Paul Hayward: The World Cup (1966)

[Music] Welcome to Travels Through Time. [Music] The podcast made in partnership with ACE Cultural Tours. [Music] Hello, I'm Artemis and in today's episode I'm speaking to the sports writer Paul Hayward about an extremely important year in English history. The year we won the World Cup. Paul was the daily telegraphs chief sports writer for more than 20 years. He's been named sports writer of the year by the sports journalist association on five occasions and has been sports journalist of the year twice at the British press awards. He also co-wrote the autobiographies of Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Bobby Rubson and Michael Owen. His new book, England Football, The Biography, is the story of the men's football team since their very first international fixture against Scotland on a cricket pitch in 1872 all the way up to the modern teams preparations for the World Cup in Qatar. Paul, welcome to Travels Through Time. I'm really excited to have you on the podcast this week, particularly as it's a kind of World Cup special episode which we've never done before. So I know you must be incredibly busy covering the World Cup at the moment. So thank you for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. It's a pleasure. So we're recording earlier in the week, but this episode is going to come out on Friday, which is the day before England's match against France. And we have to just dwell on that. For just a little moment we just have to speak about it because there was a time when England couldn't dream of doing as well as we have been doing in international tournaments recently. What's changed and why is this particular England team doing so well? Well, this game is a big one. England's traditional rivalries, biggest rivalries are with Germany and Scotland, but there's a certain frisson in games against France for historical, cultural and sporting reasons. So I think by Saturday the country will be in a fevered state. England are undergoing something of a Renaissance, two really good tournaments recently, semi-final and a final. The pressure is on them now to build on that and to get all the way to this World Cup final and really to win it, to lose in a quarter-final would be seen as regression, I think. But there is an excellent spirit in the camp and there's some seriously good attacking players, young players. The best proper players for decades and it's just a question of whether they can actually deliver on their potential. And France are obviously quite the reigning champions, so. Yes, France have set the standard really for England over the last 20 years, international level. They've been extremely successful. They've got tournament know-how experience and you know, they've actually won trophies, which is something England haven't managed. So for England to beat a frantic or a final would be, you know, a sort of a cathartic moment, I think. Definitely. Well, let's not dwell on it too much because I'll get nervous otherwise and forget about the history. Me too. How does one begin to write a biography of English football? How did you first come to have the idea to write a biography of it and how did you go about writing it? Well, I must give credit to a man called Ian Marshall at Simon & Schuster who spotted that the 150th anniversary of England's first game would fall during the Caterworld Cup. And nobody had ever really written a sort of comprehensive biography of the England men's football team. And the word biography is important there because it's not a history or a chronology. It's an attempt to tell a story really thematically and to sort of explain and understand this 150 year voyage from a cricket pitch in Scotland in 1872 wearing them played Scotland in a Nill Nill draw. To what we're seeing in Cater now, football as this, you know, conglomerate, this you know, international, fantastically sort of wealthy and obsessed over spectacle that we're seeing now. And it's a fascinating journey. England have not been historically particularly successful at international level. But, you know, the will and the spirit and the resources are there and they keep going. They keep pursuing this second major trophy. They've only won one in 1966 the year. I think we're going to talk about and they need another one. But it was a very interesting journey to go into archives and to travel around the country, speaking to people and trying to trying to understand this this enormous story which after all is a is a major part of English life. And that leads me on really nicely to my next question because I'm, it was really fascinated by 150 year biography. You know, there's so many different players and managers and things happen and the country changes. To what extent when you were researching and writing the book, did you come across a kind of essential English quality that could be reflected in football? Or is that a total myth this idea of like an English national character? No, I don't think it's a myth at all. I think the England football team is an expression of the national character in so many ways. For example, the Imperial delusions of the Victorian era and really a period running up to the modern day in many ways, this idea that because England invented football and invented certainly the international game that they somehow owned it, the sense of entitlement, the closing of minds to foreign influences and cultural changes in the game, the blockages in English thinking, the parochialism which held English football back until it was forced, I think to embrace the cosmopolitanism of the Premier League era. All that's very reflective of the English outlook in many ways. Another example would be who is a broad, which is a occupying mindset on a proportion of England fans go abroad and try to occupy foreign towns and cities in a way that's very