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.
The men in charge of the FA were regarded as a vengeful, ungrateful bunch of heartless incompetents
This is not a tale of the glory of that sunny day.

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