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Alf continued with Martin Peters for the game against Poland, but his inclusion was the only one that surprised the press. The team that took to the pitch against the Poles, Peters apart, was the one the media expected to open our World Cup campaign. Once again, Martin Peters gave Alf much food for thought. Playing in a 4–3–3 formation, Martin ghosted about the pitch creating space not only for others, but for himself. Martin impressed me with his great sense of positioning and vision, the more so since he was only twenty-two years of age. A well-drilled shot from Roger Hunt gave us a 1–0 victory over Poland and brought the curtain down on a tour in which we had remained unbeaten. Since our participation in the ‘Little World Cup’ in Brazil, we had now played twenty-one internationals and lost only one (against Austria, a match I had missed through injury). The spirit and confidence in the England camp were sky high, prompting Alf to repeat to the press a statement he had expressed some months earlier – that England would win the World Cup.

Our World Cup preparations had gone extremely well, but the build-up to the tourna-ment in England began with sensation, then farce. The World Cup itself, the Jules Rimet Trophy, had been on display at, of all places, a Stanley Gibbons stamp exhibition at the Central Hall in Westminster. One morning security staff approached the glass case in which the trophy was displayed and were dumbstruck to find it had been stolen. Shock waves reverberated around not only England, but the world. The theft of the World Cup was a huge embarrassment to the Football Association and to the whole country. The police immediately launched a nationwide investigation. Ports and airports were closed for a time as the search for the World Cup began. The story was headline news every day and, despite apparently leaving no stone unturned, the police could uncover neither clue nor motive.

A week after the event a Londoner named Dave Corbett was walking his dog, Pickles, around Norwood in south London when the dog disappeared into the front garden of a house
and began digging at the base of a hedge. Pickles uncovered a newspaper-wrapped parcel and when his owner went to investigate he was astounded to find the parcel contained the stolen World Cup.

I can only imagine the relief that swept through the corridors of the Football Association and, indeed, Scotland Yard. The recovery of the Jules Rimet Trophy made even bigger headlines and the cartoonists of the time had a field day – especially in the
News of the World
, the newspaper in which the stolen World Cup had been wrapped. Not surprisingly, one of their cartoons featured Pickles unearthing the package with a caption that read, ‘The dog that knows which newspaper sniffs out the top story.’

A man was subsequently arrested and charged with the theft of the gold statuette. Apparently he had demanded a ransom from the FA for its safe return. He was given a custodial sentence, though many people believed there were others involved who had not been brought to book. To this day the affair remains a mystery. It was not to be the last time that the Jules Rimet Trophy was to find its way into the hands of someone other than the captain of a victorious international team, but that’s a story for later.

The ’66 Tournament was the first World Cup fully to exploit its commercial potential. It was also the first to enjoy blanket live TV coverage worldwide, and this played a key role in the unprecedented commercial success of the competition. The tournament adopted a corporate logo: World Cup Willie, a cartoon lion kitted out in a Union Jack shirt and white shorts. Willie appeared on every conceivable product from badges, sports bags, T-shirts and pennants to cereal boxes, ashtrays, soft-drink cans and cuddly toys. He even released a singalong novelty record (helped by Lonnie Donegan), the opening lines being, ‘Dressed in red and white and blue, it’s World Cup Willie, we all know he’s true, World Cup Willie’. The ‘World Cup Willie’ record received a lot of radio airplay but was only a minor hit, although, curiously, it sold very
well in Japan – for the simple reason, according to Jimmy Greaves, that the disc itself fitted Tokyo’s parking meters.

The choice of Lonnie Donegan to sing the first official World Cup song was, at the time, an odd one. Lonnie Donegan had been a big star in the late fifties, enjoying a string of top-ten hits in his skiffle style. Lonnie, however, hadn’t had a hit since 1962 and in 1966 his style of music seemed to belong to another era. In pop music the Beatles ruled supreme, and the charts were dominated by groups such as the Rolling Stones, Troggs, Yard-birds, Animals, Kinks, Small Faces and Hollies, from Britain alone. The only UK solo performers to chart regularly were Cilla Black, Tom Jones and Georgie Fame and I couldn’t imagine any of them singing ‘World Cup Willie’. So the official World Cup song, aimed at young teenagers, was sung by someone youngsters perceived to be of their parents’ generation. So while everyone could sing the song, it wasn’t hip to buy the record.

