After scoring my hat-trick in the World Cup final, I went home to mow the lawn and wash the car. No wonder GEOFF HURST's wife Judith can't stand today's pampered WAGs - as the last surviving hero of 1

When I woke up on July 30, 1966 I did not know the coming hours would mark me for life.

We could win or lose. Bobby Moore was our captain, so I thought we would probably win. The only person to have a hunch about my contribution was my father-in-law.

Jack had seen me score plenty of goals at West Ham that season and predicted to my wife Judith that I would have a World Cup hat-trick.

I didn't hear about it till after the match, but I can't say I would have greeted it as a prophecy from Nostradamus.

One man to get three against West Germany ? He could have got bloody good odds.

Yet Jack was proved right.

Later that day, alongside my teammates – Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Ray Wilson, Gordon Banks, Roger Hunt, Martin Peters, Jack Charlton, Alan Ball, George Cohen and Nobby Stiles - I walked up the steps at Wembley to accept a winner's medal from Her Majesty the Queen.

I had scored three goals, the last one prompting the most memorable burst of commentary in English football.

'And here comes Hurst,' says the BBC's Kenneth Wolstenholme.

'Some people are on the pitch!'

'They think it's all over!'

I score my goal.

'It is now!'

Alf Ramsey, our manager, was waiting for us beyond the edge of the grass, as full of joy as anyone would ever see him.

He and Mooro – Bobby Moore – embraced. I was too dazed and weary to muster more than a knackered half-handshake.

At 24 years old, it was the start of a lifetime of being hailed for the events of a single afternoon.

The same goes for my teammates. The 11 of us shared something no other Englishman has ever experienced. Now all the others are gone.

I became the last boy of '66 when Bobby Charlton died, last October. At 82, living on without them feels lonelier than I can put into words.

Our lives were very different to the preening, pampered footballers of today. We were the sons of hard grafters: Bob Moore lagged pipes in a power station. Harry Cohen was a gas fitter.

William Peters was a Thames lighterman and my father was a toolmaker.

Every day of his working life, Bob Charlton went underground to mine coal. It looked as if that's where Jack would end up, but he did one shift down the pit as a teenager, came back up into the open air and resigned from his apprenticeship.

The alternative to the pit was the pitch. Bobby Moore and I played together for the West Ham youth team as 17-year-old kids.

Even then, he was calm and collected. And if his play was immaculate, so was his appearance. His white shorts always had a nice crease to them.

His mum, Doss, even ironed his bootlaces.

In 1965, the year before the World Cup, I bumped into Jimmy Greaves, who played for Tottenham Hotspur, in Romford High Street.

My daughter Claire was only two months old and I was pushing her in her pram. Jimmy was stocking up on supplies for his pipe, which was an unusual habit for a footballer even then.

It was my first proper conversation with the man I believed to be England's greatest goal scorer, and I was hypnotised by his charisma.

So hypnotised that when we went our separate ways, I realised I'd completely forgotten I was a new dad and had left little Claire in the tobacconist's. Jimmy's destiny and mine were to be forever intertwined.

In a sliding-doors moment, a Frenchman's studs gashed

Jimmy's left shin to the bone in the third group game. He played on for the rest of the match, then pulled off his boot in the dressing room to find it full of blood.

The injury meant he was out of the team for the final, and I was in. We had all been well prepared.

Alf Ramsey, our manager, wore a cloak of formality, always addressing us as 'Gentlemen'.

No one called me 'Geoffrey'. Alf did. He also called Mooro 'Robert' and Nobby 'Norbert'.

You'd never have guessed Alf grew up in Dagenham.

When he wasn't wearing a tracksuit, he was in a three-piece suit. For the World Cup final, he wore the odd combination of tracksuit and black leather shoes.

Alf had a passion for westerns, but the night before the 1966 final he made an exception to take us to the cinema in Hendon, north London, to see Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. A film about achieving aerial dominance over the Germans. Was this subliminal messaging?

