By Richard Edwards
It is July 30, 1966, and Essex are playing Surrey at a sun-baked Oval. Preparing to open the batting is a Barking-born 25-year-old with distinctive blonde hair. Going through his wicketkeeping drills on the outfield is an angular figure, who had made his first-class debut for Essex against his home county of Lancashire back in 1962.
It is not outlandish to suggest that eventuality could have come to pass. As it was, both Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore had another date penned in their diary on that date, which left the likes of Michael Bear and the ebullient Brian Taylor to take their place.
Quite how the county set manage to juggle their Championship commitments with the pressing need to watch England in a World Cup final on that July day is unclear.
What is apparent, is that Sir Alf Ramsey was fortunate enough to call on a striker and a centre-back who were also more than handy cricketers.
In the summer of 1956, a decade before he led his country’s football team to the nation’s crowning sporting glory, Moore was opening the batting for the South against the North. He was captain, too.
“Colin Milburn was their skipper but I won the toss, we batted, I opened,” he later recalled. “I’d just reached double figures when I got an edge and Ollie caught me in the slips.
“He said, ‘on your way Mooro’. I was sick. But half an hour later it rained. The match was abandoned. At least I got my innings.”
In the crowd was Doug Insole, who, despite Moore’s brief innings, had seen enough to offer him a contract with Essex. His Essex schoolboy team-mate, Geoff Hurst, had also caught the eye and, in 1962, actually made a first-class appearance for them in the County Championship.
It was a brief, and not particularly glorious, introduction. The match, which ironically encompassed England’s opening match of the 1962 World Cup against Hungary in Rancagua in Chile, saw Hurst fail to notch a run or bowl a ball.
He did, though, get to share an away dressing room with Jim Laker and admire the bowling of Lancashire’s Ken Higgs, who would go on to take more than 1,500 wickets in an extraordinary career spanning 28 years.
Higgs’ 511 career matches were 510 more than England’s hat-trick hero from 1966 managed. Years later, in an interview with the Daily Mail, Hurst recounted how he was still playing more cricket than football in the years running up to the World Cup.
“At the top level to be good enough to play the sport you have to be dedicated to doing that thing,” he said.
“I enjoyed playing football and cricket and it came to a time in my teens and early 20s when I say I was ‘messing about with both sports’.
“Four years before the 1966 World Cup I was still playing more cricket than football. I thought my future probably lay with cricket.
“It was the end of an era where people like Denis Compton and Willie Watson were playing football and cricket internationally for England.”
Thankfully for Sir Alf and for England as it transpired, he decided to ditch the cricket in favour of football. A decision which the nation has every reason to be thankful for.
Hurst would continue to play Second XI cricket for Essex until 1964, while Moore would make the odd cameo appearance in charity matches. Some three years after the World Cup triumph, Moore and Hurst, along with the likes of Harry Redknapp, Trevor Brooking and Frank Lampard Snr, came together for a match against Essex’s Belhus Cricket Club.
Bowling off-spin, Moore took 5-16 from seven overs in a West Ham win. The man from Barking could do no wrong. For club or country.
