England 1966: From the North Korean 'Dentist' that left Italy numb to Hurst's controversial goal

Bill Smith and Ben James (dpa)

England striker Geoffrey Hurst, still a newcomer to the team, managed a hat-trick in his team’s 4-2 win over Germany in the final that was played at Wembley. But it was his second goal – England’s third, in extra time – that made the Germans particularly bitter, when Soviet linesman Tofik Bakhramov ruled that the ball had crossed the goal line after bouncing off the bottom of the crossbar.

"Was it a goal? Did the ball cross the line?” the former West Ham United striker Hurst asked himself in his book 1966 and All That. “Those two questions have haunted me for most of my adult life.”

"It's a controversy that will follow me to the grave," wrote Hurst, who received a knighthood from British Queen Elizabeth II in November 1988 and is now officially called Sir Geoff.Indeed, Hurst acknowledges the controversy around his goal.

"Having listened to all the arguments over the decades and watched the replay hundreds of times on TV, I have to admit that it looks as though the ball didn't cross the line,” he said.

"Until someone proves otherwise, I'm happy to go along with Herr Dienst and Bakhramov," he said of the referee and the linesman involved in the controversy.

The greatest feats are often built around a very thin line and an extremely fortunate coincidence.

England’s greatest football hour was to come from a coach who had not been first choice for the job, from tactics that were only fully developed after the start of the World Cup, and from a striker who had started the tournament on the bench.

England were a competitive team, one that was hard to beat and that aspired to the title, but they were regarded as “efficient rather than inspired.” Teams like Argentina, Pele’s Brazil, Uwe Seeler’s Germany and Eusebio’s Portugal seemed to have greater quality.

Italy, who had by then won two World Cups, were regarded as the clear candidates to lift the trophy. And no one counted on Pak Do Ik.

The North Korean is now a retired printing house employee, with glasses and white hair. However, he still recalls with great excitement his time as a footballer and, above all, his moment of glory, when he earned the nickname “The Dentist" precisely for all the pain he caused Italy.

In 1966, he and his team-mates in the North Korean football team stood in awe of their bigger, richer and more famous Italian opponents as some 28,000 people waited to watch the game in Middlesbrough.

Facing superstars like Gianni Rivera and Sandro Mazzola, who could enjoy the celebrity lifestyle of the Swinging Sixties, the North Koreans admit they were "a bit frightened" of what would happen in their group match.

However, the fears proved unfounded as right winger Pak's goal sealed a 1-0 victory that remains one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history.

The British press hailed the North Koreans' win as a "fairy story", with one newspaper calling it a "bigger disaster for Italy than the fall of the Roman Empire". North Korea went on to the next round, and Italy got to pack their bags.

"At that time, Italy was the biggest team in the world - two times World Cup winners," Pak said. "That is why the memory can never be erased."

The fairy tale continued when the North Koreans moved to Liverpool for a World Cup quarter-final match against Portugal. Astonishingly, they went 3-0 up in just 23 minutes. But four-goal Eusebio inspired Portugal to one of the greatest World Cup comebacks, as they tore apart North Korea to win 5-3.

"That is very regrettable," Pak said of the game against Portugal in 1966. "If we had organized better, we could have gone through."

The unknowns from Kim Il Sung's secretive Stalinist state had arrived in Britain just 13 years after the end of the Korean War, a tough conflict that tore the peninsula in two. From then on, they were to relinquish football presence to their South Korean neighbours, and North Korea would not return to a World Cup until South Africa 2010.

The old Ayresome Park stadium in Middlesbrough was demolished to give way to a housing estate when the city club moved to the modern Riverside in the late 1990s. However, the new construction retained a mark precisely on the spot where Pak hit the shot that made him famous.