Hype and glory

There have been 20 major international soccer tournaments since that Saturday in July 1966 when Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup trophy for England. As each of these competitions has come around, a wave of expectation in the country has been followed, with seeming inevitability, by disappointment just weeks later. But with just three semi-final appearances to show for more than 40 years of effort and pain, why does England—as a team and as a nation—continue to believe that it has an almost divine right to succeed in international soccer? Tracing the fortunes of 10 England managers—Ramsey, Revie, Greenwood, Robson, Taylor, Venables, Hoddle, Eriksson, McLaren, and Capello—this book shows just why the England team has struggled to live with the weight of expectation. Full of dramatic on-field action and dressing room gossip, it vividly recreates the highs and lows, the agony and ecstacy, the close calls and the humiliations, and pinpoints precisely why things have always gone so badly wrong.