‘They think it’s all over... It is now!’ Fifty years on from 1966, and all that
Hurst’s efforts helped England win the World Cup at Wembley - but did it cross the line?
Today marks 50 years since English football’s finest hour, when Alf Ramsey’s side beat West Germany 4-2 in an incident-packed 1966 World Cup final at Wembley.
It was England’s first and only World Cup triumph and, not surprisingly, is still recalled with passion and fondness.
The late Bobby Moore lifted the trophy, while Geoff Hurst became the only player to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final which was full of incident and controversy, some of which still burns to this day.
The thrilling final at Wembley on July 30, 1966, in front of 96,000 fans, saw Hurst imperious in the air against West Germany to cancel out Helmut Haller’s early opener. Then Martin Peters’ 78th-minute volley appeared to have won it for England.
But even though Wolfgang Weber stabbed in at the back post to force extra time, Hurst grabbed what proved to be the winner. The West Ham United striker’s shot hit the underside of the crossbar and didn’t appear to cross the line, but the Swiss referee Gottfried Dienst consulted with the linesman Tofiq Bahramov and awarded one of the most hotly-contested goals in history.
In Hurst’s mind though, he still has no doubt that it was the right decision. “I turned away to celebrate but it wasn’t kidology. It was 2-2, in the World Cup final,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday last week.
“For me the clinching piece of evidence is Roger Hunt, wheeling away, instinctively, to celebrate. If you’re not sure, you try to put it in and Roger didn’t. It might have saved all this debate if he had, but I’m glad he didn’t.”
Hurst added his third in the dying moments, and the game, watched by an estimated 32 million television viewers, went down in English sporting folklore.
BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme’s famous phrase “some people are on the pitch ... they think it’s all over ... it is now!” as Hurst struck England’s fourth has become one of the most memorable sayings in the history of the game.
Despite controversies both in the final and throughout the competition helping them on their way to glory, England have not had as good a team since.
The best chance they had of repeating the feat was probably four years later in Mexico with largely the same side, but they blew a 2-0 half-time lead to lose to West Germany in the quarterfinals. There were the 1990 World Cup and Euro 96 heartbreaks to German teams in semi-final penalty shoot-outs. 1966 remains the only time England have played in a major final.
Perhaps all the failures in the last half a century have helped keep the 1966 final so vividly recalled. Few memories are more poignant than those of Tina Moore, the wife of the England captain who died from cancer in 1993 at the age of 51. “I can still see Bobby climbing the steps, wiping his hands so as not to soil the Queen’s white gloved hand. “Forever the gentleman,” Moore recalled.