WHEN Saturday, July 30, 1966 finally came, I felt great. I walked briskly to Golders Green for Mass. There was rain in the air and, I decided, a winning destiny. A man in the street said softly: “Good luck, Nobby. You’re going to do it, mate,” and I said: “Thanks, I think you’re right.”
I thought of all the days that had carried me to this point. Already I had a storehouse of memories and now, at the age of 24, I was hitting a peak that might never be surpassed. I had to play better and fight harder than ever before. It was as simple as that.
Alf Ramsey reinforced my mood of confidence in the morning team talk. He said we had to do it for England and for ourselves; we had done our work well and now we would collect our rewards. Yes, the Germans were a good team, they had discipline and talent, and Franz Beckenbauer, most certainly, was an excellent player. But then we had Bobby Charlton and in Alf’s opinion that was strength beyond anything the Germans possessed.
I was lapping up everything — the excitement, the anticipation of the crowd. When I came up the tunnel and hit the light and heard the roar of the fans, I remembered my father’s advice from years previously. “Look around,” he had said. “Enjoy all of it because you might not pass that way again.”
What none of us could enjoy, and least of all Ray Wilson, was that the Germans went into the lead in the thirteenth minute. The goal came from a rare mistake by Wilson. Sigi Held hit a big cross to the far post and, apparently, when Banksy (Gordon Banks) shouted for Ray to leave it, his call was misheard. Ray thought that Banks was calling a warning and headed away too early, which resulted in the ball rolling into a tempting position for Helmut Haller to shoot, and the shot squeezed past Banksy and big Jack Charlton’s outstretched leg. It was not quite what we had in mind and it took a massive effort from Mooro (Bobby Moore) to get us back into the game. It took him six minutes.
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He went powering down the left, won a free kick, did not wait for the whistle and sent a perfect pass into the Germany box. Geoff Hurst headed the ball in. The rest was hard, battling football. We had our chances and at half-time Alf was critical of the forwards for snatching at their chances. We had the beating of them, Alf said, but in the second half we had to be more ruthless.
If goals remained elusive, the conviction of our play grew in the second half. Alan Ball was inexhaustible, wearing the Germans down to breaking point, and in the 78th minute we had the breakthrough and believed that the job was just about over. It was not a classic.
Bally sent a corner to the edge of the box, from where Hurst shot on goal. The ball was blocked by the defender, Horst-Dieter Hottges, and flew into the air. Martin Peters, beating big Jack by half a yard, reached the ball before it hit the ground and shot past Hans Tilkowski, the goalkeeper. A Charlton special would have been more uplifting, but we were still ready to weigh Martin’s goal in gold. We had the game and the World Cup, and now all we had to do was turn a few screws.
As I saw it, we just about deserved the spoils. Both teams had played hard, without managing truly to punish the opposition, but on balance we had posed the more consistent threat and there was no doubt that, thanks to Bally, we had carried the game to the Germans. But for some time — and to me it seemed end-less — that would be old, meaningless opinion. The Germans, so sickeningly I felt as if I had been disembowelled, brought the game back to life when it should have been dead. The disaster came with just a minute to go.
The referee decided that Jack Charlton had fouled Held, but the big man angrily insisted that the German had “made a back” for him and conned the official. While he was doing that, I was dragging the wall into place and checking with Banksy that he had a clear line of sight. He nodded, but suddenly our goalkeeper’s vision was far from clear. The powerful Lothar Emmerich, who was having a poor game, smashed the free kick into the wall and as the ball bounced around in the box, Wolfgang Weber got a foot to it and put it past Banks.
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Alf was still one rallying speech away from fulfilling his mission. Again he did it brilliantly. He said that we had won the World Cup once — now we simply had to do it again. He made it seem entirely possible. He said our duty to England would be completed successfully.
Ten minutes into extra time, I made my last clearly conscious contribution to the match. It was the first phase of the most controversial goal in the history of the World Cup. Big Jack said that the pass I sent into the right corner was just me playing for time and I had not had a call from Bally, who scampered on to it. That, I told Jack, was bollocks. The pass was intentional.
I knew Bally had the beating of Karl-Heinz Schnellinger — by now it was written in the sky over Wembley — and I played the ball in for him. As in all other things that day, Bally immediately saw his opportunity. He raced on to the pass and put in an early cross. Hurst beat the exhausted Willi Schulz to the ball and sent his shot crashing against the underside of the crossbar and down. Did it cross the line? Roger Hunt threw his arms in the air and the linesman, Tofik Bakhramov, from Azerbaijan, told Gottfried Dienst, the Swiss referee, that it was a goal, a decision that every member of the German team will die saying was wrong. Me? I accepted the goal with thanks. It came at the end of a long, tough, glorious road and I did feel we were the better team, if only by a fine margin.
The old film does not prove the case either way and in the state of physical and mental weariness that was beginning to overtake me I could only thank God that the verdict was in our favour. At that moment, any other thoughts drained away with the last of my strength.
The fact is that the rest of the match, including the final moments of drama when, with just a minute left on the clock, Hursty raced away to score his third goal, has always remained a blur. My memory returns only at the point when I got hold of George Cohen, kissed him and told him, after he asked me what the hell I was doing: “George, we won the World Cup.” He seemed a little embarrassed that I was lying on top of him in front of the royal box at the time.
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I felt as though I had come out of a long, black tunnel into the light. The darkness came when, with the score locked at 3-2 to us in the second half of extra time, I ran ahead of the ball and took a pass from Bally in the outside-right position.
The roar of the crowd swelled as I raced on the overlap. I looked up and said to myself: “Yes, near post, I’ll go for that,” but when I came to make contact with the ball, something shocking and terrifying happened. I felt everything go. The sensation was of “whoosh” and everything had left me. The ball trickled off the toe of my boot and over the line. The crowd sighed and fell silent.
I just stood there, empty, and one concern was that my bowels had emptied, which would have been a terrible embarrassment because, unlike my team-mates, I did not wear a jockstrap or a slip beneath my shorts. But if my worst fear proved to be unfounded, I still had a dreadful problem. In the last, desperate minutes of a World Cup final and at a time when the fresh legs of substitutes were not available, it took a tremendous effort just to move.
Bally had run to take a return pass and as he came past me, rooted to the spot where the breakdown had happened, his eyes were blazing. “Move, you bastard, move,” he screamed. Bally was on fire and prepared to run for ever. Before the mist came, I knew the best I could do was to drag one foot in front of the other. Later, I asked my team-mates if they had noticed anything happening to me and they said no. I had played on. I had got through it.
I cannot remember going up the steps to collect my medal. There is a picture of me looking up into the stands and I know by my expression that I was looking for my wife, Kay, but I cannot tell you if I spoke to her before I went down on to the field and danced my jig.
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Kay says that she does not think we talked before the moment of my almost total national exposure because she has been haunted for 36 years by the fact that she was not able to say some precious words at the moment of my supreme football achievement.
They would not have been tender words along the lines of “Nobby, you are my great hero and I adore every bone in your body”. What she would have said, it turns out, was: “For God’s sake, put your bloody teeth in.”