that left the German sprawling on the ground and was sent after his captain to use the bathing facilities ahead of schedule. Now Haller was a diver and a play-actor, and may well not have been as badly hurt as he purported to be – and frankly, had I been a professional player, I might have given the arrogant so-and-so a bit of a kicking, too, but just accept the red card, don’t hang around arguing the toss when you’ve just hacked the man’s legs from under him. Silva didn’t see things that way and was eventually escorted from the field by the police with half the Uruguayan coaching staff in baying attendance.
With nine men they were stuffed, and good riddance. West Germany added three more; Beckenbauer with a replica of his one-two-round-the-keeper against Switzerland, Seeler with a right-footed howitzer and Haller passing into an unguarded net after an error by an exhausted Manicera, who used up all his energy chasing the referee. Comic relief amidst all the sturm und drang was provided by a tubby middle-aged bloke with a flag wearing lederhosen who staged a one-man pitch invasion after the third goal. There simply are no circumstances in which lederhosen look cool.
Meanwhile, at Wembley in front of 90,000+ England and Argentina were fighting a more even battle. Ramsey finally dispensed with wingers altogether – none of the three used had impressed – and brought back feisty Alan Ball, which was guaranteed to raise the temperature (and the volume, if you happened to possess the hearing of a dog). Greaves’s leg was still sore, so Ramsey introduced Geoff Hurst of West Ham, better in the air and more robust, though not as skilful or quick as Greaves.
Argentina were a good side, perfectly capable of beating England, and it was odd that they chose to play the way they did – odd unless you know a little of the history of their coach, Juan Carlos Lorenzo. Lorenzo thrived on a feeling of “us against the world”, creating a siege mentality within his teams. It was intended to bond teams – Sam Allardyce uses the same motivational tool in a more positive way – and make them more determined; Lorenzo’s sides were invariably defensive, both tactically and psychologically, and paranoid. Argentina decided the only way to beat England was by intimidation, and from the start the kicking and spitting off the ball got underway. England, also wound up by the suspicious Alf Ramsey, responded with some aggressive tackling. Kreitlein, the German referee, was harsh on the skulduggery, less so on the tackling; this in turn prompted the Argentinian captain, Rattín
, to conduct a running battle with the officials, questioning every decision, remonstrating when a colleague was cautioned and spitting at Kreitlein’s feet. When Kreitlein went to caution Artime, Rattín insisted on offering his opinion, and Kreitlein had had enough, sending the Argentinian captain off, having already booked him for a foul. Rattín’s claim that he was asking for an interpreter is hollow, and later claims that Kreitlein sent him off for “looking at me oddly” are internet-fostered codswallop. Rattín was sent off for persistent foul play and dissent. The rest of the team threatened to follow, prompted by Albrecht, only just back from suspension after being dismissed against West Germany. It took nearly ten minutes for the pitch to be cleared of all the hangers-on from the Argentinian camp who wished to put in their bit.
The game itself was pale. England did most of the attacking, even against eleven men, but Argentina defended with discipline and had a couple of chances. They knew England played without conventional wingers and defended narrow, concentrating play into the middle third of the field – when England remembered to use all the huge Wembley pitch, they had more joy. The goal came from the left wing, when Wilson found Peters in acres of space and he picked out his West Ham colleague with a pin-point cross – Hurst’s glancing header was just as precise. Argentina appealed for offside – of course they did – but it wasn’t.
England kept their heads during all the fuss and bother, and played a sensible and patient game – although a lack of imagination was exposed. Alan Ball was outstanding, riding tackles and driving through the Argentinian midfield without letting his fiery temper loose. The only one who fanned the flames was Alf Ramsey, with his borderline racist post-match comments about playing “animals”. Then remarks weren’t forgotten by the Argentinian press, and an ongoing football feud was born.