England's Calamity?

Chris Jones

Description

England's Calamity? challenges the standard view that England's famous 6-3 loss to Hungary in 1953 kick-started a revolution. The crushing defeat has long been seen as the watershed moment when England cast off its training methods and tactics of the past to embrace new continental practices. Author Chris Jones takes a different view: that the 6-3 trouncing was not a revolutionary moment but one key part of an evolutionary process. The England side of '53 had a fascinating mix of football archetypes - Alf Ramsey (The General), Billy Wright (The Golden Boy), Harry Johnston (The One-Club Man), Stanley Matthews (The Incomparable), Ernie Taylor (The One-Cap Wonder), Jackie Sewell (The Record-Transfer Holder) and Walter Winterbottom (The Boffin). England's Calamity? examines the different voices, arguments, biases, myths, agendas and responsibilities of that England XI, their coach, their observers and commentators to bring you a fresh perspective on an endlessly discussed moment in the history of the England team.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801505154
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Chris Jones, 2022
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801504157
eBook ISBN 9781801505154
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: BEFORE
Introduction
Postcards From the Era of Perceived Superiority
Context: English Society 1945-1953
The Situation in 1953
Developments in Mitteleuropa
PART TWO: DURING
25 November 1953
Kit
Warm-up and Pre-match Routine
Passage of Play
The Players and Management
Those Who Saw the 6-3
England s Competitive Record and Team Selection
PART THREE: AFTER
Aftermath.
Media Coverage
Meisl s Response
FA Meeting in December 1953
FA Yearbook
1954 World Cup
Further Voices
English Club Tactics
Passovotchka
Long-Term Aftermath and Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Photos