reminiscent of a sort of it's a throwback really to a particularly imperialistic English nationalistic mindset. Again, in many ways you look at the England football team and see it as an expression of who the English are, good and bad. It's fascinating. I'm so fascinated by how much we can learn about history and about society through sports. It's really interesting. Paul, you've hinted at it a little bit already but would you like to tell listeners if you could travel through time what year would you visit? I think I would go to 1966, professional reasons to do with the book I'd have written but also because 1966 I think was a turning point in many ways, certainly in the history of modern sport but also in society and culture. Let's go straight to your first scene because I think this is a really important one and it's going to tell us a lot about the context of the of the kind of the crux of the year, the emotional crux of the year. So where are we in our first scene, if we were to be in a place where would we be physically? We would probably be in the England training camp at Hendon where Alfransy was preparing this very hardened group of English footballers, strong characters, big names in the English club game for the challenge of their lives and the challenge that had been coming for English football after a pretty unsuccessful start to their World Cup participation. People always date the history of English football from 1966 but actually they entered the World Cup for the first time in 1950 and had been well frankly very unsuccessful. They won three of their 14 World Cup matches, World Cup final matches between 1950 and 1962. So by the time they arrived at 1966 they were developing a reputation for under achievement and given the sort of ownership delusion in the English game it was starting to hurt because England were meant to be the kings of football. In 1950 the Brazilian media proclaimed them as the kings of football, they were anything but they came home in the group stage and by 1966 in a home tournament remember the the pressure was really on them to finally deliver and finally conquer the summit of the World Game. So Alfransy who had predicted when he took over the job that England would win the World Cup, that's quite a bold assertion, certainly not one that any current modern England man she would make. All the pressure was on that small group of players at their sort of quite antiquated training centre at Hendon. To finally give the English public the the the consummation that they were desperate for England as world champions. So they did that in a fluid society really the England of the 1960s was as we know changing pretty rapidly but Alfransy was an extremely conservative figure. You know he was rooted in the 1950s. Many of the players were rooted in the Second World War certainly the post-war period and it was a conservative with a small sea environment where Ramsey stressed what he might call traditional virtues. He certainly wasn't going out in Carnaby Street every Saturday night and he certainly wasn't you know dressing like George Harrison in his Sergeant Pepper in Carnation. The values that Alfransy was stressing were togetherness hard work, abstinence from alcohol, physical strength, force of character, all the things in many ways that English football believed would in the end you know dominate the rest of the world and sort of quell this uprising of style and flair and extravagance. So I would love to have been in that camp in 66 knowing seeing the pressure on those players to deliver on that mission and watching Alfransy who was called the general in his playing days by his teammates because he was so sort of bossy and authoritative. I'd love to have seen him going about his work in trying to justify the prediction he'd made three years earlier that England would win this World Cup. I just want to dwell a little bit on the relationship between the English football team and then international football and FIFA. I had the had the pleasure of watching the FIFA film United Passions quite recently and they the English are very much the antagonists in that film. They're very snobbish about the upstarts in the rest of the rest of the world who wants to try and claim football for their own. Is that an accurate portrayal of what was going on the relations between the two? I mean obviously if the Brazilian press were saying that England were the kings of football they weren't they weren't kind of too resistant to that to that ownership that England had had over it. The bureaucratic antagonism really goes back to the 1920s mainly when I don't think that the English football association was averse to the idea of FIFA but FIFA was quite clear that he wanted to set itself up as the arbiter for the world game, the supreme authority and the FA could never get their heads around that because they were a they were a committee of sort of older manic figures who thought they owned the game, thought they'd invented it and really fully intended to carry on running it as much as they possibly could for decades and centuries to come. By the 20s that was already an unrealistic view of the world because so many countries were emerging, so many countries were embracing football and power was shifting to other continents and other cultures and the FA in the end really withdrew and decided to remain a loof and this is why England didn't play in a world cup until 1950 and interestingly they paid the price for that it wasn't it wasn't a question of just arriving at a party late and being the the funnest person at that party by the time they got there they entered a world that they could they could know they couldn't recognize the game had moved on technically and tactically it was being staged in countries particularly in Brazil and Chile and countries far from the way far from the English