How odd it seems – to be writing of the death of a man who embodied all the never-say-die qualities that the human spirit can produce. 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, and Ball was the youngest player in the squad. There is an old story about a pre-tournament conversation he had with the manager, Sir Alf Ramsey. 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, he came into his own.

Sometimes, when you walk a young dog, it seems that the dog has covered about 50 times more ground that you have yourself. 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: almost an out-of-body experience.

For in that last, fateful half-hour, Ball was a man beside himself, stoned to the eyeballs on team spirit and the desire to win. And it was that spirit that made all the difference: a small ginger-headed figure – not that we could see the ginger in black and white – with his socks rolled down round his ankles like a mad caricature of Blake’s Glad Day, romping around the grass of Wembley like a Jack Russell.

It was a time that forever defined him, despite a distinguished club career and a gloriously turbulent 19 years in management. 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.

He was not a temperate man, as you might have guessed from 1966. He was 21 then, and a man of unsnubbable enthusiasm. He was involved in the last three goals that England scored on that never-to-be-forgotten occasion. He won and took the corner from which Martin Peters scored England’s second.

In extra time, after Ramsey had said: “You’ve won it once. Now go out and win it again,” Ball set up the famous third with the run of a man fresh as a daisy while his opponents could scarcely drag one foot after another in those substitute-free days. It was from his cross that Geoff Hurst scored the goal that hit the underside of the crossbar. (It was, of course, a legitimate goal. Roger Hunt, in pole position to tap in the rebound, instead wheeled away in triumph, knowing beyond all doubt that the ball had crossed the line.)

And even as Hurst powered towards goal for that last they-think-it’s-all-over goal, there was Ball alongside screaming for a pass that never came. That was his finest hour – well, his finest half-hour – and it came when he was 21. He spent the rest of life in its shadow, but so what? Few people have 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.

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