No better book about England’s victory in the football World Cup of 1966 and what followed it has ever been written. Duncan Hamilton’s Answered Prayers has the authority of a work of history and pulses with the narrative power of fiction. Its unlikely hero is Alf Ramsey. He emerges as a curiously complicated character through whom Hamilton tells his story.
The men in charge of the FA were regarded as a vengeful, ungrateful bunch of heartless incompetents
This is not a tale of the glory of that sunny day. It is instead a kind of melancholy eulogy. England won despite English football’s powers that be – ‘unpleasant men’ such as the FA’s Sir Harold Thompson, a distinguished professor of chemistry and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who ‘had the eyes of a dead fish’ and ‘was the kind of snob who looked down his stubby, patrician nose at anyone who didn’t possess either a title or a fortune’.
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