experience and and England still had this sort of amateur mentality of turning up in these countries as if they were on a golf tour you know an amateur golf tour no real preparations not enough staff everything sort of improvised and they paid for it because they got a terrible culture shock in those first 10 or 15 years of world cup competition so the the aloofness of the FA which really started in in the 1920s came home to haunt the players and haunt the team between 1950 and 1966 obviously nowadays a world cup is like a huge international event and gone as huge amounts of media attention and also just attention and enthusiasm from the general population was that the case as much in 1966 was this was there a sense of anticipation excitement or indifference amongst the British people again this is why 66 is such a turning point because prior to that certainly in England it was regarded as a sort of exotic far away competition a bit like the Olympic Games and some of the great players the working class heroes the street footballers of the 1950s had a had a pretty sketchy view of the world cup before they actually entered it and got this this culture shock and frankly they didn't take much notice of it and the British media didn't take much notice of it I think it was regarded as a as an upstart competition that the rest of the world played so by the time the tournament became a reality in the summer of 1966 I think the English public was aware that something big was happening but there wasn't there wasn't a fever there wasn't the the type of mania that you would see now I think that staged a world cup there was there was a sort of cautious curiosity and the point has been made many times that when England played their first game against Uruguay at Wembley the match wasn't sold out you could still buy a ticket on the gate and walk up to the turnstile and get in which is which is an extraordinary thought and games of course were played around the country some of the attendances in the northeast of England for example were disappointing the concept of world cup football as as global spectacle a obligatory viewing you know four-yearly kind of obsession that it hadn't happened yet by 1966 but after that tournament all the ingredients were there for football to become this this universal language this universal passion that the television numbers went through the roof and color television came in and TV companies started to think of it as as they're a great sporting project alongside the Olympics so you really see the world cup becoming part of the global language with 1966 and that's why it was such an important tournament not just for England but for the world game I wanted to talk a bit about a particular story that's become very famous in the run up to the world cup which is about how the trophy was stolen would you I'm sure listeners are familiar with the story but it's such a good one I just couldn't resist asking you about it and including it in in the podcast today could you tell listeners a bit about it the world cup trophy in the buildup to 1966 was apparently stolen I mean now I know as you would you would you would suspect this being a a PR stunt we're so cynical a very cynical PR stunt particularly when it was found supposedly found in in the bushes by a dog called pickles who became a national hero and and and it's talked about as sort of almost part of the 66 world cup furniture you know this this this miraculous feel good story that involved all the favorite elements of English life a trophy you know a dog and in the end the queen handing the trophy to Bobby Mordy and Captain of Emily nobody really knows what happened in that story and I suspect nobody ever will but what I can tell you is that by the time the trophy was transferred to Mexico for the 1970 world cup it had this enormous security detail of MINDERS on the plane it was it when it was received in Mexico by armed police and was whisked off to a safe because the idea had taken hold that this trophy was was vulnerable it was it was people wanted to steal it it was valuable it had to be protected maybe again the the Mexican authorities very clever and cleverly adding luster to this chunk of metal by giving it an armed guard to a safe in Mexico City but it it that created pickles the dog and and the the Mexican sort of security operation to get it over the border in 1970 created much of the mystique around the trophy itself I was going to say it was kind of reminding me of what you were saying about the 1966 world cup being the one that sort of kicks off this the mystique the mythology around the whole thing that story kind of adds to that yes it does and the players will I think we'll talk about this later but the players themselves you know weren't turned into superstars or household names by the 1966 world cup but the game itself was starting to become an enormous industry an enormous product and FIFA were starting to become a sort of quasi you know global body like the United Nations they they started to see themselves as the Vatican football because they knew that they had in their hands a an immensely valuable commercial commodity that television companies and and corporations were starting to fall over themselves to get a share of and the numbers were telling them that the world cup was was really turning into just a huge a global spectacle to to match in many ways the Olympics so if you're looking for a start point from the for the commercialisation of modern football you know you could do a lot worse than start in 1966 just before we get onto the game which is obviously the most exciting I think it's going to be the most exciting part of the conversation I want to have time to dwell on that but I wanted to talk about a bit about the cultural context of the game and you mentioned how Britain was changing at this time there was