This could have been a good film but they got it wrong. The football match at the end - or soccer if you like was OK but the rest missed so many opportunities. England was not the number one team in the world at the time they never were. This was the first time England entered the world cup. Up to this time they didn't know how they fared against foreign teams as they hardly played them a couple of years later they played Hungary and got the shock of their lives when they lost 7-2. Football, in England was and is a working class game. In the film they depicted the England players with upper middle class accents. Stan Mortenson was a Geordie and had a Geordie accent. The rest of the team would have had working class accents too. At the time the England players so called professionals were earning less than the $100 per week promised to the part time Americans; nothing was made of this irony. These English players would be subsidizing their incomes from football with regular jobs some of them in the mines, some working behind the counters in shops. It wasn't till a few years later that the maximum wage was lifted and the potential to earn the fortune some of them now earn happened. This film was full of jingoistic music and some of the patriotic lines made me cringe; at one point Stan Mortenson said to the captain of the American team at the coin toss 'there's no need to make it a war out there today' and the American captain said 'if it was a war you'd be dead;' totally unnecessary and not funny. The great football/soccer film will be made one day when someone makes the story of Manchester United and the recovery after the Munich air crash which wiped put most of the team.
Review of The Game of Their Lives
