The World Cup at the age of eight.

 The World Cup at the age of eight

For an eight year old, the whole bewildering concept of a World Cup must have seemed like some incomprehensible language and yet you were acutely aware that something of vast significance and cultural enormity had taken place.For most families in Britain the now familiar sight of black and white TVs was becoming increasingly less common and the startling emergence of colour TV had now installed itself in our living rooms at home. It is hard to remember a time when the myriad colours of our TV set were few and far between. Of course we take them for granted now but at the time, it was all grey monochrome way back then. 

So to the best of your recollections it was black and white in 1970 and it was a 12 inch set tucked away discreetly in the corner of our dining room and, as a child, it was always there. But football was yet to be discovered and although you may have been more pre-occupied with exhilarating games of football with only yourselves for company, this was your voyage of discovery. You were your own goalkeeper, defender, midfielder, winger or striker. It was about individual excellence and your brother had just arrived in the big, wide world.

Back inside the family home, mum was busying herself with the important domestic duties, cleaning up the dishes, plates, crockery and cutlery and then hanging wet clothes on the washing line. It was all very simple and yet mundane if perhaps a daily necessity. You'd been at infants school for a number of years and the prospect of a major global football competition seemed about as fascinating as wallpaper. And yet there was an awareness of something in the air. Football and sport had gripped your imagination and you became addicted to this extraordinary spectacle for no particular reason. 

Every week your late and lovely mum would buy the still available TV listings magazine TV Times, which took up residence on the family coffee table every Wednesday for ages. So you rushed in and out of the family garden and then wandered into the dining room again. You can still remember leafing through the magazine and perusing the usual variety of only BBC and ITV programmes. Then you stumbled across an amazingly colourful World Cup wallchart in the middle of the TV Times. You scanned the chart and noticed pages that were heavy with symbolism and imagery. 

For the first time every country's flag was clearly delineated and illustrated on the wallchart. At first sight it was rather like turning the first page of a thick novel with over a 1,000 pages, bright, vivid, almost kaleidoscopic, rich primary colours, the vibrant yellow of Brazil, The Star of David of beautiful Israel, the red, white and blue of England, the blue and white of Italy, the exotic design of Mexico, the white of West Germany and too many good to be true. This explosion of colour in a magazine was a feast for the eyes and you were hooked. 

Scattered around in a circle were a huge array of the sublime and the ridiculous. Uruguay had that light blue and white shade on their gleaming shirts and then there was El Salvador whose flag you'd never seen before and a country you were yet to be taught about at school. So here was this giddy, heady mix of stunning cosmopolitanism, a world wide amalgam of hugely different cultures, nationalities and identities. This was decades before the the Wall that separated East Germany and West Germany crashing down, Glasnost and Perestroika in an ageing and tired looking Soviet Union and the map of the world was torn apart by division, hatred, prejudice, racism and a war footing that was ablaze with hostility. 

But you were transfixed and spellbound, desperate for more information and enlightenment. This was not quite a transformative moment in your life because you had yet to be introduced to the finer rudiments of the game, the textures and flavours of the Beautiful Game. That would come later on your adolescence, a mystery yet to be revealed but one that would be described and analysed in lucid detail in a thousand newspapers and magazines in years to come. But there was football in black and white TV and that was settled. 

So you switched on that goldfish bowl on the tiniest DER black and white TV set. ITV bore no relation to the third channel we'd always thought of and a random number led us to extensive coverage on Thames TV and London Weekend. Meanwhile the more established and conservative BBC had already captured our imagination with Match of the Day which was slowly developing into the must see football magazine TV programme introduced, at the time, by the inimitable David Coleman.

Then there was the quality of the picture on your screen. The 1970 World Cup Finals were held in Mexico and, for the BBC and ITV, Mexico must have felt like the other side of the world in those far off days but for the commentary teams on both channels, this represented the ultimate challenge. How to manoeuvre a whole load of unwieldy, bulky cameras into this Aztec paradise? Then you had to hook up all of the sound equipment, connecting wires, complex logistics that somehow bore fruition when all seemed lost. 

It was the sound on your TV which was totally disembodied from your young, receptive ears. You felt you were listening to a live broadcast from a game reserve in Kenya or the Borneo jungles, a remnant from one of the first Moon missions in space shortly before the 1970 World Cup. Kenneth Wolstenholme may just well have been on the planet Mercury, David Coleman was on some isolated lagoon next to a gorgeous island far, far away. Now nobody knew why it all felt so distant, remote and barely audible. 

In those days legendary commentators such as the great Brian Moore were seasoned campaigners who had already launched the Sunday lunchtime football programme The Big Match. Moore was the consummate professional, smart, elegant, pipe on his desk and, for the first time, accompanied by a guest list of ex professionals, managers and learned pundits. But when Moore took us over to the Azteca Stadium in Mexico, the likes of Hugh Johns, Keith Macklin and Gerry Harrison sounded like high tech robots and some of us wondered whether Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had kindly presented the microphones to them as birthday gifts. 