a certain international attitude or perhaps maybe it's not international maybe it's an internal attitude towards Britain at this time of like cool Britannia the Beatles the Rolling Stones can't it be street all this type of stuff how connected is the world cup to this particular version of British identity in the 1960s when you're writing a biography you're you're a blight to examine I think your question conventional narratives and the conventional view of London and England and Great Britain in the 1960s was this this this very cool place I mean there is a mythology around that I mean London was called the swinging city by time magazine and that that label kind of stuck and I think people of subsequent generations assumed that you know that everything was everything was free and easy everything was suddenly everybody was liberated in London in the mid 60s but actually when you look at the the history of that time it there it was quite messy I mean for example the Wilson government was in crisis they were forcing deflationary measures on the economy to save the pound there was a freeze on incomes and prices which provoked a sort of cabinet crisis it was a conservative very conservative society the colonial office this really stood out to me you know in the colonial office of the British government ceased to exist the day after the final but there were still 30 governorships around the world with direct authority from the Queen and these were these were people standing around in military uniforms in in white plumes and you know like figures from the 19th century so the the imperial notion of Britain the empire was still very much alive psychically if not in reality but at the same time culturally you know the Beatles had released revolver that year George Harrison had met Ravi Shankar the number one I think during the 66th World Cup was sunny afternoon by the kinks which is which is largely actually a lament about the high tax rates you know with that line the tax man's taken all my dough so people there was obviously a counter culture against this stifling conservatism of the 1950s but I think sometimes the mistake we make is to assume that it was a victory for that counter culture it was actually a pretty a pretty bloody struggle against a society that wasn't changing as fast as the as we like to think in retrospect our sponsors ace tours delve into public and private collections in the company of expert art historians and lecturers their tours take in some of the best art collections around the world and explore the stories of their creators from the superlative collection of German expressionist art at Leicester Museum to the 38 Renoirs on display at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts to find out more visit the ace website at www.acecultraTours.co.uk yeah and it seems I know we've sort of traveled to the late 1960s and other conversations on this podcast and that tension between the old and the new is really is really really present let's talk about your next scene the second scene where we're going in 1966 would you like to tell us where we are well we're in the World Cup final or on the cusp of it on 30th of July 1966 and this sort of rugged hyper organized super committed England team have struggled through to the final now it's important to remember that they had home advantage all the way through and some of the South American countries felt that the big European countries particularly and then were getting sort of a bit of help from the referees sympathetic referees that doesn't really bear scrutiny but nevertheless they go into that final with the country in a state I think as Arthur Hopp-Craft said in his great book The Football Man of a barely endureable tension so a country that started out was being curious about the World Cup is now completely hooked and everybody's fighting for a ticket they're playing West Germany who haven't beaten England to that point a West Germany team who interestingly are almost at some cultural level reluctant to beat England certainly the diplomatic staff in London were a bit worried about West Germany winning the game because of essentially because of war guilt they were worried that all the work they had done in the post-war period to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the other Western countries and the English in particular would be undermined if West Germany spoiled England's party at Wembley and it's remarkable to think of that now I mean that feeling didn't last very long and I don't think the German team tried to act on it because it was a very tense very physical exhausting evenly matched game between two teams of immense character and although it felt at the time like the consummation for the England team in English football it was in fact the beginning of the transfer of power to Germany it was England's last hurrah in many ways because subsequently Germany went off from one three World Cup and three European Championships in England won nothing so although it was bathed in this wonderful honeyed light of English validation with Bobby Moore holding the trophy and all those beautifully honeyed summary pictures of gallant English warriors you know finally getting hold of that as you were in a trophy it was actually the beginning of the end of something rather than the beginning but the feeling itself when you look at the footage the pattern used footage for example of the teams coming out in this Wembley this cathedral to the game and the pristine shirts with no advertising on them and the brown ball and the simplicity and purity of that match I think it's still very seductive a lot of people are sick of talking about 66 it feels like a kind of museum piece but at the same time when you go back and you watch the game and you watch the news coverage of it it does feel like a curiously innocent time and an