Last Saturday afternoon in Frankfurt’s tent-like Waldstadion, British football writing’s dumpling eminence Malcolm Brodie, 80 next birthday, laid out his pad and his pencils at his pressbox desk. ‘What’s new?’ he could have been excused for muttering in that tinny Ulster snort of his, but the rheumy eyes, deep set in his weathered, walnutty old face, were bright with anticipation for the start of the Belfast Telegraph man’s 14th World Cup. It was all of 52 summers ago that Malcolm first picked up his telephone to dictate a report of a World Cup match — Scotland’s narrow 0–1 defeat by Austria in Zurich in 1954’s fifth World Cup in Switzerland.
Brodie’s astonishing log of successive finals is ahead, by one, of the 13 logged by each of two other celebrated doyens of olde Grub Street, Brian Glanville and David Miller, who each began their live World Cup watch — when they could drum up a decent telephone link to London, that is — at Sweden’s finals of 1958 (the only occasion when all four of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland qualified for the trip).
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