AS ENGLAND hope to go one better than their Euro 2020 success last summer – and win the World Cup in Qatar at the end of the year – let’s pass back to another gilded era for English football.
Decades before the Three Lions reached the final of the European Championships, massive crowds packed stadiums as fans regained their hunger for the game and flocked back to grounds after seven years without nationally organised professional football during the Second World War.
From Portsmouth’s remarkable defeat of the mighty Wolves in the last FA Cup final before the war – via Blackpool’s two epic Cup Final appearances in 1948 and 1953 – to England’s World Cup triumph in 1966, football was still in its Age of Innocence, before superstardom and eyewatering wages.
Players were part of the same community as those who watched them – and, thanks to the maximum wage, didn’t earn much more than