innocent spectacle there was no segregation for example in the crowd there was no question of separating German and English fans in case they had a fight or they were abusive everybody mixed in together it was it was a sort of peaceful and civilized spectacle in many ways although the great hop craft complained about the complexion of the crowd because he thought it was two middle class there were too many rugby types in in blazers who had come along and didn't know who the players were and was sort of asking silly questions about the Charlton Brothers when you know he wanted it to be very much a working class audience because it was still the working class game he felt the final had been invaded by a sort of middle class arid these to feel like which is quite amusing but in essence I think the whole country was there across section of English society was there and by the point by the time they arrived in that final through the usual dramas of a of a world cup competition where getting to the final is extremely difficult the country was thoroughly in love with the team it's so interesting what you said about the crowds being mixed in together why do you think that at what point did that become just not a possibility or the fear of fighting and brawling became too much quite soon afterwards actually it was it survived that that tradition survived for the rest of the 1960s but in the 1970s the club game descended into a kind of very violent tribalism it didn't affect the England team so much because England didn't really qualify for tournaments in the 1970s they caught up in the 80s and 90s with the with the advent of of English hooliganism around the national team but the 60s still felt like this ittle I mean the English fans England fans were so peaceful in fact but the national supporters federation in the early 60s formed of an England supporters club to try and to try and drum up some passion and some you know some noise around the England team because some of the England players felt that they weren't supported as noisily and passionately as some of the other countries and it was a disadvantage to them so there was an attempt to almost construct a kind of chauvinism around the England team and the 66 final is really the last day when it would have been possible not to segregate England and Germany fans and we could talk for a very long time about the socio and economic reasons about why it all went wrong in the 1970s but it certainly did. I want to talk a bit about the kind of we could describe the experience if we were fans if we were there we're walking into Wembley Stadium how would the experience of watching a football match in Wembley Stadium in 1966 differ to today? Well it was more affordable for starters and people would have walked in with rattles, rosettes a lot of them would have been in suits and most tellingly I think the the ensign of the England team at that time was still the Union Jack the Union flag it wasn't the cross that's in George. The England fans sort of saw them as a Britain's team which must have been immensely patronising to Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland but the English nationalism hadn't yet really fully identified itself through the team at that point it was still there was still a sort of a British feel about it and even now I look around the footage of the Wembley crowd that day and marvel at the number of Union jacks and marvel at the absence of the cross and George which I think really took over with England teams at Euro 96 when everything was white background and red cross and for some reason in the mid 90s English nationalism or patriotism shoved aside the Union Jack and developed a different identity. You spoke a bit about how this was like the consummation of England's belief in itself as the the kings and the owners of football but it's kind of I think I'd guess Southgate has described it as an outlier is that right? Yes, yes. So so could we say that the victory in this match was like a happy accident or was there something about the leadership of Alpharamzi the skill of the players? Basically I guess I'm asking can we replicate it or was it like a kind of one of those wonderful things where it just sometimes goes your way? Well because England have travelled now for 56 years without winning a second trophy the temptation is always to go back and I get asked this a lot so what was it about 66 that was different you know what what what were they able to do then that they haven't been able to do since and one answer is certainly the general ship of of Alpharamzi who was a strategiser and who achieved something that the Air Southgate is now achieving which is that he he brought together a group of people and he made them understand that to win at international levels we successful you have to you have to buy into it to use a modern phrase and what that means is you have to kind of sacrifice your ego and your club loyalties and your tribalism and your and your self-interest and you have to believe in the in the possibility that's been put in front of you by the manager. So Alpharamzi said to those players look if if you work for this and if you follow my plan and he didn't have a plan a tactical and technical plan to win the World Cup I guarantee to you I could make your World Champions and and Garas Southgate after a period of of of disengagement by England players and a lack of faith and a fatalism and a sort of fear of playing for England has persuaded the current generation that it but it's worth their while and that they can be successful they can be rewarded and that they can actually enjoy playing for England it's not just an inquest way it's going to happen so I mean actually one of the biggest problems Alpharamzi had was kind of curving the the drinking culture of the mid 1960s so those players were they they you know they