A tribute to Alf Ramsey, football’s forgotten hero

No better book about England’s victory in the football World Cup of 1966 and what followed it has ever been written. Duncan Hamilton’s Answered Prayers has the authority of a work of history and pulses with the narrative power of fiction. Its unlikely hero is Alf Ramsey. He emerges as a curiously complicated character through whom Hamilton tells his story.

This is not a tale of the glory of that sunny day. It is instead a kind of melancholy eulogy. England won despite English football’s powers that be – ‘unpleasant men’ such as the FA’s Sir Harold Thompson, a distinguished professor of chemistry and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who ‘had the eyes of a dead fish’ and ‘was the kind of snob who looked down his stubby, patrician nose at anyone who didn’t possess either a title or a fortune’. 

Players and coaches were treated more or less like chattels. The Football League’s Fred Howarth, who ‘imprinted his dour personality on the League the way a fossil imprints itself on rock’, had opposed abolishing the maximum wage for footballers, and didn’t much care for floodlights or Europe or television (‘the idiot box’). These attitudes were broadly shared by chairmen and boards throughout the country. They were what Ramsey (whose childhood had been one of genuine poverty) and his players had to overcome – a challenge as great as that presented by teams from Brazil, Portugal and West Germany.

At Ipswich Town things were different.  Having retired from a playing career at Spurs and for England, Ramsey was appointed manager of the Third Division club in 1955.  He found in the chairman, the eccentric John Cobbold, heir to the Tolly Cobbold beer fortune, an enthusiastic supporter, who gave him everything he wanted, most importantly freedom and respect.