This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The key to preparing a champion football team is to give your players’ bottoms a vigorous rub before kick-off. They like a wax, too. “They should glide like a hovercraft,” the England manager said as he gave his team a buff before sending them out in a 1-8-1 formation to face a football that was almost as tall as they are. They went in search of history, these inch-high Lions, hoping to be the first England team to win their World Cup and on home Astroturf, too.

Subbuteo was coming home. Three hundred competitors had come from 26 countries, including Tunisia, Ukraine and Brazil, to Tunbridge Wells, a place that is to flick-powered football what Broadhalfpenny Down is to cricket.

Subbuteo was invented in 1946 by Peter Adolph in the nearby village of Langton Green. Adapting an earlier game called Newfooty, the former RAF driver replaced its lead figures with cardboard ones pushed into bases made from a button fitted to a washer. The first pitches were to be drawn on Army blankets (not provided). Adolph had wanted to call his game The Hobby but the Patent Office said it was too vague so, being keen on ornithology, he named it after Falco subbuteo, the hobby hawk.

A game with a Latin pun as its title invented by a man named Adolph a year after V.E. Day might have been a hard sell to the British public, but it was an instant hit. Having placed an advert in The Boy’s Own Paper, Adolph was in New York when he received a cable saying he had been sent £7,500 of postal orders. He rushed home and devoted his career to a game that gave him the playboy lifestyle he craved: a Pontiac Firebird, a home in Cannes and a Flamenco-dancing mistress.

At its peak, Subbuteo sold 300,000 sets a year in 55 countries. By 1966 and all that, plastic men had replaced cardboard, and the game would offer an array of accessories, including fans, stands, floodlights, camera crews and even a streaker, who could be flicked on to enliven a match. There were no streakers, flesh or plastic, at this World Cup, of course. Not in Tunbridge Wells.

Gary Lineker once said that football is a simple game: “22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.” For Subbuteo, amend that to 30 minutes and the Italians. Whilst a West German, Peter Czarkowski, won the first Subbuteo World Cup in 1970, the dominant force by far are the plastic Azzurri. They came to Kent in search of a clean sweep of the team titles, even if a Greek with a belly like an overstuffed pitta had lifted the individual title.

In the team event, four games are played simultaneously with the winner of each contributing a point. In the event of a tie, goal-difference is the decider, but this wasn’t needed by Italy in the pool stage as they swept past Ireland with an aggregate score of 34-3 and Wales by 31-1. Scotland beat Brazil but were taken apart by Singapore and Greece, whilst England opened their tournament with a 28-2 walloping of Japan but then faced a repechage after a defeat by Malta.

They won all four matches in that decider against Austria to get a quarter-final with Italy where, near the end of the first half, England led in two matches and were drawing one. Then came a moment of controversy similar to Geoff Hurst’s second goal at Wembley in 1966, but with a less favourable outcome for the hosts. Kaspar Bennett pinged a mighty flick that sent the ball in and out of goal, sending Bennett on a roaring lap of celebration, certain that he had taken a 2-0 lead.

Alas, he had not seen the Maltese referee wagging his finger as impassioned Italians protested around him. (Their flickers, that is: the plastic men, contrary to national stereotype, stayed remarkably unmoved.) In the referee’s opinion, the ball had not entirely crossed the line. Where was the VAR accessory? To rub it in, Bennett’s opponent sped down the pitch in the dying seconds of the half to score an equaliser. Deflated, England collapsed after the break.

Italy went on to win their seventeenth open team title of the past 24, having also claimed the under-20 and under-12 cups, leaving home hopes clinging by a fingernail. Or four of them. The veterans team was led by Bob Varney, who began playing in the 1960s when his father brought home a set. “It was all bright green and vibrant,” Varney recalled. “The best present ever.”

In 1974, he had tried unsuccessfully to qualify for the second Subbuteo World Cup. Fifty years of hurt never stopped him dreaming. Varney was the hero in the semi-final against Belgium, chipping the keeper in the seventh minute of sudden-death stoppage time, but it was not to be in the final. Italy 4, England 0.

Yet there are worse fates for a Subbuteo footballer than not winning. On an exhibition stand piled high with nostalgia was a tray of players who had gone flying from the pitch and been trampled by careless feet, unable to be saved by Bostik, nor the magic sponge. Like Ozymandias, only their stumps remained: two short and trunkless legs of resin, broken heroes from a bygone age in a sport that, despite the attractions of computer games, somehow remains alive and flicking.