weren't as professional as today's players they didn't have to be because the game wasn't based on relentless running and fitness stats they could get away with you know carousing and drinking and and and and treating training as a sort of occupational hazard almost and and and they weren't paid really to to be munkish either if you know they were paid a relatively modest amount so it was quite hard to to get a squad of players around to your way of thinking get them to get them to make those sacrifices to get them to to put aside their normal lifestyles you know that you know the drinking all night after the game and the drinking all day on the Wednesday before the game and to to believe that that would bring them some reward and Alpharamzi did that brilliantly and all the while the players felt okay we'll do this because this guy knows what he's doing he set out a plan for as he set out a structure and a scheme and if we follow it we'll get what we want because players football always always think when they deal with managers will this guy help me get what I want will he make me successful will he make me rich or she and that's their thinking you know and so Alpharamzi gave them that plan in 66 and because they were particularly committed and strong and sort of flinty people from from tough backgrounds I think they were able to to achieve it and Garas Alpharamzi has the same conundrum now he's given them the opportunity will they take it they certainly took it in 66 and and part of the nostalgia I think for that time is is about the fact that it was it was a triumph of of planning and strategy and actually English sport hasn't been very good at planning and strategy it's been very good at the heart but not so good with the head. What about the players could you tell us a bit about who is on the line up what kind of character did we have and and why were they special or important to the game? Yes Ramzi had three or four world class players I mean you can't win a world cup if you don't have a smattering of world class players so he had he had Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton particularly Ray Wilson the leftback was probably the best leftback in the world. Nobby Starr's fabulous defensive midfielder here he had all the sort of elements that he needed really individual elements and he had this sort of collective spirit and effort. Bobby Moore was was a player of sort of colossal natural ability a wonderful sense of the game spatial awareness confidence on the ball composure the ability to pass and move and see the game three moves before it happened you know and the obvious comparison there is with Franz Beckembaugh who also played in that 66 game a kind of majestic sweeper of a player who could we could see the whole pitch and was had this amazing aura about him Bobby Charlton was the most gifted player in that team a man with trauma still from the Munich Air disaster of 1958 a quiet man but a player of sort of matrioning natural ability. Nobby Starr's was the retriever the terrier the stopper the the sort of breaker of of hearts opposition hearts as he was against usabio in the semi-final against Portugor he was the enforcer Jeff Hirst was the bolter who came in late and couldn't stop scoring so you see really in any World Cup campaign you need you need you need certain components and you need certain things to go your way you need you need to have lucky guesses and you made a lucky guess with Jeff Hirst in in in many ways but it's a wonderful thing sport and football to see to see the chemistry between players an individuals and the develop and the balance the structural balance developed to the point where you you look at a team and entity and so how that's you know that's that's going places. You mentioned that today football is much more focused on fitness and that wasn't so much the case then if you were to describe the style of football that we would be watching being played if we were at this game in 1966 how would you describe it? That's a very good question because during the Covid pandemic the game was was replayed on Channel 4 from start to finish as a as a piece of theatre almost and Glenn Hoddle one of the most gifted English players of the last half century was the co-commentator and he couldn't stop himself noticing all the mistakes in the game possession of the ball was was surrendered a lot the the tackling obviously was was ferocious it was a sort of messy attritional game it certainly wasn't a thing of beauty and modern football audiences now demand beauty and they demand you know sort of orchestral play and and brilliant individual finishing an artistry by Messi or Ronaldo Killian and Bappe but at that time it was much more a physical trial that game was a physical context contest and a traditional battle between two evenly matched teams and you know you wouldn't have watched that enjoying it artistically but you would you would have seen the absolute ferocious commitment of two teams and 22 players you know fighting over every ball and every inch of turf and it was it was a it was a sort of classic of a vanished era in many ways if you played that game now people would call it a bad game but it wasn't a bad game it was it was a game of the heart and the spirit and it was a game that England had to had to empty themselves to win really it was immensely difficult for England to win that match and I think their pleasure was partly reflected just how much they'd had to had to give to commit to become world champions and just listening to you speak about it is making me think how electric the atmosphere must have been when the win was was secured could we talk a bit about the immediate celebrations the aftermath and I don't know if there are any particular accounts that we could talk about of what yeah what that moment was like yes London came to a standstill