Hype and Glory

England has singularly failed to make any impact at either the World Cup or the European Championships for over forty years. Gavin Newsham tells us why.

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There have been twenty major international football 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 has been followed, with seeming inevitability, by disappointment just weeks later. But with just three semi-final appearances to show for over forty 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 football?

Tracing the footballing fortunes of ten England managers - Ramsey, Revie, Greenwood, Robson, Taylor, Venables, Hoddle, Eriksson, McLaren and Capello - Hype and Glory shows just why the England football 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 through scores of interviews with players, managers and journalists, pinpoints precisely why things have always gone so badly wrong...