England at the World Cup: Dirt, drama and defeat in 1950 The food was just one of the manifold obstacles flung in England's path as they embarked on their first ever World Cup campaign. Brazil 1950 is widely regarded as English football's first genuine catastrophe: the one that blazed a shambolic trail for the long chronicle of chaos that was to follow. In one respect, of course, this is true. England flew to Brazil on a tide of unrequited optimism. How valid that optimism was, however, is debatable.The 'Kings of Football," they were dubbed by the Brazilian press. They had available to them perhaps the most golden generation that England has ever produced: Billy Wright, Stanley Matthews, Wilf Mannion, Tom Finney, Stan Mortensen, Jackie Milburn and a cultured right-back by the name of Alf Ramsey. The flight to Brazil was a 31-hour odyssey that stopped in Paris, Lisbon, Dakar and Recife. As Mark Pougatch recounts in his excellent book Three Lions Versus the World, when the squad landed in Rio de Janeiro, three men in gas masks stepped onto the plane and sprayed everyone on board with pesticide, leaving them coughing and spluttering. The dressing room for England's first game might charitably be described as Spartan, with rats scuttling along the floor and walls encrusted with dirt. In a wet, largely empty Maracana still undergoing building work, England laboured to a 2-0 win over Chile. The FA, in their eternal wisdom, had organised a goodwill tour of Canada at the same time as the World Cup finals. Matthews, still England's finest player at the age of 35, had been sent on the trip as an ambassador, and was now forced to undertake a 28-hour plane journey to join the squad for their second game against the United States. When he arrived, he learned that he was not even selected. Arthur Drewry, a Grimsby fish merchant who had been appointed sole selector, had a policy of never changing a winning team. Against the wishes of manager Walter Winterbottom, Matthews sat the game out. In an old bullring surrounded by 12-foot high walls - "if you kicked the ball out of play hard enough, it would bounce off them," forward Roy Bentley later remembered - England lost 1-0 in one of the most cataclysmic results in the history of football. "The game was purgatory to watch from the stands," Matthews said. Come the final whistle, I thanked my lucky stars I hadn't been part of it. Only eight Fleet Street reporters and no television crews had travelled to Brazil, and so England's humiliation passed relatively unnoticed. The big sport story in the following day's Daily Telegraph was the West Indies cricket team's first ever victory at Lord's. Defeat in Belo Horizonte was afforded just four inches on a single column well down the page. Yet the die had been cast. The year 1950 would remain a nadir for English football, one they have arguably spent the intervening decades trying to eclipse. What is certainly true is that no England party has ever had quite as wretched a time as the beleaguered boys of Brazil. At one stage, exasperated by the poor quality of the food, Winterbottom marched into the hotel kitchen and demanded to do the cooking himself. Whatever calamities befall Roy Hodgson next summer, it is safe to say things will never get quite as bad as that.