Afterwards, Bally – Alan Ball – recalled that 'nobody left the picture house. They just stood and clapped us. We were ordinary lads. We were going to win the World Cup for them tomorrow.'

England fans who have suffered through the past few decades will know how it feels when the national side under-achieves.

This was how it was until Alf took over, too. England didn't get out of their group in the 1958 World Cup. In 1962, they were soundly beaten in the quarter-final.

Alf let no one become complacent. I left the team hotel after one game, saying, 'See you next time.' 'If selected, Geoffrey,' Alf replied.

The most obvious restraint he placed on the players was to do with drink. At night, his trainer and physio would prowl the corridors like prison guards, making sure no one nipped out for a swift pint.

In 1964, just before the squad flew out on tour, Alf let the players go out but imposed a half-ten curfew.

A few players missed it. When they got back to their rooms, each found his passport resting on his pillow.

It's possible now to watch the rise of a young English player from his first kick in the Premier League: think of Wayne Rooney's explosive first goal for Everton aged only 16 in 2002, or Marcus Rashford's game-changing brace for Manchester United in 2016.

In the early 1960s, Jimmy Greaves was just about the most famous footballer in Europe, but there were no showreels or compilations: to know for sure how good he was, you had to be there.

The FA Cup final was an annual TV treat. Only the odd international was broadcast. Instead, fans went to the grounds to watch in massive numbers and knew their own team intimately.

When Match Of The Day was first broadcast on BBC2 at the start of 1964–5, there were fewer people watching highlights from Anfield – a mere 20,000 – than there were spectators attending the actual game.

At West Ham's training ground there was a sign on the pitch saying, 'keep off the grass'.

By late September, there was no grass to keep off. The only way you could tell there was any sort of pitch was the two goals and the four corner flags and by midwinter it looked like the Somme.

Now, everyone gets to play twinkle-toed, one-touch stuff on nail-clippered pitches fit for a royal garden party.

And with greater science applied to fitness and diet, footballers achieve levels of skill, speed and fitness that were not possible in what I call the medieval days.

It's easy to assume that football now is better than it was then. I can imagine kids watching the World Cup final I played in and judging it harshly. It can look slower. It's in black and white. Was Bobby Charlton really that good?

But I'm not so sure that football has had an upgrade. It's a physical game, and back then there was a lot more acceptance that you tackled hard, but you played fair.

It wasn't all exemplary - it sometimes felt like a player had to be the victim of grievous bodily harm to earn a free kick - but a lot of the games I watch today are frankly boring.

They're too namby-pamby, and they're badly marred by gamesmanship. The sight of players diving to gain an advantage – to get a foul or win a penalty – is disgraceful.

In my time, if you were tackled and knocked over, the attitude was to get up and show that you weren't hurt, you weren't going to succumb to intimidation.

You didn't roll over three or four times when someone tapped your ankle; and now, as soon as they don't get the foul they were playing for, they're straight up and running back, the feigned injury gone and forgotten. It's a joke.

As for prompting the referee to shower the opposition with bookings, I honestly don't know how some players can look at themselves in the mirror.

Our ethos was closer to that of modern rugby players.

You can't imagine a team from the Sixties playing against a team today, falling over with a hand clutched to their throat or face when they've taken a soft elbow to the shoulder.

It would be like playing against aliens.

Stratospheric salaries have created a huge gap between the players and the fans whose season tickets and TV subscriptions pay their wages.

In real terms, Premier League footballers make more in a week than professionals of my era would earn in a year.

The afternoon after my hat-trick, I went home to Hornchurch and mowed the lawn. The car looked like it could use a wash, so I did that, too.

By the time I got to the England squad I was on £90 a week.

When Judith and I bought our first home in 1964, for £5,000, it felt as if we'd taken leave of our senses.

After I retired from football, I ran a pub for five years then became an insurance salesman. Harry Kane will never have to make cold calls for a living.

Judith has been a pillar of strength to me, and she threw herself into the role of homemaker happily.

