Soccer: Class of 66 saddened by English defeat

Nobby Stiles and his mates recall happier days when England beat Germany in the World Cup final, as MALCOLM FOLLEY reports.

In a cabaret lounge aboard a cruise ship far, far, from the madding crowd at Wembley, seven members of the most exclusive football club in the land shared a nation's anguish as England lost 0-1 to Germany.

Jack Charlton toyed with a pen in his mouth, staring at the giant screen framed with the flags of St George. Martin Peters was momentarily silent, as Nobby Stiles folded his arms and nodded his head in disbelief.

"I just kept swearing," confided 65-year-old Charlton, now more likely to be found fishing than in a tracksuit, but a football fan to the core.

Across the room Alan Ball, Sir Geoff Hurst, George Cohen and Ray Wilson sat together in a beautiful symmetry of the days when they worked in partnership as fullbacks for England.

The surreal location for this reunion of the fabled Class of 66 was testament, in fact, to the enduring place these men hold in the hearts of the country.

They had been drawn together to spend the next fortnight as feted guests on a World Cup reunion cruise aboard the Sundream.

The hours before the ship left dock at Southampton were little short of a nightmare for men who always wore the Three Lions on their shirt with a passion.

Peters, aged 56, described in that faraway summer of 1966 as a player 10 years ahead of his time, could not fathom how Germany's Diet-mar Hamann had been allowed unfettered time to arrange his match-winning free-kick on Sunday.

"Any professional footballer knows that they must stand on the ball before a free-kick," Peters said. "Our instructions were that me and Nobby didn't move until we were ordered by the referee. It becomes second nature - and it's not as if they didn't know about Hamann [a Liverpool goal-scoring star], as the England players play against him every week. From then on, we were always chasing the game."

As an injured David Beckham left the field on Sunday, you thought of the feisty little man who wore the red No 7 for his country on that memorable July afternoon 34 years ago. By every available eyewitness account, Ball covered every blade of grass as England defeated Germany 4-2 on the one and only occasion the World Cup was delivered to England's shores.

"We were ordinary lads, and now we're ordinary men from a time when the game was truly wonderful," said Ball, a little more corpulent, but as passionate as ever.

"My father brought me to London for that one day in July 1966. I was doing fine until he talked to me on the night before the game. What he said frightened me.

"He told me of the magnitude and responsibility resting on my shoulders. He told me to enjoy the game, to take it all in. But how could you enjoy it, with that hanging over you."

Yet Ball favoured the day, and has savoured the memory and the towering accomplishment ever since.

There were some missing from the reunion. Sir Bobby Charlton was at Wembley, while Roger Hunt and Gordon Banks will join the cruise liner on Friday.

Bobby Moore, the Adonis who captained the team, and Alf Ramsey, the man who managed them in unique style, so far removed from the media-conscious world of today, are now simply treasured memories for those left behind. Moore lost his fight with cancer seven years ago, while Sir Alf Ramsey succumbed to illness and old age in 1999.

But as the modern England team trooped disconsolately from Wembley for a final time on Sunday, Stiles made an impassioned plea: "We think of Mooro all the time and just hope and pray that there is something, somewhere in the new Wembley to commemorate what Bobby and Alf did for the country."

Hard to imagine that the small, ageing man with the outsized spectacles was once the enforcer of the most-decorated England team in history.

But those who played against Stiles, those Germans such as Franz Beckenbauer, understood the menace, the security and the fraternity that the little man from Manchester United once provided.

Stiles scored his only England goal, against Germany, five months before the World Cup final.

"I was wearing the No 9 shirt that day and I was almost on the line when I scored," he recalls. "We got booed off, but Alf said: 'If we get the same result in the World Cup final, I'll take it."'

For Ball, a lifetime's association with the professional game is at an end, finally disillusioned by his last dismissal from Portsmouth after fighting to save the club in administration.

He will devote his attention to developing a World Cup members' club, taking punters to the races in style.

And as Ball witnessed the retreat of England's players from Wembley, he suggested: "I think our team would have beaten them, in any time capsule you want."

The final routine before the boys of 1966 and the passengers, who at 1550 pounds a head will be sharing their soccer memories, set sail was a lifeboat drill - too late to save Kevin Keegan from drowning at Wembley.