ENGLAND’S GREATEST HUMILIATION
They were the self-styled ‘Kings of Football’ but were humbled by a ragbag gaggle of amateurs and immigrants in what will for ever be regarded as …
AS FOOTBALL shocks go, the one that happened on the last occasion that Brazil staged the World Cup went down in lore as the greatest the game had ever seen. The date: June 29, 1950. The place: Belo Horizonte. The score: USA 1, England 0. The matchwinner: Joe Gaetjens.
And the reaction? ‘The biggest soccer upset of all time,’ said the report on the front page of the Daily Mail — albeit in one small piece among 21 stories on a crowded front page the next day.
‘English soccer humbled as never before,’ said another English title. ‘It was a pathetic show from a team expected to do so much.’
England had gone to the World Cup, their first, as the ‘Kings of Football’, among the favourites, thanks to star players including Stanley Matthews, Wilf Mannion and Tom Finney.
The USA, characterised as a ragbag team of i mmigrants and amateurs, were lowly 500-1 outsiders for the tournament.
Arthur Drewry, then president of the Football League and in attendance at the game, summed up England’s mood after the defeat by saying: ‘This leaves me speechless.’
And later, recalling arguably the most seismic setback of an extraordinary career, winger Finney said: ‘It was one of those games when we were destined to lose… We could have played them 100 times and beaten them comfortably on 99 occasions.’
In the USA it would be no exaggeration to say the feat went largely unnoticed. A solitary American journalist, Dent McSkimming of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, went to the World Cup. His newspaper was so disinterested in the event that he travelled there in his own time and at his own expense.
His match report was the only coverage in any major US title. To convey to his readers the magnitude of the result in this strange sport in a context they could understand, he wrote it was ‘as if Oxford University sent a baseball team over here and beat the Yankees.’
Today, almost 64 years after the event, the American player who set up the shot that sort of rang around the world, Walter Bahr, has shared with the Mail on Sunday his own version of that fateful day — and the significance the World Cup then had in his homeland.
Bahr, then a 23-year-old teacher and now an 87-year-old retiree in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, is one of only three surviving players from that infamous game. The others are USA goalkeeper, Frank Borghi, now 89, and England striker Roy Bentley, who is 90 and in frail health.
Bahr was, like all of his team-mates, a part-time player. It was his 38thminute shot that ended, via Gaetjens’ head, in the back of the England net. Contemporary reports differed over Gaetjens’ intentions, some claiming a deft finish at full stretch after a dive, with others saying the ball hit him and deflected home as he tried to duck out of the way.
‘Joe could be a gypsy on the pitch, roaming,’ said Bahr. ‘At times he could disappear. But he was in the right place that day.’
No matter the minutiae now. Every- one agrees it led to a victory of David versus Goliath proportions — not that the tournament held much lustre in the land of that game’s winners.
‘In 1950, the American Soccer League [ASL) was theoretically a pro league but nobody made a living from soccer,’ Bahr says of an ASL of nine teams, all based along a small stretch of the east coast. ‘If you turned up twice a week for training you were lucky.
‘To us players the World Cup was important. To the rest of the country it was not… to tell you how important it was, one of our better players couldn’t get off work!
‘Benny McLaughlin was a forward with my team, the Philadelphia Nationals, and he worked in a factory. His bosses said to him, “You can go if you like, but your job won’t be here when you get back”.’
McLaughlin stayed at home. Bahr rattles off the occupations of some of those who did travel. ‘Harry Keogh was a mail main. John Souza was a loom fixer. Joe Maca was a salesman. Frank Borghi drove a hearse. Ed McIlvenny had played Third Division in Scotland. And Joe Gaetjens, who was born in Haiti but grew up here in the United States, had a scholarship to Colombia University and had a job as a dishwasher.’
The USA’s previous international assignment before Brazil had been at the London Olympics of 1948. Bahr plus four others who would later face England played a solitary match at those Games — a 9-0 defeat by Italy. That game was at Griffin Park, Brentford. Bahr notes they stayed in a local army barracks. ‘It was only 2-0 at half-time,’ he says. ‘And the
score didn’t paint the whole picture. We conceded four in the last three minutes.’
The 1950 World Cup squad, comprising 19 men, were picked by a national selection committee. They met up a few days before the tournament, played one friendly against a touring English team on Randalls Island, New York [a 1-0 defeat], then journeyed to Brazil.
‘It took us two days to get there, three or four flights,’ said Bahr. ‘We flew New York to Cuba. Had a mechanical problem out of Cuba and had to go back and stay the night. Then another flight to the north of South America, and then to Rio.’
They stayed in an army base at the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain, the same place where England will train before they play Italy. The local diet was a problem for some. ‘I’m a pretty good eater but a couple of guys got upset,’ said Bahr.
The USA were in Group Two with England, Spain and Chile. They opened their World Cup against Spain in Curitiba, leading 1-0 until the 81st minute. ‘Then there was a questionable out-of-bounds call and Spain got one back and won 3-1,’ said Bahr.
So to Belo Horizonte, and history, and hyperbole. British newspaper reports variously said the crowd was 20,000 or 30,000, with one saying they were ‘completely anti-English’ aside from a few hundred workers from a local British-owned mine ‘who did a Klondike rush down 16 miles of mountain trail to watch the match.’
Official records and neutral reports say there were 10,000 spectators, and that the Americans approached their task seriously, and with competence. It seems likely that England goalkeeper Bert Williams’s later recollection was somewhat overegged when he claimed: ‘Nobody, including their own players, gave the Americans a chance — they turned up wearing sombreros and smoking cigars.’ Bahr insisted: ‘There was no cheerleading from us, no bravado. A number of our players, most of them, in fact, had played against at least some of the England players previously when they’d been on club tours of Philadelphia or St Louis, which was common.’ He himself had faced England defender Alf Ramsey before. His team knew the names Billy Wright and Tom Finney. Matthews, ‘thankfully’, was injured and did not play.
England dominated the game without scoring. They hit the woodwork ‘several’ times, Bahr says, and were thwarted several more. ‘Frank Borghi doesn’t get enough credit,’ he says. ‘He was a great athlete, good on the line, exceptional at reading the game and had an exceptional game.
‘There was a little bit of luck for us that day, and none for the English. There was no question England could have won the game five to nothing. They didn’t get a bounce the whole game. At the airport afterwards I looked at the Englishmen and thought, “How the heck are they going to explain this?” ’