England and Portugal first met in the World Cup 40 years ago. Alastair Reid wrote about it a couple of months later in The New Yorker in his roundup of England ’66. It’s fascinating to read his account of the match, played when blanket TV coverage of sports, celebrity play-by-play commentators and instant replays (or action replays, as they were called in Britain) were all in their infancy, Bobby Charlton and Eusebio were in their prime, and good feeling reigned on the soccer field.
England had never before appeared in a World Cup semifinal, and, almost by sudden instinct, the wise men and soothsayers of football stopped predicting and started holding their breath. One columnist reported fancifully that a strange, flickering blue light hung over the whole country, a kind of television halo, and certainly those who had grumbled the loudest about having to sacrifice some of their favorite television serials for the lavish coverage of the World Cup had by now stopped caring whether or not the serials ever came back. I had watched a fair proportion of the games on television, and not only was the treatment technically beyond reproach but the strange tampering with the sequence of time that television is so easily able to indulge in had become almost part of our expectation. We had grown used not simply to seeing a goal scored but to seeing it over again almost immediately, then possibly a third time, in slow motion, to say nothing of being able to watch it later the same evening, and even the following day. The B.B.C. and Independent Television sportscasters had grown into family friends, as familiar as mailmen. And yet nothing quite equalled the experience of the games themselves, even though the goals were over in a flash, and did not immediately and mysteriously repeat themselves.
As I travelled out to Wembley on the Underground for the semifinal, faces seemed grimmer than usual. The touts on the way to the ground were hoarse by this time, the variety of ribboned rosettes had dwindled, and I found myself waving aside programs and surveys, for I now knew all the names by heart and had grown as adept as any of the announcers at identifying the Portuguese. The scandal of the Argentine match was still very much in the air, however, and we wanted above all some kind of restitution—some omen that might make the inconceivable possible. So far, England had leaned heavily on its almost impenetrable defense, and on Gordon Banks, its brilliant goalkeeper, but defense, we knew, would never win against a team as mercurial as the Portuguese, and especially against an opportunist of Eusebio’s calibre. Wembley under the lights seemed as miraculous a setting as we could wish for, and when the teams walked out, the national chant (a staccato sequence of claps followed by a cry of “Eng-land!,” which had first been borrowed from the Brazilians as a battle cry during the World Cup in Chile) had never been so urgent, never so hopeful. If England were to win against a team as dedicated and pure as the Portuguese, the combination of morale and “home advantage” Would obviously make it the favorite for the Cup.
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. When Charlton scored for England after thirty minutes, the enthusiastic embraces of his teammates were punctuated with Portuguese handshakes, and the shouts that came from the crowd were of appreciation rather than partisanship. More than that, what we saw was a transformed England team, playing not the canny, covering, defensive game of its earlier, economical wins but a swift and deadly attacking game, a game it might have learned overnight from the Portuguese; a fluent, fast, and diagrammatic football, with long, clean passes that seemed always to find their man, the kind of game that would turn the closest of goal-line saves into a sudden spurt of attack down one of the wings; a game that scarcely any of us felt we could look away from long enough to make even the briefest of jottings in our notebooks. My Portuguese neighbor might have been a dedicated English supporter, so vociferously appreciative was he of the spectacle, while we, in our turn, took only delight in the graceful subtleties of Eusebio and José Torres. Bobby Charlton scored again for England with only ten minutes left—a rocketing shot that took him well clear of the ground, and did much the same for the crowd. Even then, Portugal seemed to be only beginning. England handled the ball in the penalty area, and from the consequent penalty kick Eusebio scored superbly for Portugal, sending the goalkeeper diving one way, with a wriggle of his body, and the ball the other. It was Eusebio’s eighth goal of the championship, and it set him up without question for the trophy awarded to the leading scorer. 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.
The following day, the press forgot itself in lyrical ecstasies. The front pages all showed us Eusebio either in tears or embracing Bobby Charlton. The economic crisis had retreated to page 3, and nobody seemed to have the time to see Mr. Wilson off to Washington, or even to notice that he had gone, so intent were we on the breathless possibilities ahead. Alf Ramsey pronounced the result England’s greatest victory since he had become manager, and Tass, the Russian news agency, in an uncharacteristic burst of poetic fervor, declared, “The World Cup semifinal between England and Portugal was like a spring of clear water breaking through the murky wave. It was beautiful, correct football.” The Portuguese officials were no less generous in their praise, and, however inglorious the Argentinian game seemed in retrospect, the bad taste it left had been more than obliterated.
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