Answered Prayers

England. 1966. The World Cup.

Duncan Hamilton watched England beat West Germany as an eight-year-old boy in the company of his father and grandfather. He recalls ''Wembley, spread out in the sun; the waving flags; the delirious, joy-of-all-joys moment of the final whistle; the trophy sparkling in the late afternoon light''.

But, seeing the whole game again during the misery of the first Covid lockdown, finally made him realise what Alf Ramsey and his players had no inkling of, which was what came next for them. How, for many of those boys of summer, almost everything after that shimmering moment amounted to an anti-climax or a setback. How ''66 was not a beginning, a guaranteed path towards more success, but a slow decline and fall, and also a disproportionate number of disappointments. And how the triumph of ''66 was dulled through constant repetition, the same images always flashed before us.

Hamilton recognised, too, how many myths and misconcep