Four Lions by Colin Shindler

Author:Colin Shindler [Shindler, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784082727
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Bobby Moore with team manager Alf Ramsey at the 1970 World Cup finals in Mexico (Popperfoto / Getty Images).

In the summer of 1969, when The Italian Job was on general release in England, Ramsey had taken the England team on a tour of South America to give them some experience of the heat and the problems of playing at high altitude which they would face the following year. After a 0–0 draw with Mexico, the party flew to Montevideo where they beat Uruguay 2–1. It was an excellent result, the gloss of which was tarnished when it emerged that the England players had refused to eat any of the food at the barbecue laid on by the host’s football federation. Jack Charlton had tried to digest something which turned out to be sheep’s kidneys and was vomiting for the whole of the following day. Finally, in Rio, against the team which would be their main rivals in Mexico, England lost somewhat unluckily, having held on for most of the game to a 1–0 lead given them early on by Colin Bell. The Brazilians scored twice against an exhausted England in the last few minutes. Ramsey was by no means dissatisfied.

Mindful of the horrors of the food in Brazil in 1950 and the unfortunate confrontation in Montevideo in 1969, Ramsey ensured that his 1970 World Cup squad would eat and drink nothing but food that had been shipped to Mexico from England. Ramsey’s most recent biographer, Leo McKinstry, revealed that 25,000 bottles of Malvern water were sent and Ramsey negotiated with the frozen food company Findus to transport 140 lb of beefburgers, 400 lb of sausages, 300 lb of frozen fish and ten cases of tomato ketchup. Unfortunately, the Mexicans got wind of the importation because Findus were too keen to boast of their part in England’s future success and the hosts were predictably insulted. The Mexican authorities refused to allow any meat or dairy products into the country and the England team doctor had to go down to the quayside and watch his carefully planned supplies of steak, butter, sausages and beef burned in front of him. It might have been done on the grounds of public health but it must have felt like a twentieth-century version of a sixteenth-century religious persecution.

For the rest of their stay in Mexico, the frustrated England players subsisted on a diet of fish fingers and chips as if they were adult versions of their five-year-old children. Ramsey’s meticulous preparations did not extend to the provision of a Spanish-speaking press officer, as a result of which the cultural divide between the stoic British and their allegedly excitable Latin American hosts widened still further. Ramsey’s fear and loathing of the British press was significantly increased when he was confronted by local journalists. Ramsey was a past master at alienating foreigners and the press. The combination of the two meant that England were as popular in Mexico City as Louis Napoleon’s troops had been a hundred years before when they tried to make the Habsburg prince Maximilian into the new Emperor of Mexico.

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