OLIVER HOLT: My magical night with Sir Geoff Hurst – one of the last links to a disappearing world

Thick wet flakes of snow had begun to cover the path outside the Royal Spa Center when audience members who had paid a few pounds extra for the Meet and Greet with Sir Geoff Hurst portion of the evening began to arrive in the foyer.

We comfort ourselves in shelter and warmth. A huge poster announcing an upcoming evening with Anton du Beke and a flyer for a show called Totally Tina stared down at us from the walls.

I bought a couple of signed retro jerseys, one West Ham, one England, from a souvenir stall that had been set up on a trestle table.

There were other options: signed Geoff Hurst boots, signed Geoff Hurst soccer balls, signed Geoff Hurst photographs, Denis Law memorabilia, Martin Peters memorabilia, George Best memorabilia, and a bright yellow Brazil jersey with Pelé’s signature. . All our yesterdays in a provincial theater in Leamington Spa.

I stood there for a while, admiring a print of the famous image of Sir Geoff in the air at Wembley on July 30, 1966, his left leg extended in front of him and the ball flying into the West German net, one of the the best sports action pictures ever taken.

It was England’s fourth goal in the World Cup final and Hurst’s third. Somewhere high up in the stands, BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme was saying, “they think it’s all over, it’s now.”

One of the employees asked us to form a queue for the Meet and Greet. After a while, we entered the auditorium and sat in the first two rows. I looked at the people around me. There were plenty of West Ham fans, old and young. And a lot of people, like me, football fans who had come so they could say they had once met and heard the greatest living footballer in England, a man who would be a legend in any age.

A lady entered with the help of two sticks. I spoke to her afterwards. Her name was Myrtle Tunney, she was 86 years old and had come with three generations of her West Ham supporting family.

He had grown up in Forest Gate and had been a regular at Upton Park when Sir Geoff, Bobby Moore and Peters were on the side. We were all here on some kind of pilgrimage and this was hers.

A pilgrimage and maybe a little more than that. Sir Geoff is one of the last links in a vanishing world, a link in a part of glorious history that we have never been able to fully emulate.

Only he and the great Sir Bobby Charlton remain of the Boys of 66, the team cherished in our memories as the youngsters who gave England its sporting greatest moment almost 60 years ago.

Perhaps one of the lessons we can learn from the Gary Lineker case, one of the lessons the BBC should have taken into account, is that there is a powerful bond between the sports heroes of yesteryear and the fans.

That bond is hard to break and the near unanimity of football’s support for Lineker, not a World Cup winner but one of our greatest goalscorers ever, was another reminder of the affection we have for the game’s icons.

To be in Hurst’s company, to hear him speak, to hear him remember, is a precious thing if you love our game. We talk a lot about wanting to honor sports heroes of the past and show them that they’re not forgotten, but all too often it’s just lip service.

The evening at the Royal Spa Centre, for me anyway, was a small way of showing one of my heroes how much we value what he did for our game and how much we value the team he represents.

I’ve met Sir Geoff briefly before, at press events here and there, but I would have paid double or triple what I did at Leamington Spa for the chance to shake his hand and hear him tell stories that brought about that golden day at Wembley. back to life

I went up on stage when it was my turn to take a picture with him and sign my shirts. Exchanging a few words with him, and those memories that I grabbed, are things that I will treasure.

Half an hour after he finished his Meet and Greet, a larger crowd of us returned to the auditorium to listen to him chat about the past. I’ve heard some of the stories before, obviously, like the fact that Hurst knew his second goal had crossed the line when he bounced off the crossbar because Roger Hunt, a supreme goalscorer, turned when he saw where he had landed.

And there were some stories I hadn’t heard. As he ran towards the finish line in the dying seconds of extra time, Hurst said, he could hear Alan Ball, who was man of the match that day, yelling for him to come through.

“Hursty, Hursty,” Hurst yelled, imitating Ball’s famous high-pitched voice. Hurst said, with a wide smile and a happy profanity, that he had put that thought out of his mind.

‘My thought process was that I would hit it as hard as I could,’ he said, ‘and that I would probably miss but fly so far over the bar that by the time I could recover, then surely to God. the game would end. Anyway, as we all know, I messed up and it went in.

The audience erupted in a small roar of applause at that moment, and that image of Hurst in the air, his left leg stretched out in front of him, crossed every mind in the theater.

Hurst spoke about Sir Alf Ramsey, Bobby Moore and Jimmy Greaves, the man he called “a genius”, the man whose place in the team he took halfway through the tournament.

He talked about how Manchester United manager Sir Matt Busby had once offered West Ham £200,000 to sign him and West Ham manager Ron Greenwood had sent him a telegram simply saying: ‘No thanks’.

And he also spoke of sadness. He spoke about Ray Wilson, England’s left-back in the final, announcing to the rest of the team at a meeting a few years ago that he was in the early stages of dementia.

He spoke of seeing his great friend Peters suddenly fail in the midst of the same illness. Hurst is lean, lean and sharp as a tack at 81, but he paused there for a moment as he considered the friends he had lost.

After a couple of hours, it was over, applause rang out, the spell was broken, and we all headed back to the lobby. It was still snowing those big wet flakes outside, so I grabbed the signed jerseys in a plastic bag in my hand and wrapped them even tighter against the elements.

Guardiola has influenced a generation

A ranking of the best coaches from 1996-2022 compiled by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics placed Sir Alex Ferguson first, José Mourinho second, Pep Guardiola third, Arsene Wenger fourth and Joachim Low fifth.

I found it a bit strange not to have Carlo Ancelotti (who was sixth) further up the list, given that he won the Champions League four times in the allotted years, but they are all great coaches.

Another question would be to ask who has been the most influential coach of the last 25 years. On that list, Guardiola would be alone at the top.

BBC radio stars deserve gratitude, not abuse

The abuse directed at radio commentators Ian Dennis, John Murray and Alistair Bruce-Ball, who have no connection to Match of the Day and did their job over the weekend, was nothing more than the ugly, irrational and misguided rant of a crowd.

Dennis, Murray and Bruce-Ball represent the best of BBC Sport. They are your best radio commentators and operators, professional to the core, loyal, committed, knowledgeable, informed and wonderful to listen to.

A drive in the company of one of the game commentators is an enriched journey and an enhanced part of life. Dennis, Murray and Bruce-Ball weren’t being unfair to Lineker, who won a humiliating corporate drop on Monday, just as Carol Kirkwood wasn’t being unfair to him by doing the weather report on BBC Breakfast.

The idea that Lineker was being undermined in any way is patently absurd. In fact, it seemed quite ironic that, in the midst of a discussion that in part concerned freedom of expression, some would try to impose a tyranny of silence on other stations.

Of course, there were some with no connection to Match of the Day who chose to pose anyway so as not to miss out on some reflected virtue. Dennis, Murray and Bruce-Ball, who work on staff contracts at the BBC anyway, lived up to their obligations to their listeners and, like hundreds of thousands of their other devotees, I was grateful to them for that.