England did not partake in the first three World Cups, a trifling matter of a global tournament seemingly beneath the country that invented the game. When Walter Winterbottom’s squad, featuring all-time greats Billy Wright, Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews set out for Brazil in 1950, they were favourites to return with the trophy.<\/p>\n
After the Three Lions won their first match against Chile, it was hard to give much hope to the United States’ rag-tag bunch of amateur players. A 3-1 loss to Spain in their opening game of the tournament meant the U.S. had lost their past seven international matches by an aggregate score of 45-2.<\/p>\n
England opted to rest Matthews \u2014 these were the days before substitutions \u2013 \u00a0for the presumed tougher challenges to come and laid siege to the U.S. goal without reward during the early stages in Belo Horizonte. Then it happened. In the 37th minute, Walter Bahr lined up a speculative shot, Joe Gaetjens launched himself at the ball and the Haitian-born forward saw his diving header fly past wrong-footed England goal keeper Bert Williams.<\/p>\n
Despite pressing hard to equalise, England could not find a response and arguably the greatest single-game upset in World Cup history was greeted with unanimous disdain back home, decried as England’s worst-ever performance. Draws in the group stages of the 2010 and 2022 World Cups on more equal terms mean England has still yet to beat the Americans in a men’s World Cup.\u00a0<\/p>\n
MORE: Back to The Sporting News’ 140 Greatest Sports Moments of All Time<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England did not partake in the first three World Cups, a trifling matter of a global tournament seemingly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-546094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}