The turn of phrase aptly described the country’s view of itself. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that by standing alone from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor we’d saved the world but, as obviously, that Britain was no longer the dominant player. As the Russians and Americans carved up the world between them, it wasn’t certain how we fitted in. But we could still lead by principled example and were still able to show the world ‘a thing or two’, even give the enemy ‘a bloody nose’. Alert on our feet, we could get out there, sharply off our line if necessary, to save this new world from the dangers it was creating.
Bert Williams played his first full international as the Soviet Union was being persuaded to lift its siege of Berlin. For nearly a year the US air force and the new England keeper’s own RAF had airlifted in water and other basic supplies in defiance of the Soviet blockade of the west of the old German capital. The Soviets had tried to strangle the place. In taking them on, we dared them to shoot us down. They didn’t have the nerve, and we held ours. This was what we were like. We did the spectacular when we had to, to keep the world safe.
At the same time, the Amethyst, a British boat sailing up the Yangtze river in China, was fired upon and besieged for weeks by communist troops. Why it was calmly steaming through a country in midst of revolution was unclear; it was also beside the point, as the Royal Navy made repeated attempts to rescue it. Finally, it just slipped away and, under cover of darkness, got back to safety, brilliantly, as you’d expect and to rapturous cheers at home. The enemy were ‘caught napping’, resting back on their heels. Like Bert Williams, we wouldn’t have been. We were the types prepared to dive on concrete – piece o’ cake these Chinese.
Just a few days after the flop against the Swedes, Williams was drafted into the team for the season’s last international. Three weeks earlier he had played in Wolves’ FA Cup Final success against Leicester City. A nerveless performance in the 3–1 victory over France in Paris secured his place in the England team. It also tidily completed the otherwise messy process of the Swift succession.
The new era got off to a shaky start, however, early the following season. As with Williams’s old club Walsall, the uncertainty owed something to geography. In September 1949 the Republic of Ireland came to play an international at Goodison Park, which posed the question ‘Who are they?’ England played Ireland every year but that was the north of the island. This team were more rarely taken on and went under the title ‘Eire’. Few people knew how to pronounce it: was it ‘Air’, or ‘Air-rer’? As it turned out, it rhymed with Eamon de Valera. Even few Irish people used the term, preferring simply ‘the Republic’.
Still it was convenient in a way because it emphasised to us the foreignness of the place. For reasons best known to themselves, they had gone their own way and wanted to be different. In the war, for example, they stayed neutral even though Irish regiments fought with the British army. De Valera refused to give Churchill guarantees, my mum would recall, that German U-boats wouldn’t be allowed to use Cork harbour. You never really knew where you were with them. They weren’t people who stuck to clear-cut lines; the edges were always slightly blurred.
Some of their players had played for both ‘Ireland’ and ‘Eire’. Johnny Carey, their captain, was a case in point. In the Protestant north of the island, football was played on Saturday, Sundays kept sombrely free. In the south they went about things in the chaotic-but-fun, Catholic-continental way of lumping church and football all into the Lord’s day. Some Irish footballers had played for both the island’s national teams in the same weekend.
Not that Eire’s team was cracked up to be much. Most of them played in British league teams but back at home football came a poor third in popularity after Gaelic football and hurling. Their 1949 team was a suitably makeshift outfit. It had three goalkeepers. Tommy Godwin of Shamrock Rovers was to play between the posts on this occasion, but Con Martin upfront had also won international honours in goal, and Carey had played a league match for Manchester United when the regular keeper had cried off late before the game.
The fact that they won the match, therefore, was cause enough for English disillusion. But it went further than seeking reasons and scapegoats for the 2–0 scoreline. If this Ireland was the alien ‘Eire’, then England had lost their proud record of never having succumbed at home to a foreign side. Hadn’t they?
The problem was deftly solved in a Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon way. The edges were blurred and the lines made less clear-cut. Sure, weren’t we all a bit Irish anyway? In my family there had been Great-great Granny Smith, with her one eye and caravan in Sandy around the turn of the century. But, fundamentally, it was noted that nine of the winning team played in the English or Scottish leagues, including both the goalscorers: Martin of Aston Villa and Peter Farrell of Everton. At Goodison Park Farrell was on his ‘home’ pitch. Keeper Godwin was an exception, but he soon won a transfer to Bournemouth in the Third Division South, and you could hardly get more English than that. No, whatever they were – and forget the signs in landlords’ windows saying ‘No dogs, Blacks or Irish’ – they were not foreign. After a nasty scare, England, it was decided, had kept their home record intact.
Two months later against Italy at White Hart Lane, there were no ambiguities about the opposition’s national status, but many nasty scares. In front of a 70,000 crowd – Ditchbum, ruefully, among them – it was Bert Williams’s finest game. Despite the cold, misty afternoon, the Italians tiptoed through the England defence and pounded his goal. The spectators watched in amazement, the Italian players with their heads in their hands, as Williams saw them off. One shot he diverted with his legs, while diving in the opposite direction. England managed a couple of effective breakaways near the end to win 2–0, but Williams took the credit. Italian newspapers nicknamed him ‘II Gattone’, ‘the cat’ (to be exact, ‘the big cat’, such had been his presence).
The performance placed Williams second only to Swift in the ratings of post-war English, and arguably British, goalkeepers for much of the next two decades. But in a key sense, it was almost immediately forgotten. Although Italy had made England look inept for most of the game, the final score encouraged the thought that we were ready to advance off our lines, at least with a quick dash to take on the newly emerging threats caused by upstarts, the lot of them, who needed to be put in their place.
Before the World Cup arranged for Brazil in 1950, the tournament had been staged twice in the 1930s, then war intervened. British teams had shunned it; as a notion dreamed up by a Frenchman, Jules Rimet, it was a bit of a cheek. Foreigners had created a competition which presumed to anoint the champions of ‘our game’. Sensible analysts knew who the world’s champions were. They were the annual winners of Britain’s home international championship, the toughest international competition in the world.
The World Cup illustrated just how like foreigners it was to go organising fancy events with fancy titles. They always had to show off. When you played them, before kick-off they presented things like elaborately tasselled pennants. Even when Moscow Dynamo came in 1945, they had taken the field with great bouquets of flowers for each of their opponents. The British players looked lost, the crowd laughed. What was the point? All insincere gestures and flashing smiles (well, in this case, maybe not the Russians), foreign teams tried to wheedle their way into your affections, then turned on you and got nasty once the game started. They were people who weren’t what they appeared to be. Play them on their grounds and, like as not, they’d fix not only the match ball, but also the referee.
England went to Brazil in keeping with the new spirit of international cooperation and comradeship. Having fought with, or against, each other we had to live together, rather than, as after the First World War, retiring to our respective corners, in effect to prepare for the next conflict. Something else had also begun to gnaw away at us. There was no need to announce it to everyone, but perhaps we had something to prove. The World Cup was creating an alternative pole of development which others might come to regard (wrong though they would be) as the true yardstick of greatness. We wouldn’t have been wrong to stay away, but would not have wished our actions to be misinterpreted as shirking a challenge.
When England turned up in Rio de Janeiro in June 1950 they were greeted as the ‘kings of football’. The arrival of the inventors