My dad and I had no right to be there. It still amazes me that we were. We’d gone to none of the earlier games, had no friends in high places, had visited London only once throughout my childhood. My dad, a weekend golfer and motor-racing fan, wasn’t even that interested in football. But he was good at wangling things – free entry to this, sneaky admission to that. And when he heard that one of the patients in his GP surgery might have a pair of tickets for the World Cup final, he was quickly on to it. The patient had been to some of the Group 3 matches, played at Goodison Park and Old Trafford. But he’d no interest in trekking down from the north to the Big Smoke. So while he stayed home and watched the match on television, we were given his tickets. I still have the stub for mine: Empire Stadium Wembley, Jules Rimet Cup Final Tie, B Turnstiles, Entrance 24, East Standing Enclosure.
Rugby was the game at my grammar school, but I’d been obsessed with football since the age of 10 – went to Turf Moor to watch Burnley; created a pitch in rough ground at the back of our house where I could practise my ball skills; played midfield for a local youth team; attended trials, along with five others in that team, at Preston North End. My dad didn’t encourage my playing ambitions (professional football was no career for a middle-class boy) but nor could he dampen my enthusiasm. And when July 1966 came round, he too was caught up in the excitement.
The excitement was slower to build than it would be 30 years later, when England hosted the Euros. As every ageing pundit will tell you, things were different back then: not just the crowds (mostly standing) and the game (heavy ball, heavy tackling, no substitutes) but the structure of the tournament. Take the qualifiers. Then as now, both the hosts and current champions were given an automatic place in the finals. But the system by which the other 14 teams got there was bizarre. Some of the European groups consisted of four teams, others of three, and one had only Spain and the Republic of Ireland (they finished level on points and had to have a play-off in Paris). And whereas Europe was allowed eight qualifying groups (plus England), South America had just three (plus holders Brazil). The pro-European weighting looks even more marked if you consider Group 15, which consisted of nine teams split into three sub-groups – Mexico eventually emerged as winners, at the expense of teams such as Costa Rica, Honduras and the USA. With the whole of Africa boycotting the competition and several Asian teams withdrawing for economic reasons, the final qualifying group was made up of North Korea and Australia, with the former winning easily both home and away.
The 1966 North Korea team were as much a mystery to westerners as the country is now. Like everyone else, I fell under their spell. After drawing with Chile and beating Italy, they went through to a quarter-final against Portugal – and took an implausible 3-0 lead. As I watched on telly, I began to feel sorry for Eusébio, who after the eclipse of Brazil’s Pelé (kicked to bits by opponents) was the tournament’s star player. The sympathy soon faded. Eusébio went on to score four goals in the 5-3 win. My abiding image of the match was of a North Korean player so worked up while waiting for a free-kick to be taken that he left his position in the defensive wall, ran forward to where the ball had been placed, and kicked it down the other end of the pitch.
Portugal were England’s opponents in the semi-final. Till then, there’d been little to justify Alf Ramsey’s confidence that we’d win the World Cup: a boring goalless draw against Uruguay, a scrappy win against France (the decisive goal coming while a French player lay injured after a horrendous Nobby Stiles tackle), a 1-0 quarter-final win over the 10 men of Argentina (their star and captain, Antonio Rattín, having niggled and nattered his way to a red card). Only Bobby Charlton, with a glorious strike against Mexico, inspired hope. And it was his two goals against Eusébio’s one that won the match against Portugal, the second of them set up by Geoff Hurst, who some called a carthorse compared with Jimmy Greaves, but to whom Ramsey had taken a shine.
England’s semi-final took place on the Tuesday evening. On the Thursday, we set off from Skipton to London – our first experience of the M1. My mother and sister came too: a long weekend would give us time to see the sights (most importantly, Carnaby Street). It’s a mystery how my dad got us two rooms at the Regent Palace Hotel near Piccadilly Circus, despite it being last-minute, and peak holiday season, and the World Cup final. But he did.
I don’t remember much about the Saturday morning, apart from weeping with frustration as we sat in a cafe somewhere with my mother and sister, who were going to a matinee of Swan Lake. “You are advised to take up your position at least 30 minutes before kick-off,” it said on the back of my ticket, and there we were, miles away, with only three hours to go. We made it in good time, of course, buying souvenir programmes on the way in: two shillings and sixpence each – “daylight robbery”, my dad said, though cheap compared with the tickets, which cost over a pound (in some parts of the ground, they cost a mere 10 shillings). Still, the programme was a glossy production, with a blue cover: “Maybe it’ll be worth something one day,” my dad said.