Introduction
IN HIS popular Pelican title from 1951, The Greeks , the classicist H.D.F. Kitto elucidates on the monumental date in ancient Greek history where the unbelievable happened - the Spartan army lost in the field of battle in a straight fight. This mind-boggling defeat took place in 371 BC at Leuctra and the foundations of Greek society were irreparably shifted. The victors were the Thebans under the leadership of Pelopidas and Epaminondas. They didn t assure victory by the simple solution of a vastly superior military force; they did it by devising a new and innovative military tactic.
Engaged military conflict in ancient Greece had, previously, followed a highly predictable pattern, with opposing forces lined up in a tight phalanx of heavy infantry eight men deep. The two lines then came together in brutal face-to-face combat. The Theban generals developed a new system where they reduced one side and the centre and packed the other wing with a depth of around 50 men. This concentrated pack of men just smashed their way through the Spartan lines and the passage of Greece s future was irrevocably changed. It wasn t hugely sophisticated, but it worked. A group of men sat down and thought through a series of issues and problems to see how they could become victorious in their specific field.
Some 2,324 years later the Hungarian national football team, the Aranycsapat , or Golden Squad, replicated the role of the Thebans. Their planned approach to the clash with England in November 1953 put their opponents amateurish outlook to the sword just as clearly as the fallen Spartan soldiers. Football in England would change, at least in part, due to the national team s 6-3 defeat at Wembley. However, the long-argued point that it was an instant revolution involving all areas of the English football world is somewhat of a myth. The crux of the matter was the sometimes intense split between two opposing outlooks. On one side were those in the game who wanted to see change with a broad expansion of coaching and tactics, and then there were those who harked back to a perceived Golden Age where England reigned supreme. This divide would shape the game in England for the next decade and beyond.
Since the England players trudged off the Wembley pitch after their 6-3 destruction at the hands of Hungary on 25 November 1953 there has been endless comment and analysis of this match and how it stood as the point of change between the old and modern worlds of English football. It made its way into near endless commentary from football journalists, writers and commentators but also moving into wider fields such as Jean-Luc Godard s 2004 film Notre musique and the 2003 book Budapest by Chico Buarque, a Brazilian writer who named several characters in the novel after the Hungarian players. The popular image from 70 years removed is that managers, coaches, players, administrators and writers went sprinting down Wembley Way to the Tube station to set up wide-reaching committees and quangos, who drew up an unshakeable template for rapid change that was religiously followed by every team in the land. The reality was much more nuanced and layered. There was no immediate revolution but a much slower, sporadic evolution for which a very small number of people had already sown the seeds for.
The 6-3 defeat and its sister slaughter of 7-1 in Budapest six months later acted as a fulcrum of tensions between those who wanted to twist and those who felt it was necessary to stick. In 1953 there were limited options for a televisual experience of a game. If you wanted to experience a match and analyse it for yourself, you physically went to the ground. It didn t matter whether that was Wembley or Port Vale, Newcastle United or Halifax Town. On that late-November day a packed Wembley acted as a vast magnetic force attracting absolutely anyone and everyone of consequence in the English game, both in 1953 and for the next 25 years.
The importance of this match lies in the broad range of characters, individuals and personalities present in the world s then most famous football stadium. Important and never-ending tropes of the game were represented through the patriarch (Stanley Rous), the boffin (Walter Winterbottom), the incomparable (Stanley Matthews), the golden boy (Billy Wright) and the one-cap wonder (Ernie Taylor). They all brought their perspective to this game and the post-match commentary. Their roles and positions brought forward a myriad of semi-explanations and excuses heard by any follower of football since the 1860s: the endless stream of excuses for a football defeat.
Postcards From the Era of Perceived Superiority
A MAJOR question of all historical enquiry is where do we start in terms of space and time? Do we start at the beginning of the organised game? The 19th-century codification of several disparate games had brought clear lines of division between association and rugby football. The rise of professionalism in the clubs of the north-west of England and the employment of a new breed of players coming down from Scotland ended forever the domination of the game by the amateurs of The Wanderers and the Royal Engineers. The pattern of English club football was strongly established by the likes of Preston North End, Blackburn Rovers, Everton and Aston Villa. English professional football became innately connected to the world of factories, mills, shipyards and coal mines. A world of rigidity and patterns, where the repetition of clocks, shifts and timetables dominated. So perhaps Scotland v England in Glasgow in 1872 is a start point or Portugal v England in Lisbon in 1947 or three years later at USA v England in the Brazil World Cup of 1950?
An appropriate place to begin seems to be the founding of FIFA in 1904 and the complex relationship and nonrelationship between FIFA and the Football Association from 1904 to 1947. The F d ration International de Football Association was founded in May 1904 with a small group of original members - France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Holland and Denmark. Not exactly world-encompassing; more a western European federation. The FA (Football Association), as football s Mother Country, were invited to join from the inception. The original codifier of the game had to receive an invite to this nascent body. At first Frederick Wall, secretary of the FA, concluded, probably in about seven seconds, that there was absolutely nothing to gain from joining this little, French-led grouping. The same year may well have been the year of the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France at governmental level, but no one at the FA seemed to be aware of a new, formal relationship. However the year after the FA did relent and no matter how reluctantly joined FIFA.
The spectacular arrogance of the rulers of the English game was confirmed four years later when England embarked on their first international tour around continental Europe. In four games they destroyed the best that Mitteleuropa had to offer. Austria were dispatched 6-1 and 11-1 in Vienna, Hungary 7-0 in Budapest and Bohemia 4-0 in Prague. In 1909, there was another tour of central Europe resulting in three more consecutive victories - 4-2 and 8-2 v Hungary, and 8-1 v Austria. In two consecutive summers England played seven matches on tour and scored 48 goals, with a straight run of victories. The belief that England were the paramount masters was hegemonic, and the English never gave anyone a rest from communicating the position that they alone held their omnipresence on Mount Olympus. Britain, in general, was the undisputed home of football and the original masters of the game: the codifiers and initiators who established both the international and professional aspects of football, who then through cultural imperialism exported it across Europe and Latin America. British engineers, sailors, soldiers and businessmen stashed footballs in their luggage and booted them down the gangplank to found the game across major international cities.
The explosion in the popularity of the England v Scotland and Rangers v Celtic matches only confirmed the pre-eminence of all things British in the microcosm of pre-World War One football. By 1912 Celtic Park and Ibrox were accommodating 74,00