The marketing people learned an important lesson from the ‘Willie’ experience. In future, if they couldn’t get a current top pop star to record a football song, they went for the team, a ploy that was effected with some success until 1990, when New Order bit the bullet and recorded ‘World In Motion’ as England’s official World Cup song for Italia ’90.

In many ways the marketing of the 1966 World Cup set the scene for what was to come. The days of people counting out their coppers and asking for a pie would soon be committed to history as supporters dug deep to buy anything and everything from World Cup Willie duffel bags to jumpers and jerkins. The strangest souvenir I can recall was marketed by Daniel Schuster’s Football Souvenirs of Sutton, Surrey. Schuster’s produced a glass wellington boot with World Cup Willie on the front, marketed as ‘a real souvenir for your mantelshelf’. This five-inch-high glass wellie was supposedly a liqueur glass. It appeared that the imagination of those who made and sold World Cup souvenirs under licence knew no bounds.

The very phrase ‘for your mantelshelf’ is suggestive of another era,
seemingly an anachronism in this period of ‘G’ plan furniture, central heating and the emergence of Terence Conran’s Habitat. While we rightly see the sixties as a decade of radical innovation, we tend to forget that, for every person swept along by the tidal wave of change in popular culture and new social opportunity, there were many who lived lives of modest expectation, whose lifestyle and homes had changed little since the fifties. In an era when domestic consumerism really took off, the material desires of many people were held in check by low wages and, as such, didn’t extend much beyond a real souvenir for their mantelshelf – still the centrepiece of their living rooms.

In 2002 some thirty-two nations contested the World Cup finals in South Korea and Japan. In 1966 there were just sixteen, divided into four groups of four. The group winners and runners-up proceeded to the quarter-finals, which were played, as now, on a straight knock-out basis, followed by the semi-finals, the play-off for third and fourth place and then the final itself. England kicked off the tournament on 11 July and in less than three weeks, on 30 July, it was all over. They didn’t drag it out in those days: thirty-two matches concentrated into twenty days around which television had to fit their schedules. Television was playing an increasingly important role in spreading the gospel of football, but football’s governing bodies were still very much in charge of the game and beholden to no one.

The tournament took place in four zones throughout the country and eight grounds were used. The south-east zone used Wembley and, for just one game, France versus Uruguay, White City. The White City stadium was a strange choice as a World Cup venue, given that London boasted White Hart Lane and Highbury, two of the best stadiums in England at the time, as well as the cavernous Stamford Bridge.

White City was known more as a greyhound stadium than a football ground, but its inclusion had much to do with its ability to offer covered accommoda-tion for 50,000 in a capacity of 60,000. Much of Highbury’s ample terracing was open to the
elements, as were the paddocks on the lower tiers of the East and West stands at White Hart Lane. Today, alongside the A40 Westway flyover where the White City Stadium once stood, there are now houses and offices offering covered accommodation for all.

The Group Two matches took place at Hillsborough and Villa Park, Group Three at Goodison Park and Old Trafford, while Group Four was staged at Roker Park, Sunderland, and Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough.

Few grounds met FIFA’s minimum requirements for seating, so clubs such as Sunderland, Middlesbrough and Aston Villa had to install temporary grandstands, though grand is hardly the right word for what was actually put in. At Roker Park and Ayresome Park, for example, low rows of benches were placed on the terracing where the crush barriers that were already in place restricted the view of the pitch for many supporters.

England matches, prime games such as the semi-finals and those involving Brazil apart, attendances for the 1966 World Cup were decent rather than staggering. Many matches were played in front of crowds that were well below capacity, for two basic reasons. First, the price of admission was nearly three times that of Football League games. For example, the minimum admission price for children was 7s. 6d. (37½p), whereas they were used to paying only 2s. 6d. (12½p) to follow their clubs. This prevented many from attending games, or made them selective about which matches they did attend. The second reason was that many games took place at the same time. If an attractive game was on television, what was the point of going along to their local ground and pay to see a less interesting match? For example, only 24,000 turned up at Old Trafford to see Hungary against Bulgaria when England’s game against France was broadcast live on TV. Attendances at Old Trafford in particular suffered from this conflict of interest, the highest attendance of the three games staged there being 29,886 for the game between much-fancied Portugal and dark horses, Hungary.

