Back Home

 

Even for someone with no interest in football, it could be hard to ignore the World Cup whenever it rolled around on its four year cycle. Somehow, I’d managed to avoid it in 1966. Our dad never followed football, so it was simply never talked about in our house. I’d started school that same year, but the final was played on 30 July, after we’d have broken up for the school holidays, so I couldn’t even pick up on the excitement of England’s win from playground chatter. I have only the dimmest recollections of the tournament: seeing the Blue Peter presenters adding the commemorative stamps to their album, and a few glimpses of England mascot ‘World Cup Willie’ who appeared on keyrings and other promotional items.

It was quite different in 1970. This time, with England as the reigning world champions, there was a palpable buzz in the media. By now, I was nine years old, and had been playing football at school (admittedly with no real enthusiasm) since the previous autumn. I’d chosen my blue jersey because it looked like the one worn by Mr. Spock in Star Trek, so you can see where I was coming from. My school friends thought the blue top meant I supported Everton, but I’d never heard of such a place...

In fact, it was my brother, two years younger than myself, who began to take an interest in soccer, and (he’ll probably correct me here) I’m sure that the 1970 World Cup had a lot to do with it. He had, in fact, been collecting stickers of UK team players issued by Panini the previous year, and now a new set appeared featuring all the teams in the international tournament. As collectable items, I took a passing interest in these, but was never quite won over. I was too busy trying to complete my set of Star Trek bubble gum cards…

Other collectables quickly began to appear. Esso petrol stations got in early with their set of commemorative coins. Around the size of a shilling piece, these featured portraits of the England squad, and a single coin (wrapped in paper) was given away with every four gallons of petrol. The promotion was already well advanced by early May, when press advertisements advised collectors that they still had time to complete their sets of coins. Coins could be mounted in a display card, which looked suitably impressive once completed. I’m fairly sure that my brother completed a full set of thirty coins, and with the average price of a gallon of petrol being around 32.5p, that meant spending in excess of £39 on 120 gallons of four star. With our dad’s Singer Gazelle averaging around 30mpg, the full set of Esso coins would have equated to around 3,600 miles of motoring – still more if you allow for the number of duplicate coins (Peter Bonetti was ubiquitous, as you can see below).

Also well ahead of the curve were the players themselves who, for the first time, were persuaded to record a celebratory pop record ahead of the World Cup. This, of course, turned out to be an act of the utmost hubris. The right time for a commemorative World Cup song was after the win in 1966. ‘Back Home’ was written by the Eurovision-winning team of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, whose track record included ‘Puppet on a String’ and ‘Congratulations’. Who better to pen a song in anticipation of England emerging victorious once again? In fairness to the song, the lyrics don’t mention the possibility of winning – it’s a song of hope: ‘Back home, though they think we’re the greatest that’s what we’ve got to prove’. It was also extremely catchy, and tapping into the mood of the nation as the tournament approached, it did in the pop charts what the team were hoping for on the soccer pitch, making it all the way to number one, where it resided for three weeks from the 10th to the 30th of May. On the day that the World Cup kicked off, May 31st, the squad were deposed at the top of the charts by Christie’s ‘Yellow River’, which looks in retrospect like a bad omen. A win might well have propelled the song back to the top, but by the time the squad went out 3-2 to West Germany on 14th June, the song had dropped to number 9. It would linger around the lower reaches of the chart until the beginning of August.

‘Back Home’ is probably my clearest memory of that 1970 World Cup. You couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing it, and my brother had the Pye records single (with its football centre label). The only match I can remember seeing was on 14th June where England went out to West Germany. Conspiracy theories weren’t really a thing back then, but there must have been many who wondered at the food poisoning that forced star goalkeeper Gordon Banks to miss the match. 

The evening’s game was broadcast on both BBC1 and ITV – I suspect we watched the latter, where comment and analysis were provided by ‘ITV’s soccer experts’ Pat Crerand, Derek Dougan and Malcolm Allison, presided over by Billies Wright and Bremner. Over on BBC1, David Coleman and Frank Bough did the honours in the Mexico and London studios.

England’s failure at the 1970 World Cup – especially after all the promotional build-up – probably helped to put me off football forever. If I was left in any doubt, the final coffin nails were supplied by a sadistic games teacher who started taking us for football practise in the autumn. By the time the tournament was over, my only enduring interest in the game lay in following the cartoon strip ‘Billy’s Boots’ drawn by Tom Kerr in the recently launched football comic ‘Scorcher’, which was being bought for my brother every week.

England didn’t even qualify for either of the next two World Cups, and 1978 brought yet another example of pop song hubris, this time from Scottish comedian Andy Cameron whose ‘Ally’s Tartan Army’ was even more gung ho than ‘Back Home’, promising that ‘we’ll really shake them up when we win the World Cup.’ It didn’t even have an original melody. If there’s anything guaranteed to ensure failure in a World Cup tournament, it’s celebrating your win prematurely in song…