How odd it seems – to be writing of the death of a man who, of all the people in sport, embodied the spirit of never-say-die. Alan Ball in extra time: it has become an archetypal image, that of the man who refuses to accept everyone else’s reality and creates his own in a wild frenzy of action. It was the World Cup final of 1966, England were playing West Germany and Ball was the youngest player in the squad. He is the second of the boys of ’66 to die, after Bobby Moore, the captain. There is an old story about a pretournament conversation Ball had with Alf Ramsey, the manager. Having established, by a series of pedantic questions, that Ball owned a dog, threw a tennis ball for the dog and the dog fetched the ball back to him, Ramsey said: “That’s what I want you to do for Bobby Charlton.” Ball did that with a will throughout the tournament, but right at the end, when it really mattered, he seized the occasion as his own.

Sometimes, when you walk a young dog, it seems that the dog has covered about 50 times more ground than you have – an extraordinary, incomprehensible level of energy and commitment. That was Ball in extra time. It was not just the kind of energy that comes from a fit young body; there was something demented about it, something almost ecstatic. It was like witnessing an out-of-body experience.

For in that last, fateful half-hour of that final, Ball was a man beside himself, stoned to the eyeballs on team spirit, the desire to win and every other little thing that football can do to a man’s mind. That was what made the difference that day. It centred on a small, ginger-haired figure – not that we could see the ginger in black and white – with his socks rolled down round his ankles, a mad caricature of Blake’s Glad Day, romping around Wembley like a Jack Russell.

It was an afternoon that forever defined him. Of course, there was a distinguished club career, which was followed by a gloriously turbulent 19 years in management, but it was that afternoon, and in particular that half-hour of extra time, that gave us the essence of Ball and with it the essence of hope. England, leading 2-1, conceded an equaliser in the final seconds. It was a setback that would have destroyed many a footballer; it was the making of Ball.

I met him just the once and found a man who, like Tommy Docherty, loved to talk on any subject, which was always football. He was briefly in tears as his passion caught him routinely unawares. But then he was not a temperate man, as you might have guessed from 1966.

He was 21 in that year and a man of unsnubbale enthusiasm. He was involved in the last three goals that England scored in that extraordinary final. He won and took the corner from which Martin Peters scored England’s second and until that dreadful last-second equaliser, it had looked to be the winner. But it was when the winner had been cancelled out and extra time began that we saw Ball as he really was.

Ramsey said: “You’ve won it once. Now go out and win it again.” Ball took that as a personal mission. He set up the famous third with the run of a man fresh as a daisy, while all around his opponents could scarcely drag one foot after the other. It was from his cross that Geoff Hurst scored the goal that went in after hitting the underside of the crossbar.

Still it continued. Kenneth Wolstenholme, commentator for the BBC, said unforgettably: “Alan Ball is running himself daft.” Wisdom in daftness. And even as Hurst powered towards the West Germany area for that last, “they think it’s all over” goal, there was Ball alongside screaming for a pass that never came. He might have run forever, that day. That was his finest hour – well, to be accurate, it was his finest half-hour. It came when he was 21 and he spent the rest of life in its shadow – but so what? Few people have ever had a half-hour quite so fine as that.

No causes are lost, no injustices need be accepted, nothing is impossible, the more you ask of yourself the more you can find, the more difficult the task before you, the greater your resources for dealing with it. That was Alan Ball in extra time: a sporting archetype, a sporting image not only for extra but for all time.