Byline: IAN WOOLDRIDGE
IAN WOOLDRIDGE looks back to a tournament that had patriotism without jingoism and, above all, old-fashioned courtesy-
EVEN then there were WAGs but the difference was that the wives and girlfriends of our 1966 heroes did not live on baronial acres, give their husbands a new Ferrari Dior Handags Replica on a whim, own 300 handbags, strip Bond Street of its latest designer labels and then go and get sloshed on [pounds sterling]200 bottles of Cristal with vodka chasers to follow.
As our photograph reveals, they were appropriately dressed for the big occasion, not quite yet ready for senior advancement in the Women's Institute but in no mood to act up for the paparazzi with a modelling career or a book contract in mind.
Similarly, their menfolk, despite their enormous national celebrity, kept their wits about them and mostly let their feet do the talking. No front-page scandals about 'roasting' - a word with an entirely different meaning then - or getting entrapped by some trollop intent on making [pounds sterling]50,000 from a red-top newspaper for a graphic account of a night of rampant, or less-than-rampant, lovemaking. And this was at the height 'of the sexually-liberating Swinging Sixties.
The biggest 'scandal' I can recall from that era was Bobby Moore being caught drinking a few beers after lights-out. It caused quite a stir at the time but there was no repetition. Unlike the regime of Sven Goran Eriksson, who had no moral leg to stand on about anything, England were then under the puritanical ringmaster, Alf Ramsey.
This will be hotly disputed, but had Moore transgressed again I believed Ramsey could well have dropped him from the World Cup Final. Considering the sheer, calm brilliance with which Bobby marshalled England that day, it is possible that without him West Germany might have won. Ramsey did leave out Jimmy Greaves, of course, a great sadness to me because Jimmy and I have been friends for many years. But what happened? Geoff Hurst scored a hat-trick and Ramsey was vindicated.
The actual day dawned brightly but not everything has changed between then and now. I had foolishly stuffed a few significant bank notes in a back trouser pocket to pay for a fortifying pre-game lunch at Wembley with a few friends before the kick- off. But they were missing - hopefully to help a hospice in Kenya, though I doubt it - when the bill arrived.
The significant difference was in the three-month run-up to that World Cup: enthusiastic, obviously, but lacking hysteria. England's players did not emerge in public with such ludicrous forecasts as 'obviously we will win, we have the finest individual players in the world'.
I have been in sports writing sufficient years now, and got so much wrong, to know that predicting anything unpredictable is why bookmakers are still in business. That is why several England players, harvesting another few quid, were made to look so foolish this year.
Nor, though 1966 was far closer Brass Bangle to World War II, was there much 'achtung kraut' baiting. Obviously there was hugely noisy patriotism but there was also a polite tolerance of our opponents and their supporters. Security, as we know it now, was minimal.
That evening there was vast acclaim for the England victors when they appeared on the balcony of their Kensington hotel but mercifully it was before the days when politicians raced to the scene to associate themselves with a national sporting triumph by promising OBEs, CBEs and knightho
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