Not its grand-daddy of all managers, because Winterbottom's legacy is one of style and thoughtfulness, not World Cups or even club trophies in the crystal cabinets of the game.

No, lest we were forgetting, this gentle figure from the days when the nation was recovering from war was the father of modern English football.

The curriculum vitae is short because he held one job with a notoriously high casualty rate for longer than any of a succession of gifted men.

Winterbottom was England manager for 16 years. His achievement is not to be found in the winning of any of the four World Cups to which he took England.

It resides in his coaxing of reactionary old England out of its isolationism to enter the ultimate competition for the first time in 1950, then in the founding of a coaching system which developed the players and imparted the knowledge which went into winning the 1966 tournament.

A more unlikely-looking revolutionary would be difficult to picture. Here was the promising amateur footballer at Manchester United, whose response to a career-ending illness was to become the bespectacled academic of the Football Association.

He took the game not by storm but by self-effacing charm, unflagging courtesy and a willingness to impart all his wisdom with a generosity of spirit which sought no reward other than to see the seeds he had planted flourish.

Had he been in his scholarly pomp today, he could have made a fortune lecturing on the subject he loved, except that he would never have asked for a penny.

No other England manager could have survived so devastating a World Cup defeat as that humiliating 1-0 by the USA's collection of rednecks, lumberjacks and college athletes in 1950. Not with such luminaries as Stanley Matthews wearing the white shirt.

Somehow, the fuddy-duddies of the FA selection committee realised that the result would raise Winterbottom's horizon, and stayed with him. Perhaps it helped that he never really tried too hard - not to the point of obstinacy, anyway - to wrest that archaic right of team selection away from them.

Not that picking an England XI was difficult back then, not with the likes of Matthews, Finney, Lofthouse, Wright and Lawton around.

And Winterbottom was not only devoid of ego but concerned with higher and more pressing affairs.

When the Hungarians of Puskas and Hidegkuti came to bring the walls of Wembley crashing down, he turned historic defeat into a powerful argument for change.

Here began the appliance of football science to natural born English ability. Winterbottom found an eager disciple in Ron Greenwood and hurried the young Bobby Moore into the 1962 World Cup in Chile when many diehards insisted he was too young.

When his fourth finals ended in further disappointment, he resigned without fuss or commotion, leaving Alf Ramsey's side to triumph in 1966.

We are all indebted to the owlish man from an era when you played football on Saturday afternoon and Christians like him kept the Sabbath holy.

How touchingly typical that when he died this weekend he did so on Saturday, and that the news should be broken at about the time of Sunday evensong.