In those days football commentators were our idols and heroes, jewels of verbal dexterity, the tones of their voices so perfectly pitched that you almost felt you were in Mexico sitting next to them. But it was all reminiscent of some old Western film where the likes of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart had rolled into the Wild West on their trusty horses with shot guns to announce their arrival. Radio commentators only had radio microphones which were the only available means of communication in 1970 and for many following years. So there was a crackling, humming sound on your TV set that did rankle with some for a while but there was an acceptance of the status quo. 

In 1970 ITV showed us the full box set of innovations and radical experiments. Now was born the ITV panel, Brian Moore, deep in animated conversation with the men who had done it all before. There was Pat Crerand, Manchester United's secure and reliable defender, who'd won the European Cup two years before at Wembley when United polished off Portuguese titans Benfica 4-1 at Wembley. Crerand was softly spoken, wise, perceptive and almost objective at times. But his was the definitive voice of authority. 

Then there was Malcolm Allison, fedora hat on his head but without cigar in the TV studio. Allison was unashamedly flamboyant, garish in his choice of shirts and always with a controversial line in footballing rhetoric and choice comments. Allison was unstoppably talkative, blisteringly opinionated and fiercely critical of Sir Alf Ramsey's England. Allison had transformed Manchester City and then walked into Crystal Palace during the latter years of the 1970s as if he owned Selhurst Park. 

The appearance of Brian Clough on the ITV panel was a temptation too good to resist. In 1970 Clough was a young  manager yet to taste the delicious puddings of League Championships and European Cups with Derby County and, gloriously, with Nottingham Forest. We now know why that he should never have come anywhere near the grenade that went off in his face at both Brighton and Leeds United but Clough was a voice in the background, firm, outrageous, serious, businesslike, a mouth that spoke at the most passionate volume, gregarious, ruthless and never afraid to challenge the Establishment. 

And finally there was Derek Dougan, Wolves prolific striker, tall, gangling, the most uncomfortable opposition for any helpless defender. Dougan scored goals from every Pythagoras Theorem angle and would rough up full backs and centre halves on gluepot pitches that resembled allotment sites. So Dougan offered his pragmatic pearls of wisdom, shrewd, insightful, probably factually correct and accurate even if it was hard to tell. But Doogan was a model of modesty, studious and quietly reflective.

After Dougan we later learnt that Dougan had become involved with the combustible world of football politics, a strong and forceful personality, honesty personified and a trouble shooter at the heart of the FA's decision makers. Doogan argued the case for those gullible men at Lancaster Gate, then the FA's home. He never held back and reminded you of a militant trade unionist vehemently making his presence. 

So it is that we now find yourselves in the present day. This evening the current edition of the World Cup for men is now hours away from another rendition of those delightful skills and thrills. To those who aired those perfectly understandable moral objections to the last World Cup of Qatar in 2022, there is a widespread air of confidence, positivity, creativity, an extension of yet greater frontiers and more teams than ever.

This time the expansion of the World Cup to an unprecedented and astonishing 48 teams may sound bloated and beyond any understanding to those who feel it's almost overwhelming in its scope. England will be there, Spain and France will join in quite artistically, Germany can never be discounted or written off because we know everything we need to know about Germany. Brazil, Ghana, Cape Verde, Panama, Australia, South Africa, hosts USA, Canada and Mexico, Croatia and Scotland, Ecuador, Morocco and Turkey have rounded personalities, a galaxy of grandstanding gadabouts, showmen, delusional in some cases but nevertheless warmly welcomed to the greatest blue riband international football tournament in the world.

Some of us will be watching loyally and devotedly because we know about England because it's now so well documented that we can already see how it might turn out. Gareth Southgate, England's groundbreaking former manager, will be watching as a media observer this time and he's got several portfolios on the subject of international management. Southgate almost delivered but then found himself thwarted at the winning line because somebody should have told England to take a deep breath.

We would love England to win the World Cup because we were two going on three in 1966 and totally oblivious to all the fuss and commotion. In later years we found out all about the emotionally repressed and phlegmatic Sir Alf Ramsey, a man so broken with nerves and crippling anxieties that by the end of the 1966 World Cup Final, Ramsey just buried his head in his hands and had no idea how to react. England had undoubtedly won the World Cup but Ramsey looked shell shocked, numb and dumbfounded. Then the realisation sunk in and Ramsey grasped the World Cup with the broadest smile.

Clearly, Ramsey was privately delighted but still a tormented soul, still registering the greatest sporting achievement of all time. And yet four years later, this seven going on eight year old living in the comfortable and salubrious suburb of Ilford, Essex, was still deciphering the complex rules and regulations of the Beautiful Game. The masterful maestros who were Pele, Tostao, Jairzinho, Gerson and Carlos Alberto were gentle and enormously well respected footballing teachers to this small child who once wore a tank top for a primary school group photo in the middle of June. You were young and foolish but nobody seemed to care.