The pall of that West German humiliation at Wembley in April 1972 clung around the shoulders of Sir Alf Ramsey like a sodden raincoat as we entered the following season and the start of the campaign to qualify for the next World Cup. He had always had his critics, never going out of his way to win friends and influence people at any stage of his time in charge of England, but those naysayers were becoming more vociferous. Results had always inured him against any really damaging flak – World Cup winners in 1966, European Championship semi-finalists in 1968, desperately unfortunate not to go any further than the quarter-finals in the 1970 World Cup – but as results withered away, there was no shortage of people waiting to pounce.Hindsight tells us that for Ramsey, 1973 was always going to be a pivotal year - every bit as much as it was for the UK, readying itself to join the EEC but about to be beset by the oil crisis and the looming reality that its ageing industrial base was beyond its best - for he was a man that was beginning to run out of road. Still only 52, he looked, sounded and behaved as though from a bygone age, hostage to an ironic turn of history. Just recall that when he went into management at Ipswich Town in August 1955, England was still a very straitlaced, proper, almost pre-war country, where the right kind of background counted for plenty if you were going into a managerial position of any kind. The background of “Dagenham Darkie”, a boy of Romany stock, brought up on the Becontree estate in a house without electricity, did not pass muster, hence the elocution lessons that he took to disguise his native Cockney accent. It left him with that unconvincing, strangulated whine that you that might have expected from a failed BBC continuity announcer, or a minor diplomat sent to the corner of some largely ignored foreign backwater, never to be heard of again until his pension came up.That wasn’t Ramsey’s fault and nor, in the highly class conscious 1950