A stained statue at the edge of a car park, an unrecognisable bust and a modest gravestone in Ipswich. IAN HERBERT asks: Why is England's only immortal manager barely celebrated?

It's 25 years since the man who delivered English football's most golden summer was laid to rest in typically understated fashion – eleven floral tributes, with Frank Sinatra's 'My Way' played on a three-manual pipe organ – and the scale of his accomplishment seems greater than ever.

No-one imagined, when Sir Alf Ramsey took the country to the top of the world, that there would be a wait of at least 60 years – and quite possibly a fair few more – for football's ultimate prize to come home again. 

Or that a men's European Championships trophy would prove so elusive that the next manager to bring one of those back – just perhaps Gareth Southgate, six weeks from now – will achieve a kind of immortality.

Ramsey is the only man to have delivered for England yet he was not, and never has been, lionised. 

While other football heroes seem to have grown bigger and been more loved as the years have rolled on - Bobby Moore, holding up the World Cup to all who pass down Wembley Way; Sir Matt Busby, imperious on his lofty plinth outside Old Trafford – the mastermind of 1966 is barely celebrated at all.

A particularly dismal Ramsey bust, unveiled at the Wembley tunnel entrance in 2009, is not even a recognisable likeness. 

It is the players - not him – who we witness in the images of that glorious afternoon, from Nobby Stiles skipping to Geoff Hurst scoring and Moore hoisting up the cup. Ramsey never entered our national hall of visual images.

As Southgate and his players look to emulate that summer's achievements once more, I headed to Ramsey's beloved Ipswich last week, searching for signs of him in the place which held him dearest. 

It was a melancholy sight. A modest blue-grey bronze statue of Ramsey, erected a year after his death in what had then just been named Sir Alf Ramsey Way, at Ipswich Town's ground, is careworn, now. 

The chemicals created when bronze is exposed to the elements bleed into the off-white stone of the plinth, staining it blue. The inscription - 'In recognition of a great man' - is weathered and barely legible.

Ipswich certainly knows how to celebrate its heroes. The Portman Road perimeter rightly deifies Sir Bobby Robson, who beams out from many images. 

But blink and you'll miss the statue of the man who delivered a World Cup - staring out implacably at the edge of a car park, hand tucked into the pocket of a plain suit, lips pursed. 

The nearby statue of Ipswich's late Kevin Beattie – inscribed 'The Beat' – is grander.

Ramsey would have had no problem with any of that. He was an intensely private man who set out to be judged by results, not charm, wit, or mateyness, and treated any media question as if it were a dagger aimed at his back. 

'Can you tell us what role Martin Peters will perform?' he was once asked, following the West Ham player's surprise selection for a match against Poland just before the '66 finals. 

'No,' Ramsey replied, rising to leave the room.

What his players felt for him was all he cared for, and that was a combination of admiration and respect - sometimes tinged with fear - because of the absolute clarity he brought. 

He also refused to court England's selectors, whom he considered a nuisance and an irrelevance.

That meant he was confronted by small-minded bitterness and petty jealousies after England failed to reach the 1974 World Cup and he was sacked. 

He received no World Cup medal, a meagre pension and – almost beyond belief - no invitation to a 1996 Wembley event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the triumph. No-one complained much. 

The quiet men of management – the thinkers, who lack the vast egos and the soundbites – are generally far less cherished.

The heartbreak this brought Ramsey is vividly conveyed in Answered Prayers, the excellent recent retelling of the England 1966 story by Duncan Hamilton, who relates what Ramsey's wife Victoria saw in him after he had been discarded like an old rag. 

'He lived for football and he just felt lost,' she said. 'There was nothing left for him, really. I really do think it broke him.'

It's a half-hour walk from Portman Road to Ramsey's grave in the vast Old Ipswich Cemetery, a route which took me past eye-catching statues of an archbishop, a cartoonist's favourite character and a Russian prince who once played rugby union for England.

England's greatest manager's ashes are interred in Plot OC 194, a place as hard to find as the clinical anonymity of its location name suggests. 

An elderly woman, sitting with her husband on a bench in the tranquillity of the warm evening sunshine, is surprised to hear me inquire after this old, familiar name. 

'Alf's buried here?' she says. 'Give him our best.' 

A rudimentary site map, situated near the cemetery entrance, helps me through the labyrinth to a shady, elevated spot, beneath a beech tree glade, where Ramsey's gravestone sits.

It is a stone of extraordinary modesty, adorned by a small vase of plastic blue and white flowers, dwarfed by the two graves which stand at either side. 

The inscription, cut in gold gilt and composed by Victoria, whose own ashes were interred here 16 years after his, bears no reference to football, Wembley or the boys of '66. 

Ramsey, understated always, would perhaps have been happy with that.

It was in the quiet of this very place that Jack Charlton stood after Ramsey's interment, 25 years ago, and despaired that there had not been a greater appreciation of the manager who had taken England to the heights. 

'People don't seem to have time to remember what's important,' Charlton said back then. 'We forget things so quickly now.'

Blink and you'll miss Windies tour 

When Australia arrived in England for what would be the legendary Test series of 1961, their ship docked at Tilbury on April 21, a first tour match took place in the shadow of Worcester Cathedral seven days later and the team had spent three and half weeks up and down the country before the Edgbaston opener. 

Noone is suggesting that West Indies should attempt something similar this summer but a tour match or two would build a sense of significance for what used to be such a wonderful sporting occasion. 

Three Tests in July and the Windies will be gone. It's not sentimental to feel a profound sadness in that.

The enduring beauty of Panini  

Sticker companies Topps and Panini are too busy fighting each other to see that they are procuring cash from children for inadequate Euro 2024 albums, each proclaiming to be 'official' products. 

Panini's strategy of blocking Topps from carrying England players in their genuinely 'official' UEFA album is risible. 

Topps raking in cash for stickers as pointless as the Luxembourg full-back and even the Topps company logo is risible. 

But some fundamental truths are the same as always. Panini stickers look beautiful. Topps stickers don't. And I really must get out more.