Disappointing attendances occurred especially when England played. On the afternoon of our quarter-final against Argentina, West Germany played Uruguay at Hillsborough, Portugal, North Korea at Goodison Park and Russia took on Hungary at Roker Park. Whereas we played in front of a full house at Wembley, 40,000 turned up at Hillsborough and 42,000 at Goodison Park. Healthy crowds in themselves, but below capacity for both those two stadiums. The telling difference was at Roker Park where only 22,103 turned up to see Russia dispense with Hungary. The English public loved the World Cup but, for a good proportion, their love of cosmopolitan football did not outweigh their love of watching England.

The draw of the host nation live on television, and its adverse effect on the attendances at other games, was a lesson FIFA learned during 1966. In subsequent World Cups, not only did matches involving the host nation not clash with other group games, all group matches were to be given staggered kick-off times. The structure of the World Cup finals would never be the same after ’66 when the power of television was seen for the first time.

England not only had home advantage, but had been drawn in Group One and all our games were to be played at Wembley. Alf had originally picked a squad of forty players that, three weeks prior to the tournament, had been pared down to twenty-two. The eighteen players unlucky to miss out on the finals were goalkeepers Tony Waiters (Blackpool) and Gordon West (Everton); full backs Chris Lawler (Liverpool), Paul Reaney (Leeds United) and Keith Newton (Blackburn Rovers); half backs Marvin Hinton and John Hollins (both Chelsea) and Gordon Milne (Liverpool); forwards Joe Baker (Nottingham Forest), Barry Bridges (Chelsea), Gordon Harris (Burnley), John Kaye (West Bromwich Albion), Peter Osgood (Chelsea), Fred Pickering (Everton), Peter Thompson and Tommy Smith (Liverpool
– yes, Tommy was a forward in those days), Derek Temple (Everton) and Terry Venables (Chelsea).

The final twenty-two comprised myself and two other goalkeepers, Ron Springett (Sheffield Wednesday) and Peter Bonetti (Chelsea); full backs Jimmy Armfield (Blackpool), Gerry Byrne (Liverpool), George Cohen (Fulham) and Ray Wilson (Everton); half backs Jack Charlton and Norman Hunter (both Leeds United), Ron Flowers (Wolverhampton Wanderers), Bobby Moore and Martin Peters (both West Ham United) and Nobby Stiles (Manchester United); forwards Alan Ball (Blackpool), Ian Callaghan (Liverpool), Bobby Charlton and John Connelly (both Manchester United), George Eastham (Arsenal), Jimmy Greaves (Tottenham Hotspur), Roger Hunt (Liverpool), Geoff Hurst (West Ham United) and Terry Paine (Southampton).

Alf’s backroom staff was tiny compared with that in attendance for England games today. Apart from Alf himself, it comprised trainer Harold Shepherdson (Middlesbrough), the assistant trainer, Les Cocker (Leeds United), who also acted as our physio, and Wilf McGuinness (Manchester United), who helped Alf with the coaching. That was it, four people in total, though we did enjoy the services of a doctor for the duration of the tournament. (Don’t knock the doc – he managed to get himself on the official photograph of the final squad, and not on the end of the back row either. Dr Bass was pictured wearing an England tracksuit and seated left of centre, between Alf and Jimmy Armfield, with Alan Ball, Ian Callaghan and Nobby Stiles sitting on the ground at his feet!)

I felt Alf’s final twenty-two was as strong as it could be. With all due respect to those players who had just missed out, I don’t think there was anyone missing from the squad that could have added greatly to it. Alf got it right and not for the first or last time.

Alf was confident we could go on and win the World Cup, though doubts were expressed not only by certain members of
the press, but a number of people in football. The Scotland manager of the time, John Prentice was on record as saying, ‘England won’t win’. The Leeds manager, Don Revie, sat on the fence: ‘England can take the trophy, but I would not say they will win it.’ Matt Busby of Manchester United was similarly non-committal: ‘Certainly Alf Ramsey knows what he is aiming for and England could do well… but unless England find that attacking flair, I am afraid they will have to struggle to get through to the final and win.’