England are at lowest point since 1966, but Sam Allardyce can evoke spirit of Sir Alf Ramsey

New manager: England have appointed Sam Allardyce as Roy Hodgson's successor
Matthew Lewis/Getty Images
John Dillon30 July 2016

By rights, England should this week be looking forward to staging its next World Cup rather than looking back mistily to its last one 50 years ago.

Fifa’s rancid corruption sent its 2018 tournament to the sporting kleptocracy of Russia instead of here.

Wembley, Old Trafford, Anfield and the rest of the game’s oldest great cathedrals were ready and waiting.

The eyes of the world were transfixed by the game and its culture here. But there were no bungs or kickbacks to be had by Sepp Blatter and his now-fallen cronies. So the tournament went east, with 2022 landing even more astonishingly in Qatar.

It is a scandal that should become more infuriating and exasperating to this nation with every passing day of the current revelations about state-sponsored doping, cheating and conniving across every level of sport in Russia.

It shouldn’t be forgotten even if it is six years ago now that England was robbed by the warped votes of the old Fifa lizards before the law finally ensnared them.

Indeed, it may yet haunt the game if the fall-out scars the next World Cup on Russia’s home soil as profoundly as their sporting criminality is staining the Olympics in Rio just now.

The FA was humiliated on that infamous day of decision in Zurich in 2010.

This was despite the fact they had the best technical bid, had the stadia already built and fitted every one of the governing body’s platitudinous criteria about diversity, inclusivity and equality more closely than any other football nation.

It was yet one more embarrassment, one more excruciating humbling in the tumble from grace of England in the international arena that had been taking place since the World Cup win of 1966.

Only this time, it was off the pitch instead of on it.

So now, in this anniversary week, England is left only to look back instead of forward.

We do it fondly, wistfully but frankly, in utter befuddlement about how far the national team has fallen since the glorious afternoon when Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet trophy and, unwittingly at the time, launched a nostalgia brand that has been stronger than ever these past few summer weeks.

Perhaps there is one saving grace to the fact that England wasn’t awarded the 2018 World Cup.

What a foot-shuffling, awkward situation it would be for the nation to be now proclaiming the advent of the next tournament only a month after the national side were beaten by Iceland at the Euros in France.

Who, in such circumstances, could have then taken seriously any suggestion that England might win the following World Cup as host country, which is what the FA would have been obliged to do?

Alf Ramsey – before he was knighted – made just such an assertion before the start of the 1966 tournament and was proven correct in his confidence.

Of course, it was made at a time when this nation had a far higher opinion of itself in international football, and by a man whose own personal levels of conviction were deep and profound.

1966 World Cup Final - England vs West Germany

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Yet even then, this assumption of importance was based on very little in terms of the World Cup.

After haughtily deigning to enter the first three competitions, England had failed to progress beyond the opening phase in 1950 – where they were infamously humbled by the USA with Ramsey in the side in Belo Horizonte - and 1958, and only reached the second stage in 1954 and 1962.

There will be anger among those who have been distinctly under-whelmed by the appointment of Sam Allardyce as Ramsey’s latest successor to suggest any similarities between the two.

Indeed, Ramsey, before he took the job, had won 32 international caps and managed Ipswich Town to an extra-ordinary league title triumph in 1962; neither of which Allardyce has come remotely near doing.

Yet self-belief, stubbornness, toughness, modernity, organisation and practicality were Ramsey’s strongest suits as a manager, and Allardyce has all of those qualities in abundance.

How profoundly they are required now, with the England side undoubtedly at its all-time lowest point.

They were, in fact, hugely important in 1966, too, when Ramsey pointedly ignored a huge wave of scepticism about his tactics and his team selections which placed hum under fire in the early stages of the competition.

These plain character traits of Allardyce may yet be the unglamorous but critical factor that halts the spiral of decline.

That’s where we are. That’s what we need now. It may be all we’ve got.

How did things sink so far since that memorable afternoon 50 years ago? The more successful international nations gently mock England’s nostalgic obsession with it all.

It will surprise many, but the Germans simply don’t place half as much stock in the supposed rivalry with England that looms so large here. They don’t need to. There is, though, a wider social context to England’s triumph that partly explains the obsession with 1966 along with the plain facts of the football.

This was one of those periodic times when London and England were the cultural centres of the planet. This was the era of Swinging London, Carnaby Street, the mini-skirt, the Beatles and the Stones (although, for the record, the best selling record of that month in the UK was The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’.)

Blond, handsome Booby Moore was to become the first footballing superstar here. He symbolised the aspirant, rising working class in much the same way that Michael Caine and Terence Stamp did at the cinema.

It is a part of the history lesson, anyway. It has a certain resonance to a certain generation still. Let’s be honest, though. London and England are more often than not the cultural centres of the planet.

It is certainly true at the moment and has been many times since the Sixties, even if there’s currently much more of a flavour of international money and soaring property prices driving the boom along with the art, the fashion and the music.

It is just football which has failed to keep up here; international football, at least. The England side has fallen off a cliff.

Of course, fans of the game among the generation growing up during this London crescendo certainly won't be looking back on Saturday and thinking about the days of Mary Quant and Radio Caroline. It’s really for the over-55s.

It’s not even certain how closely they follow the England side at a time when the Premier League’s power, glamour and might have become so all encompassing. And when every match played by Real Madrid and Barcelona is shown live on TV here.

This is the forthcoming season in which Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp, Arsene Wenger and Antonio Conte will square up across the technical areas. The whole planet will watch, agog with excitement.

Two years of an international qualification tournament would be mundane by comparison at any time.

After England’s calamity in France, it will appear even more irrelevant. This is yet another measure of how dramatically the ground of the game has shifted since 1966.

With the International Champions Cup currently involving most of the world’s biggest clubs on a global scale, it's not difficult, either, to see a time when international football will be usurped completely.

After 1966, perhaps it was surprising that the hope of some sort of further success for England lasted so long. All the evidence suggested otherwise.

The last vestiges of national belief in the side drained away during the debacle at the South Africa World Cup under Fabio Capello in 2010.

Since then, in three tournaments under Roy Hodgson, people expected very little and that is exactly what they got – with only the scale of the setbacks in Brazil and then France providing any surprise.

Next up at Wembley for England is the visit of Malta on October 8. This nation has no right whatsoever to peer down its nose at smaller opponents.

Ramsey was manager when they last came to London in May, 1971. England won 5-0 but the glow of 1966 had already dimmed. It burns again nostalgically this weekend. Is it any wonder? There is nothing else.

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