SPURS HIT BY RACE ROW
ROUND up as many of England’s 1966 World Cup winners as possible, herd them on a coach, drive up Wembley Way and take them to the match.
At face value, the task was tricky – but this was the Euro 96 semi-final against the old enemy, Germany.
Tickets were pure gold dust, executive coaches do not grow on trees and Scotland Yard do not allow any old bus to drive up English football’s most famous boulevard.
Oh, and the Boys of ’66 were in high demand.
Thirty years of hurt had elapsed, and the market for nostalgia was at fever pitch.
Remarkably, a decent core of Sir Alf Ramsey’s legends had agreed to turn up to accompany a group of Fleet Street journalists – Sir Geoff Hurst,
Martin Peters, George Cohen and Gordon Banks among them.
We were given a police escort and on the 20-yard walk to the gates, something happened that will live long in the memory.
As Hurst and Peters, England’s goalscorers on that summer day in
July 1966, made their way through, fans swarmed to pat them on the back.
One England supporter, draped in
Cross of the St
George, looked Peters square in the eye, shook him by the hand and said: “Thank you for what you did for your country”. Peters died peacefully on Saturday after a dignified twilight amid the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease.
He was 76. Now there are enough Boys of ‘66 in the celestial changing room to make up a formidable five-aside team: Banks, Wilson, Moore, Ball and Peters. According to Sir Alf, Peters was 10 years ahead of his time – which puts him up there with Doctor Who and
Marty McFly in the pantheon of elite time travellers. He was also a wonderful player who was denied hero worship as scorer of the goal that took England to the holy grail.
Peters’ opportunism had put the host nation 2-1 up in the World Cup final against thethen West Germany.
But Wolfgang Weber’s equaliser seconds from the end of normal time, with a suspicion of handball that VAR may have cleared up, sent the game into extra time.
His West Ham team-mate Hurst then duly completed an unforgettable hat-trick.
Peters was reduced to best supporting actor for his contribution to the Jules Rimet Trophy gleaming in the sunlight. If the World Cup was his crowning glory at the age of 22, Peters would later become