I can't give a monkey's about football...

But in July 1966 I was a 7 year old schoolboy.. and 'we' won the world cup...!!!

That team were heroes, the stuff of legends....
even better than the Beatles..

..and I was swept up in the excitement and hysteria,
just like any other boy raised on British comics,
eagerly reading stories every week about great British warriors and sportsmen,
that reinforced how great we British - but more specifically, us English - were...
That we were the natural born champions, rulers of everything and everywhere in the World...

Oh well, that proud feeling of innate world beating superiority couldn't last forever...

But as old and cynical as we may have become,
Gordon Banks was one of our real life heroes for that short special time half a century ago...


[Btw.. as an adult militant lefty - avowed foe of British nationalism and xenophobia,
and it's pernicious entrenched breeding ground in football culture,...
I couldn't help getting a bit excited about meeting Bobby Moore when he opened an East London cinema in the 1990s...]