By Frank Malley, PA Chief Sports Writer
Last updated February 21 2006
The words were hissed through gritted teeth and delivered without a semblance of emotion. "You've beaten them once. Now go out and bloody beat them again."
That was Sir Alf Ramsey's simple battle speech as his England team gathered in shock having just conceded the last-minute equaliser which allowed West Germany to take the World Cup final of 1966 into extra-time.The words - the sort of simplistic but passionate soliloquy with which current England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson would struggle to identify- sum up Sir Alf at a time when the world was rocking to Beatlemania, Harold Wilson was Britain's Prime Minister and winning a football match did not seem such desperately hard labour as sometimes it does under the guidance of the bespectacled Swede.
They evoke memories, too, of tough-guy Jack Charlton, on his knees, hands to his head, weeping uncontrollably, Alan Ball with his socks permanently around his ankles, Moore sitting imperiously on the shoulders of his team-mates holding the World Cup aloft. And perhaps the most enduring image of all - dear old Nobby Stiles skipping around Wembley with that toothless grin and myopic expression which told the world England were the greatest soccer team on the planet.
Could it happen again in Germany 40 years on? Only if an England side with undoubted talent, youthful exuberance and a touch of genius in Wayne Rooney emulate the spirit of Ramsey - the original and the best manager by some distance that English football has ever had. Not just because he was the man who won football's greatest prize on that famous July afternoon, although that surely is achievement enough. But because he was the man who set in motion the revolution that dragged English football screaming and kicking into the modern international world.
Before Sir Alf the England manager was little more than a messenger boy, the man who collected the team list from a faceless committee of grey suits and pinned it up on the dressing room wall. Sir Alf's great achievement, largely forgotten in the £4million-a-year world of Eriksson, was smashing that cosy, amateur, underachieving cycle with the force of his own character. And characters did not come much stronger than Ramsey, who famously and fearlessly branded Argentina "animals" after the tempestuous World Cup match against England in 1966.
It is a measure of the Ramsey legacy that the yardstick of England success is still gauged by how the current team compares with his side of almost 40 years ago. How would Rio Ferdinand compare with Jack Charlton, Steven Gerrard with Alan Ball, David Beckham with Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst with Michael Owen, Eriksson with Sir Alf? The truth is our current squad compare well as individuals but not yet as a team.
