HAMMER SEALEY SEALS IT
NOT every fan who approaches Sir Geoff Hurst wants to talk about 1966.
Many Hammers supporters will talk about a game played 14 months earlier, a match Hurst remembers as “ranked by many as one of the best games ever played at Wembley”.
There were 100,000 fans packed into the stadium to watch West Ham play 1860 Munich in the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup.
The majority went home happy after seeing the Irons become only the second British club – after Spurs two years earlier – to lift a European trophy, just as boss Ron Greenwood expected.
From the start of the adventure, Greenwood told his players they were as good as any team in the competition – and so it proved.
West Ham qualified by winning the FA Cup, Ronnie Boyce the goal hero in the final 3-2 victory over Preston.
Boyce played every minute of the next season’s European campaign, culminating in the final where nine members of the Irons’ Academy were in the starting XI, including Bobby Moore and Martin Peters.
The matchwinner was Alan Sealey, a signing from Leyton Orient who had scored only three times previously that season and had got married the previous week.
Brian Dear had been prolific in the build-up to the final, scoring 14 goals in 14 matches, and thought he had extended his goal-den streak in the first half at Wembley.
More than half a century on, Dear was still saying his first-half effort should not have been ruled out for offside.
Keeper Jim Standen performed acrobatics to keep out Peter Grosser and Hans Kuppers, while Hurst was twice thwarted by Petar Radenkovic.
But Radenkovic was helpless in the 70th minute after Boyce nudged the ball into Sealey’s path.
Sealey took a touch and fired a rising right-foot rocket into the top corner.
Two minutes later, Moore steered a free-kick towards Peters and the ball fell to the unmarked Sealey six yards out. He instinctively struck the ball in the net.
Afterwards, even the reserved Greenwood said it was a match that “exceeded my wildest hopes”.