One of the greatest and most incredibly legendary World Cup stories took place off the field and not on it.
It is the story of how the dog Pickles found the lost World Cup Trophy when it went AWOL shortly before the World Cup in 1966
Picture, if you will, the great and solemn guardians of football pacing about in a state of well-buttered panic, for the Jules Rimet Trophy had done the decent thing one moment and the thoroughly indecent thing the next by vanishing from polite society. The air in London grew thick with furrowed brows and murmured consultations, and the officials of the 1966 FIFA World Cup wore the haunted expressions of men who had mislaid the crown jewels down the back of the sofa.
Enter, at this juncture, Pickles, a dog of no pedigree but immense moral fibre, who, being taken out for a constitutional, allowed his nose to guide him into the shrubbery. There, tucked away with all the subtlety of a guilty uncle at a wedding, lay the missing treasure, swaddled in newspaper like yesterday’s fish and chips. Pickles, having no interest whatsoever in international sport but a keen eye for items that needed rescuing, seized the moment and restored the trophy to the much relieved officials of FIFA officialdom
Thus did Britain’s greatest sporting crisis of the decade end, not with the flourish of detectives and dignitaries, but with a wag of the tail and the quiet triumph of a dog who only wanted a decent walk and, ideally, a snack afterward.
A detailed report of how that story unfolded can be read in this entertaining article in from the Guardian.
Honestly, Pickles had a better nose for silverware than most of our strikers have had in the sixty years since (apart from Kane of course). It’s just peak England, isn’t it—the only reason we actually got to lift the trophy was because a dog did more investigative work on his morning walk than the entire Metropolitan Police.