Alf Ramsey – still the only manager of any England side to lead the country to World Cup glory – is the complex central figure in Duncan Hamilton’s elegiac account of the shadow that fell across the coach and his players after 1966
is the complex central figure in Duncan Hamilton’s elegiac account of the shadow that fell across the coach and his players after 1966victory of 1966 is written in sorrow, and in anger, and in a melancholy acceptance of what befell the sporting heroes of yesteryear. It is sometimes agonising to read, because we are made aware of how the bright star of a single summer’s day is set against the long haul of lives drifting into eclipse. Agonising, but also absorbing.
A hero to Ipswich, he was a deeply strange man to all. Recessive, remote, abrupt to the point of rudeness, he lacked the one thing most great managers are famous for: charisma. He knew only football and his limited conversation made him awkward company. In Hamilton’s resonant phrase: “Ramsey was an introvert in an extrovert’s job.” He shunned the press, as far as he was able, and doled out quotes like a miser giving alms.
manager in May 1963 the book picks up a gear and begins its thrilling countdown to the World Cup three years away.This will be catnip to footie aficionados but also to those interested in the 1960s, just when the age of deference was giving way to a new porousness in the class system. Not that you will find many rebels among Ramsey’s England squad. Most of these raw young men were just happy to be playing football under a paternalist boss who spoke their language.
England captain Bobby Moore kisses the Jules Rimet trophy as the team celebrate winning the World Cup.It is the book’s contention that the euphoria of 30 July 1966 marked not a beginning, but an end. For the players, it was a froth of fleeting joy that blurred in their minds; a feeling of anticlimax ensued. In the longer term, it heralded times of bleak unfulfilment and, for some, a decline into illness, depression and drink.
Ramsey himself was characteristically low-key in victory. One is unsurprised to learn “he would not be chaired around the pitch” and thereafter refused all self-promotion bar a knighthood – no autobiography, no football manuals, no “exclusives” with the press. He was a man from a different era, possibly a different planet. Thompson and the FA made themselves his enemy, so too the press, who were ready to call for his neck after the dramatic disasters in Mexico four years later.
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