A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution.

In its glorious descent from Empire to food banks, the UK might be considered a cautionary model of how a society can peck itself to the point where there seems to be not much left but feathers. In the spectral light of the current Qatarmess experiment, we look at the role football may have played in this unravelling, when everything had seemed to be going swimmingly and everyone was driving a Mini in a mini skirt.

Pundits and commentators can argue till the cows come home but, seen through the distorted lens of football folklore, like the subjects of this piece, they might have got their angles wrong.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano observes the unhappy lot of the goalkeeper, second only to that of the referee who, not for nothing, wears black. An outfield player usually has an opportunity to redress a mistake, but when a goalkeeper makes one it is often fatal, and football fans are an unforgiving lot with long memories. As Colombia’s unfortunate Andrés Escobar – among others – would testify, the unforgiving camera records the precise moment when the arrow of destiny hits its mark.

Galeano cites the case of the hapless Brazilian ’keeper, Moaçir Barbosa and the 1950 World Cup final between Brazil and Uruguay in front of 175,000 people at the Maracanã stadium, in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil were expected to win – indeed there was much premature celebration: newspapers were printed, even commemorative watches engraved. With the scores at 1-1, a shot from the Uruguayan winger, Alcides Ghiggia, somehow squeezed in between Barbosa and the near post for the winning goal. There was silence then defeat then disbelief and grief. 

A stunned nation blamed the defence but particularly Barbosa for this disastrous ‘Maracanãzo’, and with such intensity that he lived in exile for over 40 years. He only returned to Copacabana near the end of his life, by which time he was an alcoholic. Before his death in 2000, he noted that the maximum term of imprisonment in Brazil was 30 years, but that he had been paying for something that was not even his fault, for fifty.

At the Mexico World Cup in 1970, the holders, England, were expected to reach the final, their only serious obstacle being Brazil, whose team that year is widely regarded as the finest ever to have graced a football pitch. Many also hold that the driving force behind Brazil’s footballing dominance between 1958 and 1970 was the need to erase the humiliation of 1950. In Brazil, football is closer to religion than sport.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Labour party was also basking in the glow of the 1960s, and the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, saw no reason to doubt that any of this would change. Consequently, he decided that the date for the 1970 General Election would be June 18, just four days after England’s expected mauling of West Germany in the World Cup quarter finals. After all, England had never lost to West Germany. (I know, right? – Ed)

However, last-minute food poisoning meant that England’s invincible goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, would be replaced by Peter ‘The Cat’ Bonetti. In the scorching heat of León, with twenty minutes remaining, England were leading two-nil, and all was as it should be. Yet, in a manner that they all too readily replicated in subsequent years, England contrived to lose.

Sure enough, four days later, Harold Wilson’s Labour government lost the election to the Conservatives. They, in turn, were brought down by the powerful trade unions and, following another, more troubled term in power for Labour, Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979. She stayed there until 1990, by which time even her own people realised she needed shooting. 

Blamed for two of the goals, many placed England’s 1970 defeat in León at the door of Peter Bonetti. Accordingly, could it possibly be, that in the space of less than half a football match, Bonetti somehow made the ghoulish transition from unlucky goalkeeper to unwitting catalyst for the eventual onset of Thatcherism and the lingering decline of British society, the reverberations of which may unsettle the very foundations of a fragile Europe and invite the collapse of western civilisation? Oh, Peter.

But then again, if it’s conspiracy theories you’re after, was Gordon Banks really poisoned, and if so, by whom? To wit, did Margaret Thatcher have a decent alibi for her whereabouts in the second week of June 1970?

RIP to Barbosa and Bonetti, who were never allowed to forget.

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