IT IS UNLIKELY THAT when Stan Mortensen was plying his trade as an inside forward for Blackpool and England in the short-back-and-sides days of the 1940s and 1950s, he would have imagined that one day the leader of a rock band would play his character in a Hollywood film. Indeed, there was no such thing as a rock band when Mortensen was in his pomp, although by the time he was winding down his career in the third division north, Bill Haley and his Comets were just emerging on to the scene.

Half a century later, however, the moment has arrived. In The Game Of Their Lives, to be released this spring, the part of the Brylcreemed Stanley Harding Mortensen, native of South Shields, Second World War bomber pilot, winner of 25 England caps and an FA Cup winner’s medal, is to be played by former punk Gavin Rossdale, front man of a heavy rock band called Bush. It is hard to make the connection with Mortensen, although at least Rossdale was born in Kilburn and professes a liking for Arsenal.

As it turns out, Mortensen and his England colleagues are but supporting characters in this story of the most sensational result in international soccer, as the sport must be called for American filmgoers. The Game Of Their Lives, according to Crusader Entertainment, the Californian production company, is less about the actual match than about the family traditions and passions that shaped the lives of the players who made up this team of rank underdogs.

The stars of the film are, of course, the Americans — Mortensen is the only opposing player in the cast list — and in particular their captain, Walter Bahr, who led his side of part-timers to that legendary 1-0 victory over England in the 1950 World Cup finals. It took place in Belo Horizonte, a Brazilian city that ten years later enjoyed another brief moment of fame when climatologists declared it the best place on the planet to survive fallout from a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Containing no household names, the film reunites David Anspaugh, the director whose work includes Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice, the television series, and Angelo Pizzo, as writer, who collaborated on a movie called Hoosiers, in which Gene Hackman starred. That film tells the story of a coach with a chequered past who teams up with the local drunk to steer a small-town high-school team to a basketball championship, which may give us a clue to the treatment of the US’s greatest soccer moment. The film’s score has been written by Jerry Goldsmith, whose credits include Star Trek films and Planet of the Apes, and the actors were taught the rudiments of the game by Eric Wynalda, the veteran striker of more than 100 US international games and Bundesliga football with FC Saarbrucken and VfL Bochum.

The tournament in Brazil was the first time that England had bothered to enter the World Cup and they arrived as joint-favourites with the hosts. After an undistinguished win over Chile in their first game, they lined up against the US on a bumpy little ground where the concrete cricket wicket of the British mining community had been torn up to accommodate a soccer pitch. The Americans went ahead with a 39th-minute goal by Joe Gaetjens, their Haitian centre forward.

Gaetjens, who later disappeared during political unrest in his country, scored with a header that was either the result of acrobatic opportunism or a complete fluke, depending on who is telling the story.

England were not immediately alarmed, but as the game wore on and their every goal attempt was either saved, hit the woodwork or went narrowly wide, the possibility of a hugely embarrassing defeat began to dawn. Bahr, who went on to spend 30 years as a high school soccer coach and whose sons played both in the North American Soccer League and as place kickers in the gridiron NFL, recalls: “The English didn’t panic. After all, they were controlling the game. Only in the last 15 minutes did I sense they were worried. At the final whistle I wondered how they were going to explain this back home.” But if the British press were about to heap scorn on England, who went out of the competition after losing their next game 1-0 to Spain, the reaction in the US was muted, to say the least. There was only one American journalist at the 1950 World Cup, a reporter from St Louis, and he went along only as a fan.

The Americans’ tournament also ended after one more game. They pulled back from 2-0 down to draw level against Chile but then conceded three more goals and were on their way home, registering barely a blip on the US’s sporting radar. Fifty-four years later, Hollywood is about to put that right.

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