1966 England 4 West Germany 2
After extra time
This was the summer I really fell in love with football. And one player in particular, Jimmy Greaves. He seemed the epitome of cool to a nine‑year-old boy and I’ve been a Spurs fan ever since. I’d been devastated when he got injured early on in the competition and had looked on his replacement, Geoff Hurst, with some suspicion. By the time England had reached the final, though, I had just about forgiven Hurst and was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as I sat down in front of our grainy black and white TV to watch the game with my mother. I burst into tears when West Germany scored their late equaliser and again when England scored twice – with a little help from the Russian linesman – in extra time. But as the players went on their victory lap around Wembley, a little part of me couldn’t help feeling that somehow Hurst had just scored Greaves’s hat-trick. And judging by the look on his face, Greaves felt much the same.
1950 USA 1 England 0
Following the 1966 World Cup, I set about reading everything I could about football and persuaded my parents to get me a subscription to Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly. The magazine covered all aspects of club and international football, but one game seemed to be referenced far more than any other. USA v England, played in Belo Horizonte. This was the first World Cup England had deigned to compete in and the notion that the country that had invented football could lose to one that had no real interest in the game had been unthinkable. Yet that’s exactly what happened thanks to a headed first-half goal from Joe Gaetjens. Even nearly 20 years later, when I came to learn about this game, the scars of the defeat were still raw. Many reporters still seemed to have trouble believing England had lost. Some blamed the state of the pitch but everyone agreed such a shock could never happen again. We were all to learn the hard way that just wasn’t true.
1954 Hungary 2 West Germany 3
My father had little interest in football and struggled to understand my childhood passion for it. But he did occasionally make an effort by taking me to watch Swindon Town and buying me the odd book. One day he came home with an old copy of the autobiography of Ferenc Puskas and I became captivated by the story of Hungarian football in the 1950s. Back then they had been hailed as the best team in the world – having beaten England 6-3 at Wembley – and were everyone’s favourites to lift the 1954 World Cup. And they looked odds on to do so, going 2-0 up in the final. Then everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A German player fouled the Hungarian keeper in the buildup to one of their goals, West Germany scored a fluke winner and Hungary wrongly had an equaliser ruled out. It still feels a travesty of justice that such a brilliant team never won a World Cup.
1970 England 2 West Germany 3, Brazil 4 Italy 1
It took a while for England’s quarter-final defeat to sink in as I’d rather assumed that as England had won in 1966 then there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t do so again. That’s the innocence of the 13-year-old mind for you. I’ve since come to realise that being 2-0 up midway through the second half was just England’s way of softening me up for decades of disappointment to come. The one upside of England’s early exit was it freed me up to enjoy the sheer brilliance of Pelé and the rest of the Brazilian team in the final. It took me out of my narrow European mindset and opened my mind. Here was football being played in a way I’d never really seen before and the final goal, scored by Carlos Alberto, is still fixed in my mind as a thing of beauty.
1978 Argentina 6 Peru 0
The game in which I lost my innocence. The host nation needed to beat Peru by at least four goals to qualify for the final and I willing Argentina to succeed. I was in the middle of a politics degree and over the course of the tournament I’d become an admirer of the leftwing, chain-smoking manager César Luis Menotti, who was openly at odds with the ruling military junta. As the goals went in, my excitement mounted and by the final whistle I was ecstatic. It wasn’t long before the doubts crept in, as various pundits began to suggest the game might somehow have been fixed. I’ve still no idea if it was rigged or whether it was just the improbability of the scoreline, combined with a bit of casual racism about the untrustworthiness of two South American countries: but I do know that since then I have learned not to take everything in football at face value.
1982 West Germany 3 France 3
West Germany won 5-4 on penalties
Shortly before the tournament started, I got an invitation to go on holiday to Crete. Someone had dropped out at the last minute and there was a spare place on offer. Did I want to come? I hadn’t got anything better planned so I said yes and soon found myself spending a lot of time with a woman I’d never met as the other couple often wandered off on their own. Which meant that almost every evening I would drag her down to the rather grungy local taverna, rather than to the more upmarket ones in the centre of town, because that was the only place showing every World Cup game. Falling in love at the same time as concentrating on the football was no easy task but I’m pleased to say that I was up to the challenge. The only time Jill lost it with me was during the semi-final when I – and the whole cafe – went mad when Harald Schumacher, the German goalkeeper, launched a full-on assault on Patrick Battiston. Still, I must have got something right as we are still together 36 years later. Though, to this day, Jill still hates football.
1990 England 1 Belgium 0
After extra time
Most people’s memories are of the semi-final: Gazza’s tears and the inevitable losing on penalties to West Germany. And I too still feel the pain. But the game that most sticks in my mind is the one against Belgium in the last 16 because it was such an outlier. The game that England didn’t contrive to lose. A largely unremarkable match was deadlocked at 0-0 going into the final minutes of extra time and I already had the script written in my head. A penalty shootout and England would lose. But then a free-kick was dinked into the box and David Platt twisted his body to send a right-foot volley into the corner of the net. Cue bedlam in my living room where me and a few friends were watching. With just seconds left even England couldn’t screw this one up.
2006 Italy 1 France 1
Italy won 5-3 on penalties
After 40 years of World Cups, I finally got a bit careless. I booked a trip to Barcelona to celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary without bothering to check if the weekend clashed with the final. For a day or so, I went on and on about the football until my wife reluctantly – and very grumpily – cracked. We agreed that we would eat dinner on the beach in a restaurant that had the football on in the corner. We barely exchanged a word during the first half as I couldn’t maintain even a pretence of conversation. For the second half, Jill gave up, stomped off down the beach and said I could watch the game by myself. Which would have been fine had the game not gone to extra time. She returned to find me just as monosyllabic. The only conversation I could manage was about Zinedine Zidane. It remains my all-time World Cup highlight that a player could think that head-butting an opponent, getting sent off and losing the final was a price worth paying for not allowing another player to get away with insulting him. I was lucky to escape a butting myself. It wasn’t until at least three hours after the final whistle that Jill spoke to me again.
2010 Netherlands 0 Spain 1
After extra time
From the moment Panini had published their first World Cup sticker book in 1970 – I still have my Mexico 70 album – I became an obsessive collector. Buying the new sticker book six weeks or so before the first game was a rite of passage of any tournament and there was something remarkably therapeutic about filling in the blank spaces with stickers during the half-time break. This tournament was special, though, as it was the first one in which my 14-year-old son, Robbie, took an interest in the football – so naturally he insisted on having his own Panini album too. It proved an expensive, if bonding, habit and I felt there was an important sense of symmetry in England being knocked out by Germany in Robbie’s first Panini World Cup, just as we had been in my first Panini World Cup 40 years previously. Shortly before the end of the tournament we both completed our collections – thanks to a bit of judicious buying on eBay – and we settled down to watch the final together safe in the knowledge that our work was complete. The game itself was a lot less beautiful than both our albums as the Netherlands decided the only way they could win the game was by committing GBH. With a less generous referee than England’s Howard Webb, the Netherlands could have been down to seven players by the final whistle. But justice was ultimately done. Both on – thanks to Andrés Iniesta’s extra-time winner to give Spain their first World Cup – and off the field.
