Get your Kicks from ‘66

Yesterday we saw Germany play Argentina, two teams linked together by World Cup history. Today we will see a similar historical tie with Brazil playing France in a rematch of the 1998 final, as well as England playing Portugal, two teams that squared off in the 1966 semifinal. It is that match, and indeed that year, which will be on the minds today of many people who were around to watch it happen.

In this week’s New Yorker magazine, there is an excellent piece on the 1966 World Cup. Reading it, I was struck by how much the competition has changed, but also how much it has also stayed the same.

Back then, the teams from far away lands were little known and with the exception of superstar players like Pele and Eusebio, you really did not know what to expect when you watched your team line up to play North Korea or the Soviet Union.

There are a couple of passages about that Portugal and England match that really capture the moment. Hopefully we will see a similar display of wonderful football today regardless of whether the outcome is the same or different than it was in 1966.

The game itself proved to be the turning point of the whole competition. After the ugly incidents, the squabbles, and even the tedium of simply getting the games played out, the game with Portugal seemed a kind of unveiling, a revelation of all that was best in football, a game that must have converted even chess addicts, and that certainly won over clusters of people who had previously done little more than unwillingly suspend their disbelief. From the beginning, both teams seemed to have sworn solemn vows to demonstrate that the kind of fouling that had marred the quarterfinals had absolutely nothing to do with football at its best. The referee, in fact, scarcely had to use his whistle at all, and the spectacle of players helping their opponents up after a fall or patting one another’s backs in appreciation after a particularly brilliant piece of play sent the crowd into a roar.

The end was trauma—England ahead two goals to one, and Antonio Simöes poised with the ball, fated, we felt, to score, until little Stiles materialized from nowhere and stole the ball and, we felt, the game. The final whistle had never seemed more of a relief, more of a sibilantly emphatic piece of punctuation. All twenty-two players were as eager to thank their opponents as to embrace one another, to trade shirts, to bask in the ovation of the moment. Eusebio wept as he left the field, and it was only as we were trailing out of the stadium, still dazed by football, that it began to dawn on us that England was in the final.

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