This was the only World Cup match in which eventual champions Brazil failed to score, and it was due mainly to the defensive tactics worked out by Walter Winterbottom's assistant Bill Nicholson, who had watched their opening match against Austria. The Brazilians were not allowed to get into their smooth rhythm. The nearest they got to breaking down the disciplined England defence was when Vava rocked the crossbar with a shot from twenty yards. Bill Slater played a key role in what was a triumph for England, sticking close to their ball master Didi and not giving him room to produce his devastating passes. The result forced the Brazilians to re-think, and they were persuaded to call up two exceptional but untested individualists: Garrincha and Pele. The rest is World Cup history!  Slater finished the match with bruises on the inside of both knees where he had kept banging them together to stop Didi pulling off his favourite trick of threading the ball through an opponent's legs - now known as the nutmeg.

Source Notes

TheFA.com
Original newspaper reports
Rothman's Yearbooks
Mike Payne's England: The Complete Post-War Record (Breedon Books Publishing Company, Derby, U.K., 1993)
Norman Giller, Football Author
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CG