It was 46 years ago today.

It was 46 years ago today.

Those ghostly, whistling winds are still haunting the England football team of a certain vintage. It was indeed 46 years ago today when Sir Alf Ramsey, the architect of arguably England's finest hour, looked ashen faced searching desperately for a hole in the ground. In 1966 it was fated that England would win the World Cup in front of their own adoring Wembley fans.

 Roll forward seven years later and the atmosphere would assume a much more sinister aspect. Years and decades later and it still seems barely believable. England would be denied a place at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany by the most horrific howler ever seen on a football pitch. The inquests followed rather like the aftermath of a celebrated court case. It just didn't seem possible at the time but on reflection we should have seen it coming from miles off.

Months earlier in Katowice, the imperious World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore had his rush of blood to the head when he dithered outside his own penalty area thereby leaving Poland the freedom of the country to capitalise on Moore's hesitation, beating England quite easily in the end. At the time none of us thought it would become the forerunner of a series of banana skins in England's World Cup group. They had also struggled terribly against Wales but weeks before England's return match with Poland at Wembley in 1973, England had emphatically thumped Austria 7-0 at Wembley.

And so it was that on this day in October Poland had come to Wembley privately fearing another demolition from the English bulldozer. Most of the nation still believed, with an unreasonable arrogance, that all they had to do was turn up on the night, close their eyes, swagger across those hallowed North London acres, pull up a deckchair, plant some sun glasses over their eyes, stick on the traditional sun factor and just wait for the flood of goals to arrive. But then it all went haywire.

In the ITV studios on the night of the game, Brian Clough, perhaps lamenting what might have been, referred to the Polish keeper Jan Tomaszewski  as the ultimate circus clown. That night Tomaszewski performed so many acrobatics that by the end of the game even the high wire trapeze act was laughing their head off. The remarkable Polish keeper stopped everything that England could fire at him, flinging himself outrageously at everything, tipping shots over  the bar at point blank, spreading his body across at marauding attackers and generally acting as an impenetrable shield in front of his goal.

For 90 minutes the tall, bustling, broad shouldered Martin Chivers who by then had become an established fixture in Spurs forward line, hurled and launched himself heroically in the air at every cross that came his way that night. But the Polish fortress would refuse to budge and Chivers just slouched his way dejectedly away from Wembley that night rather like somebody who'd just missed the last train. If only the Polish goal had been ever so slightly bigger for Chivers.

But you could never have accused England of not trying. They threw the cliched kitchen sink at the Polish keeper, bombarding the visitors keeper with every shot in the book. A whole sequence of shots either crashed off the post, bounced around the Polish penalty area like a smouldering grenade and then the ball just assumed an air of feeble defeat and resignation.

Then it happened because, quite frankly it does at times even when you think it won't. With the minutes ticking away inexorably the Leeds United hard man Norman Hunter went in for a tackle on the half way line that was never likely to be his. Hunter's mind was quite clearly in another post code when he lunged at a ball that was closer to Neasden than Wembley. In a tangle of legs Hunter lost the ball as Gadocha went haring away with the ball at his feet before laying the ball square for Domarski who slamned the ball under the body of England goalkeeper Peter Shilton.

So it was that the shy and reserved man who had delivered England their only World Cup, shrugged his shoulders, scowled gloweringly at the cameras around him and then just trudged away into yet more gloom. Sir Alf Ramsey, so acclaimed and eulogised by the whole of England seven years earlier, now became the villain of the piece, the hooded man, the vilified man, the man who simply wanted to creep away from the scene of the crime in the hope that nobody would notice him.

 Ramsey was sacked, given his marching orders and a man named Brian Clough, who had so cruelly lampooned a Polish goalkeeper as a clown, missed out on the England job now vacated by Ramsey's dismissal because tact was never his strong point. It is hard to know what either West Germany or Holland would have made of England had they qualified for the following summer's World Cup in West Germany but the irony of course was that an English butcher by the name of Jack Taylor would referee the final between the Dutch and the West Germans. Oh a penny for the thoughts of a certain Gareth Southgate. Your country awaits you sir.