and the the automobile association said it's like the E night election night a new year's eve rolled into one I've seen this elsewhere in the world I was in France in 1998 in Paris when France won the World Cup and the whole of Paris was on the streets till dawn and it felt like the end of a war it was the this communal joy was astonishing and I remember wandering around Paris all night wandering around the streets of Paris thinking this is this is the happiest I've ever seen people or certainly this number of people and you got swept along in this unquestioning pride and joy a uniting pride and joy and London would have been quite a lot like that in 1966 after England won the footage of the coach trying to get back to the team-hotelling Kensington is intriguing there's a huge surge of bodies towards the coach and towards the hotel and and London police officers dressed in in the normal bobby outfit of you know long coat and helmet but no riot gear no no barriers there's no there's no sort of modern crowd control there the policemen are just sort of linking arms and trying to hold these people back nobody does anything silly nobody tries to storm the hotel the players end up on the balcony serenading the crowd it's a it's a it's a it's a scene really that English football had wanted since 1872 I would argue which is when my book starts and and and it ended up as a as a banquet you know a sort of banquet that showed up the some of the dubious thinking of the time in some ways I mean you probably know that none of the women wives and girlfriends were allowed into the the the banquet into the main meal the celebratory meal they were they were all put in an annex in a separate room a lot of the players felt awful about that the room was packed with you know committee men and FA people and hangos on and stage George Johnnies but the the women who played such a big part in that victory obviously were were banished to a separate room and there's quite a lot of shame from that certainly from some of the players they knew it was wrong and they they felt guilty about it for many years afterwards the fact that the women would deny their part in that victory in that way and was sort of frankly humiliated in that way was was the was the one really sour note of the whole celebration I think but they all managed to get together again and go out clubbing and and stay out all night and and it was a tremendously hedonistic scene but then the next day they they were quite cool those England players because of course they were dressed in the sharp suits of the sixties and the following day they all turned up in sunglasses and sharp suits to a so-ho cinema to watch the game again with you know with a sort of glass of larger in hand and everybody everybody looked very mellow and cool and so-ho-ish and it was it was quite a nice the ham it was quite a nice way to wrap the whole thing up and then and then they returned to their normal lives and I'm bored drove up the m6 and had egan chips Jeff first went back to his house that afternoon and mowed the lawn that leads us on perfectly to our final scene which is the aftermath that our players if we were going to be in a particular place for this final scene where would we be? We would be in Ashington a colliery town in the northeast of England where Bobby and Jack Chalton came from they came from a mining family in a in a deprived colliery town a town with a great tradition of producing great footballers and I think in August 1966 they went back there to be received by the people of Ashington who had sent them on their way all those years ago and that to me is one of the most poignant scenes in in English football history because they turned up in Ashington and they were given a ride through town in a 1926 rolls Royce Phantom with the top down must have cost a fortune to hire that for the day and this was the town where the shopkeeper had run in 1958 to tell sissy chalton that her son had been involved in the Unicae disaster and you know nobody knew whether Bobby Chalton had survived the chalton's were royalty really in a town that didn't go in for royalty very much they grew up in a in a terrorist street which I've been to back to back houses that played football on the cobbles outside Jack Chalton's great gift to his parents was to buy them a house in the end with an indoor toilet and the the sort of climax of their return to Ashington that day was a gallow dance organized by the Ashington mine workers federation you know I mean could you imagine today's footballers and having that as their as the climax of their World Cup winning campaign so we're really peering into a vanished world a world where England's footballers and footballers generally were completely rooted in the communities from which they came and the money they did and the fame they achieved did enable them to move into a different sphere but it was very modest fear they they if they had a detached house with a bit of a garden and three bedrooms they felt like they'd made it and to give you an illustration of that the the World Cup winning team in 66 shared 22,000 pounds in win bonuses the players felt probably more particularly felt that they should share it equally even the players who hadn't played much would get the same amount as Jeff Hurst who had scored a hat trick so they all got a thousand pounds each which was a pittance really for winning the World Cup and certainly compared to the money they had generated by doing so and again it's it it's very moving to think that in not long after really 66 I mean Ray Wilson for example became an embarma that is father-in-law's funeral business Jeff Hurst was on the dole for a while and became a had to go up being a door to door salesman you know he tried everything to find a second life Bobby Moore lost money in business ventures and became a tabloid columnist