The 1970s Wasteland

Lore & Background

Fans who had grown up watching Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst score were now watching a team of competent but unspectacular internationals shuffle through qualifiers and then crumble at the business end of a tournament. The managerial instability compounded the problem. Greenwood, a steady but unglamorous figure, inherited a squad that lacked a true talisman until Keegan's emergence in the second half of the decade. Yet it would be unfair to call the 1970s a total void. Colin Bell's elegant long-range passing at Nottingham Forest, Osgood's blistering runs for Southampton, and the early Keegan goals at Anfield gave supporters moments of genuine joy.

In Their Own Story

The crowd is thin—maybe forty thousand, not the eighty that would pack the stands for a big friendly. A young lad in a too-large England shirt sits on the top tier, his breath fogging the cold air. On the pitch, the team in white can't seem to string two passes together. The ball is punted long, cleared, punted long again. Somewhere in the stands, an older man mutters about 'the old days' and the lad doesn't argue. He just pulls his collar up and watches the clock crawl toward the final whistle, knowing that next summer, in West Germany, it will be the same. Three losses. Three losses. And the silence in the press box afterward is worse than the booing, because no one is even angry anymore. They're just tired. The lad folds his program, tucks it in his pocket, and walks home through the rain, already wondering if he'll ever see England win a big game again.

Reader's Guide

The legacy is a scar. The 1970s taught England's fans that talent without structure and structure without inspiration is a recipe for three consecutive group-stage exits. It also set the bar: any manager who could take England past the second round in the 1980s or beyond would be measured against this wasteland, and the relief of finally going deep in a tournament was sweeter precisely because the drought had been so long.

Did You Know?

• Three different managers (Ramsey, Revie, Greenwood) were in charge of England across the 1970s, meaning the team never had a single tactical identity sustained through a full qualifying cycle and tournament.
• Colin Bell, one of the most technically gifted midfielders of the decade, made only 29 appearances for England despite his brilliance at Nottingham Forest.