He was right. Those in good condition can fetch up to £200. Mine has water stains, though, and I’d not want to part with it, if only because of the adverts, most of them for cigarettes and booze: Players No 6, Embassy (“The Accepted Cigarette”), Guinness, Gordon’s gin, Johnnie Walker, Carlsberg. There are also ads for The Black and White Minstrel Show (twice nightly at the Victoria Palace) and one from English Electric inviting applications from draughtsmen for “vacancies at all levels”. Apart from the ads, everything in the programme, including the picture captions, appears in four languages: English, French, Spanish and German. The first photo, taking up a page, is of the Queen; photos of the Fifa organising committee take up another three. They include a professor, two doctors and a man in military uniform – a serious-looking bunch seemingly untainted by bribery and corruption.
While the Royal Marines band played, my dad got out his fountain pen and wrote down the England team in the programme’s centre spread: Banks, Cohen, Wilson, Styles (sic), J Charlton, Moore, Peters, R Charlton, Ball … He didn’t get as far as our two front men, Hurst and Hunt, let alone Held, Haller and the Germans, because the teams came out. England were in red, having lost the toss for who would wear white. Red shirts weren’t as bad as grey. It seemed a bad omen all the same.
Sure enough, the Germans were soon ahead: a poor header from Ray Wilson and there was Haller. It might have stayed that way but for a smart piece of thinking from Bobby Moore, whose quickly taken free kick Hurst ghosted on to and glanced in: 1-1. Honours even at half-time. Among the tunes played during the interval by the marching massed bands was “Colonel Bogey”, to which, in the 1940s, the words “Hitler has only got one ball” were sung. The memory of wartime enmity was inescapable. But you didn’t talk about it. I can’t remember any acrimony between supporters. Nor segregation.
England had the better of the second half, and after 78 minutes Martin Peters scored. At 2-1 and with a minute to play, I dared to hope. It was fair. It was fate. Blow the whistle, ref. Then Germany won a dubious free kick (had Jack Charlton really committed a foul?), the ball somehow evaded the England defence and hit Schnellinger (handball!), and Wolfgang Weber turned it in. Extra time. The Germans had the momentum now. We were bound to lose. Whoever was to blame – the Swiss referee, the hubristic Ramsey, God – had ruined a perfect day.
I felt little better after what happened next. In my memory, the “Russian linesman” (in fact, a former player called Tofiq Bahramov from Azerbaijan, in whose honour the national stadium in Baku is named) was standing directly below us. But the map on the back of my ticket suggests we were on the opposite side of the ground. Perhaps my angle of vision has been confused by 50 years of watching the TV replay. Whatever the case, when Hurst’s shot bounced down from the crossbar, Bahramov thought it crossed the line. Numerous scientific analyses and computer simulations have since found otherwise. All I could see were the frantic German protests. A sense of injustice flared up in me again, this time on their behalf. It wouldn’t be right for us to win 3-2, not with a ghost-goal like that.
But at the end, that’s exactly what I thought had happened: that we had won, unfairly, 3-2. Yes, Geoff Hurst (once again fed brilliantly by Moore) had smashed the ball in for a seeming hat-trick. Yes, the Wembley scoreboard said 4-2. But I knew my rulebook. After a goal is scored, the opposition must always kick off again. And the Germans hadn’t kicked off again. The final whistle must have gone before the ball hit the net. Unlike the 99,999 other spectators, I left the stadium knowing there’d been a misunderstanding, which the ref would soon clear up.
But every copy of the evening paper – printed at amazing speed – said England had won 4-2. And though my schoolboy pedantry told me I was right and everyone else wrong, I didn’t want to spoil the celebrations. At 15, tied to my parents, I couldn’t celebrate as euphorically as everyone else in London, by jumping into fountains, kissing strangers on the steps of Eros, and getting drunk. But I was happy watching the fun. And happy lying awake through the small hours as cars circled Piccadilly Circus parping their horns.
Within a week I’d developed chickenpox, and next thing I was back at school. The 30 July had been a great day. Now it was time to look ahead. With the team England had, there would surely be other triumphs in the years to come: the next European Championships, the next World Cup, all the ones after that. Thank God I’d never have to become an old man telling his children or (laughable prospect!) grandchildren how he was there in the stadium when Bobby Moore, after carefully wiping his hands, accepted the trophy from the Queen and an England football team, for the one and only time, won the World Cup.