and radio ponder Bobby Chalton opened a a travel agency in the main these men returned to the world that they had come from you know and they were they were well known but they weren't they weren't mega celebrities and they certainly weren't rich and and they ended up really I think in many ways in in in in their own museum because England haven't won anything since these these these guys have been curators in their own museum telling their stories that you know the same story is trying to add new detail to make them fresh but Jeff Hurst is is still talking about 1966 his hat trick in 1966 at dinners and talks and corporate events and he's been doing that for 50-60 years I sometimes wonder whether he ever gets sick of it it's his living now largely and you can see why he does it but it's curious to see the surviving members of that team still trapped in a place and a period where to most English people now it it's a it's a it's a piece of history it's it's a it's something that's in not a packet in usrael but it's it's nostalgic before the European championship final which England lost to Italy on penalties Gary Linnaker said and spoke for a generation really when he said look we all respect and love the memory of 1966 but we also need something new we're a bit sick of it now we need we need another win we need another team to to venerate and you know he admitted to the weariness that people feel about being stuck in something that now feels very old but when you go back into it it does come back to life and it does it does invigorate and entrance all over again it certainly did for me I have one last question before we find out what your memento is from 1966 and we head back to the present we've kind of covered this in in different ways throughout our conversation but I just wanted to kind of distill it down maybe if possible what can 1966 tell us about the history of English football the best thing that it tells us is that England are capable I think there have been times in the last 20 years when people have given up on the idea of England as tournament contenders you know particularly in 2016 in in Nice when they lost to Iceland in the European Championship there was there was a widespread feeling that this was just this was a dead end and that everybody should just go back to their clubs and it's a Premier League football and Champions League football and just enjoy that and forget about the England team ever being successful in tournaments but the current here the Garas Southgate area is telling us that it's not over and that the possibility is still there and that if you do the right things and make the right decisions you still can be successful so we're not flogging a dead horse with the England team anymore but it felt like we've worked for an awful long time and 1966 there are still lessons in from 1966 to encourage the current generation it's not all just stale history there are there are little principles embedded in there that can inspire players over generations and not just you know on it on a TV screen in a nostalgia session the commitment the spirit the the togetherness the self-sacrifice the fervor and spirit that you need to be successful at international football alongside all the other things that you really do need like technical and tactical prowess so I think I think 66 can still encourage English football it still sustains English football on some level it's just that it's rather old now and you have to you have to really dust it down to to define the lessons in it because it's lived on its own in this this museum for too long well we all have our fingers crossed for tomorrow and for the rest of this tournament before we head back to the present day you're allowed to bring back a memento with you from 1966 so what would you like to bring? Well when I was researching my book I went to see a woman called Linda Spragan and Millsborough who showed me the tracksuit top that was worn by her father Harold Shepperton who was Alphranzen's number two in 1966 and she produced it and held it up for me and it was a it was an absolute thing of beauty the the color and the the the the gold the gold twine on the badge and the sort of the pristine it was like a sort of mod it was like a great mod jacket really you know and I was looking at it saying god I'd love to have one of those you know that's that's just that that is the distillation of the best of English football in one tracksuit top and the best of the 60s so I wouldn't mind having that but in the absence of that I would take as my item please the original vinyl edition of a revolver by the Beatles one because it's such a great album and two because it expresses a point of change in music it's a it's a it's a transitional transformational album the points way into the future and makes you realise that the culture's not a static event it's a it's a moving river and it's it's such a brilliant album so if I could get a copy of that from the day it was released preferably signed by the Beatles I think I think I'll have that if you don't mind yeah I think we can manage that I think we can manage that we're all big Beatles fans on the podcast so good proving poor thank you so much this has been such an interesting conversation and has really got me even more fired up and then I already watched for the World Cup so thank you thank you it's been an absolute pleasure that was me arsumous oven speaking to Paul Hayward about the year 1966 England football the biography is published by Simon & Schuster and is available to buy now don't forget you can visit our website to find out more information about this episode and any of our others that's tttpodcast.com and if you've enjoyed this conversation we'd really appreciate it if you left us a review on Apple Podcast it really helps us out thanks so much for listening we'll see you next week