World Cup 1966: Alfie's Boys- BBC2 8.00pm tonight.

Great start -

Jimmy Greaves - Missed out, through injury ...

"1966 was bloody awful, the worst year of my life."

This country is unrecognizable from the scenes from the 1960's

It is indeed ...

Excuse the pun - mecca - But - yes ...

No Mosque domes in this black and footage.

Great programme Dive..thanks for putting it up...would have missed it otherwise

never to be repeated-its all too beautiful

Happy days. Saw it in Blackpool on the first day of a week's holiday with 2 pals, was going out with a 16 year old who looked like Jean Shrimpton at the time and started my first job 9 days later.

Will have to catch this on IPlayer as only just noticed the thread. Cheers MD.

saw the third English goal - its a red ball? it clearly did not go over the line? the contrast of the red ball... who's lying to themselves. Still if the ref says its in its in.
Maradonna's handy hit almost makes up for the bad decision. turnabout.

It always has to come down to some legalistic way of winning? Like a decision from a referee. Can't they win like Germany beat Brazil in the last world cup?

Watching the World Cup Final killed Jimmy Greaves inside.

The Russian linesman said it was a goal - zorrostrikes - not the Swiss Ref.

Perhaps the Russia linesman did not forgive the Germans for seige of Leningrad, in the Second World War.

He wasn't Russian at all. He was from Azerbaijan, which at the time was under Russian rule as part of the USSR.

I've no idea what Tofiq Bahramov's personal views were, but there's no reason to believe he'd necessarily have been antagonistic towards Germany, which after all had been fighting his country's occupiers 25 years earlier.

A nice footnote is that as when the Azerbaijanis gained their independence after the collapse of the USSR, they immediately changed the name of the national football stadium from the Vladimir Lenin Stadium to the Tofiq Bahramov Stadium, and erected a statue in his memory.

The wounds from that goal were still fresh when I was teaching in a West German school 15 years later. There were arguments in the staffroom, with a maths teacher drawing diagrams with vectors and forces to explain how it was "physisch UNMOEGLICH, dass der Ball ueber die Linie ist."

Pupils who hadn't even been born in 1966 wanted to take issue with the goal, but thankfully soon shut up on being told to argue their case in English.

To this day a goal which goes in off the crossbar is called a "Wembley-Tor" over there.

roger hunt thought it was a goal and that's good enough for me

Hunt should have followed up and bagged himself an easy goal, Tel, them there would be no dispute.