Football's Coming Home: How England Won The 1966 World Cup | Part One | It Was What It Was
6/15/202657 min
This week on The Overlap, Rob Draper and Jonathan Wilson begin a four-part series revisiting England’s 1966 World Cup win.
Part one focuses on Sir Alf Ramsey’s background - and the conservative England setup he inherited, including the FA selection committee and a poor early World Cup record. We'll look at how a trip to Brazil in 1964 helped to change things for Ramsey - and we'll see the emergence of his core players - who would go on to become England legends.
If you want more, subscribe to It Was What It Was. Plus - if you want early access to the entire series - join our Patreon now. There's loads there - and a great community too!
00:00 Meet Alf Ramsey
01:49 Ipswich Miracle Title
03:28 Ending Selection Committees
05:20 England World Cup Woes
06:50 Dour Yet Radical
09:23 Xenophobia And Origins
14:14 Was 1966 A Curse
17:28 Ramsey Playing Roots
20:36 Ipswich Tactical Experiments
24:38 Brutalism And Football
27:27 Brutalism Meets Football
31:21 Ramsey Blueprint Emerges
33:02 First Camp Shock Therapy
36:43 Early Results and Doubts
40:05 Brazil Trip Reality Check
40:43 Curfew Crackdown
46:16 Tactics Shift and New Spine
47:51 Jack Charlton and Stiles Debut
53:19 Foundations of 1966
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRob Draper· Host0:00
Welcome to It Was What It Was. I'm Rob Draper. I'm the co-host of the Football History podcast with Jonathan Wilson. And with the World Cup underway, we've got a special four-part series on England's 1966 World Cup win. Yes, 60 years of hurt. We're going into the origin story of that. Um, coming up for you on the channel is part one, where we discuss, um, England's World Cup winning manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, and how he prepared the team for what would become the finest day in England's footballing history. And in other further episodes, we're gonna go in more depth. Why on earth did he drop Greaves? What was the controversy around that? How did they celebrate? And also, the tactical genius that was Ramsey that won them this World Cup. We go into proper depth into a story you might have heard before, but hopefully it's gonna be a load more detail. And if you enjoy it, please do head over to It Was What It Was. And if you sign up to our Patreon channel, you'll get everything, all four episodes straightaway on demand. You won't have to wait for them. Um, but if you wanna wait for them, just head over to It Was What It Was, listen to them on there. If you go onto our It Was What It Was feed, there's almost 200 episodes now of all sorts of histories from Colombia's 1994 World Cup to Arsenal-Liverpool 1989 title climax. Everything you could think of is on there. But also, if you go onto our Patreon, there's a whole history of the World Cup on there from 1930 to 2022, and lots of bonus episodes on football hooliganism, on why Brazil