As part of our This is Europe week we look at how the game has been influenced by teams, managers and players from the continent
Alf Ramsey didn’t have much time for foreigners – and for him that meant anybody who wasn’t English. “Welcome to
Scotland,” a local journalist once said to him as he landed at Prestwick. “You must be fucking joking,” he replied. In
Moscow, given the chance to attend the Bolshoi Theatre he preferred to go to the
British Embassy for a screening of an Alf Garnett film. He was not somebody who held any truck for continental sophistication. And yet his greatest lesson came from the Hungarians.
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