EXCLUSIVE MIKE WALTERS INSIDE

WISH them luck as you wave them goodbye.

But if he emulates Sir Geoff Hurst’s feat of scoring a hat-trick in the World Cup final, at least Harry Kane is unlikely to find himself signing on the dole or spending nearly 20 years flogging insurance.

Apart from the FA’S cheapskate £1,000-a-man bonus (before tax) for England’s 1966 heroes, Hurst’s reward for an unrivalled achievement on football’s grandest stage has been a lifetime of honest endeavour punctuated by unspeakable heartbreak.

He still laughs at the memory of a national hero being invited to present a bingo jackpot winner with the keys to a Mini in Ilford and being introduced to the audience, “Ladies and gentleman,

Mr George Hurst.”

He is still baffled by the lack of an organised night on the tiles with his team-mates

56 years ago.

Jack Charlton passed out in a front garden in Walthamstow after a pub crawl, Nobby Stiles stopped off for egg and chips on the M6, while Hurst and a handful of team-mates, including Alan Ball and Martin Peters, joined revellers in Danny La Rue’s club on Hanover Square in the West End.

And he is still amused by the knock on his hotel room door, the night before they thought it was all over against West Germany, to find an adidas rep with a tin of white paint and a brush, offering Hurst and Peters £500 each to add three white stripes to their plain black boots.

But Hurst, who is 80, is one of only three surviving Boys of ’66 and increasingly he is aware of his own mortality.

Tomorrow night, in a searingly powerful documentary produced by long-time friend and former TV sports presenter Matt Lorenzo, Hurst opens the curtains on some of his darkest moments as well as the triumphs. He talks on camera, for the first time, about his younger brother Robert’s suicide by stepping in front of a train at Chelmsford station in 1974. Eight years later, after being sacked as Chelsea manager and a short spell drawing unemployment benefit – what a way to treat a legend – he found himself on a neardeserted train from Norwich to Liverpool Street when his memory was virtually tasered, let alone jogged.

“I was working for Anglia TV as a pundit after leaving Chelsea, and the train back from Norwich one Sunday was almost empty. I was the only passenger in the whole carriage.

“The buffet car wasn’t open, but the conductor offered me a cup of tea from somewhere and when he reappeared with a brew five minutes later, he told me he was working on the train the day my brother passed away.

“Most strangers want to talk about whether my second goal in the World Cup final crossed the line. Especially if they are Germans or Scots. But I wasn’t expecting that.” Voice faltering, he added: “You could argue it lessens over the years, but the grief never leaves you. It never passes.” As Hurst has discovered to his cost, tragedy transcends fame and celebrity.

With indiscriminate cruelty, his daughter Claire Driver succumbed to brain cancer in December 2010 after a 10-year battle.

If providence offered him two hours of his life to relive again, he would cash it in for an encore with her, not a football match that went to extra-time in July 1966.

“For any of us, family life is always more important than anything you’ve done in your workplace,” he said. “I would give anything to enjoy certain moments with her again.

“That’s why I talk about it in the documentary – because there is more to my life story than scoring goals.” Hurst’s anecdotes about his postfootball incarnation in the insurance trade are mercifully brighter.

He has high hopes of Kane (left) avoiding a similar career path.

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing Harry on the dole,” he laughed.

“That’s not how it works these

The grief of losing a loved one never leaves you. It never passes