Duncan Hamilton’s account of England’s World Cup victory 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. Like all the best football books, Answered Prayers is not just about football; it’s about hope and despair, friendship and enmity, and the character it takes to handle them.
The particular character it concerns is Alf Ramsey, the man who masterminded the England team’s finest hour. Hamilton begins by visiting his statue, obscurely situated in Portman Road, Ipswich, ignored by all but the pigeons. Yet in life it would be Ramsey’s fate to endure much worse than bird shit. Born poor in Dagenham in 1920 – his father was described in the census as a “hay & straw dealer”, like an indigent from Henry Mayhew – he was driven by football and self-improvement, carefully planing down the edges of his cockney accent. After a distinguished playing career (Southampton, Spurs, 32 caps for England), he joined unfancied Ipswich Town as manager in the mid-1950s and within six years had engineered a remarkable ascent from the old Third Division to First Division champions in their debut season.
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. Hurrying once through an airport, he was hailed by a reporter who asked if he might “have a word”. Without breaking stride, Ramsey obliged him: “Goodbye.” But his achievement had already done the talking. Once he takes over as England 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. Hamilton overeggs it in calling him an “authentic auteur”, but the players understood his steely singlemindedness and they knew better than to cross him. Only Jimmy Greaves, with his cheery insolence and knack for “pilfering the limelight”, failed to toe the line. His goals weren’t enough; Ramsey wanted workrate and obedience. The way he assembles the team is reminiscent of Yul Brynner recruiting his Magnificent Seven; he saw precisely the job each of them had to do. None more so than Bobby Moore, to whom Hamilton delivers a touching tribute – not just the best player on the pitch at Wembley but also the bravest (he’d made a rush recovery from surgery for testicular cancer). Ramsey later said that victory “would have been impossible without Bobby Moore”. The captain’s modesty and graciousness light up these pages.
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. Thus is Saint Teresa of Ávila’s famous warning played out: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” As so often in sports stories, the villains wear blazers and titles, principal among them, Sir Harold Thompson of the FA, with the Football League’s Alan Hardaker lurking in a subsidiary role. Aside from skimping on decent remuneration for the players – it’s said that a T-shirt seller outside Wembley that day earned more than the victorious XI put together – the game’s boorish time-servers seem either baffled or affronted by the honest evidence of talent. Post-playing career, only Jack and Bobby Charlton prospered, one in management, the other as club ambassador, but there was a twist even there: the brothers barely spoke to each other for 30 years.
Ramsey himself was characteristically low-key in victory. One is unsurprised to learn “he would not be chaired around the pitch” (who would have dared try?) 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. That tournament is English football’s stations of the cross – Moore’s false arrest in Bogotá, Ramsey’s Captain Mainwaring act towards his Mexican hosts, his wrong-headed substitutions in León, Gordon Banks succumbing to Montezuma’s revenge, Peter Bonetti’s horror show in goal, and so, relentlessly, on. Perhaps it would have been wiser to quit the job then. Hamilton deplores the way Ramsey was eventually discarded in 1974, though he doesn’t seem to accept that there was good reason for him to go – his loss of nerve as well as of tactical nous had turned England’s football crabbed and negative. Sometimes a thing is true even when the Sun says it is.
Answered Prayers is an elegy and a corrective: England should have been so much kinder to Ramsey and his team. Hamilton hails from the cultured end of sportswriting: thoughtful, hostile to cliche, with a touch of Hugh McIlvanney in the flair of his prose and aptitude for quotation – from Philip Larkin, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, WG Sebald. Grand names, and an honour not wasted on those Boys of summer ’66.
Answered Prayers: England and the 1966 World Cup by Duncan Hamilton is published by Riverrun (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