I think it's safe to say Judith's experience had almost nothing in common with the glamorous life of a modern footballer's wife.

It's a long way from Alf to Sven: in Baden-Baden in 2006 came the dawn of the WAGs. Sven-Goran Eriksson, with his colourful romantic life, wasn't in a position to discourage wives and girlfriends from tagging along, dressing up and colonising the tabloid newspapers.

Judith quietly rolls her eyeballs at the Beckhamisation of football: the wives clamouring to be stars in their own right, the players dragging half-a-dozen toddlers in kits onto the pitch after big games.

And don't get her started on the libel case unsuccessfully brought by Rebekah Vardy against Coleen Rooney. She firmly believes that the circus has got out of hand.

It's a fact of football history that my second goal of the 1966 final was the most controversial in a century of World Cup tournaments.

The ball ricocheted down off the crossbar. Did it cross the line? I always say I'm the wrong person to ask as I was flat on my back, so I had the worst view in the stadium.

Today, there would be a camera in the stanchion of the goalpost that could determine if my goal against West Germany really was a goal.

The argument would be settled by technology and my life might have turned out very differently.

Of course, success on the football pitch is no defence against the difficulties of life.

In the years before and after our World Cup triumph, my teammates and I suffered our share of personal tragedy.

For Bobby Charlton and Nobby Stiles, there was the life-changing trauma of the Munich air disaster in which several young Manchester United players were killed.

Jimmy Greaves endured the loss of a baby son at less than six months.

Gordon Banks's disabled older brother was beaten up and died of his injuries in hospital.

Grief came my way in 1974 when my younger brother Robert committed suicide at 28.

Then, when she was pregnant with her first child, my daughter Claire began talking nonsense.

We knew something was seriously wrong. It turned out to be a brain tumour. After years of treatment, she died, aged 45.

Those sadnesses have taken decades to process. What has been almost as hard to bear is seeing several of my 1966 teammates, notably Jack Charlton, ravaged by dementia.

Though medical science has never conclusively proved as much, it is widely assumed that for footballers of my vintage, heading was the root of much evil.

The modern football may have many different designs, but it is uniform in weight and air pressure.

The old ball wasn't quite a pig's bladder, but it was made of absorbent, unlacquered leather that when wet would get heavier.

When Jeff Astle – who played in the 1970 World Cup – died in 2002 at the age of 59, the coroner found the cause of death to be repeated head traumas.

The verdict was death by industrial injury. In other words, football killed him.

The causal link between heading and dementia still hasn't been scientifically established, nor is there research about the specific impact of heading a heavily waterlogged leather ball, but the evidence of my teammates makes a strong case for the prosecution.

Jack, in particular, headed the ball almost as often as he kicked it.

So, I cherish the memory of the reunions we had while we were still mentally fit, even if we were starting to show our age.

The biggest and most important took place in 1985, after the Bradford stadium fire, which claimed the lives of 56 football fans. It was the first of the three big tragedies in the 1980s, succeeded by Heysel and Hillsborough.

A disaster appeal fund was set up and, to contribute to it, the entire England team from 1966 turned out at Leeds United's ground at Elland Road, 19 years on from our big day.

Our opponents, who generously flew in that morning, were a West German team containing seven of their World Cup players.

Our movement was slower and we were carrying a bit of timber around the midriff. Nobby played with his teeth in (he would take them out before games when we were younger).

Ray, after seven knee ops, trotted out for a five-minute cameo.

The Germans looked quite tasty and we were behind at half-time, but managed to end as 6–4 winners.

The match highlights on YouTube testify that the old skills were intact: Bobby was letting off missiles from distance, Bally scored with a crafty chip and Jack's long legs were still slide-tackling.

Oh, and I got a hat-trick.

Adapted from Last Boy of '66 by Sir Geoff Hurst (Ebury Publishing, £22), published on October 24. To order a copy for £18.70 (offer valid to November 2, UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.