English football is forever trapped in a moment, and returns to that moment endlessly, and can't get over it, and can't get enough of it, and broods about that moment as if it were a lost lover, seething with regret, wondering if the moment could ever come again.

Wembley Stadium, late in the afternoon of 30 July 1966. The sky is clear after summer rain. In their unfamiliar red shirts, the England team hoists their young captain onto their shoulders. In his right fist is the World Cup. On his face is a smile that lights up a decade, a sport, a nation. Bobby Moore of West Ham United, 25 years old and in his triumphant prime, the England captain with the Jules Rimet trophy in one hand, and sunshine on his golden curls.

Bobby Moore would never again reach such heroic heights.

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But then neither would England. In the old photographs, it feels as if you are always looking up at Bobby Moore. In the white shirt of England, in the claret and blue of West Ham, photographers tended to shoot Bobby from below, against a blue sky to emphasise his heroic status. But Bobby Moore - English football's ultimate hero - was a greater hero than we ever knew. For, less than two years before England won the World Cup, at just 23 years of age, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

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November 1964. Bobby Moore's heavily pregnant, 22-year-old wife Tina turned over in bed, suddenly pressing against him, and he woke up, screaming. "You can't ignore it any longer," his wife told him. “You have to see a doctor. You have to know."

Until this moment, their life had been a dream. Earlier in the year, Moore was voted the youngest ever Footballer of the Year by the Football Writers' Association. In May, in possibly the greatest FA Cup final of all time, Moore led West Ham to victory over Preston, the Irons twice coming from behind and grabbing the winner in the dying seconds of injury time. Moore was the poster boy of English football. But suddenly everything was on the line. His career. His health. His life.

“Bobby had been in that dark place before Lance Armstrong was even born," wrote Tina in her autobiography. “In many ways it was more devastating. In those days cancer was something you just didn't mention, a taboo word, a fearful prospect. All I could think was — he's only 23 and he's been handed his death warrant."

“A training injury," said the club physiotherapist of the crippling pain in his groin. “It will wear off." But it did not wear off, and 24 hours after waking up in agony, Moore was on the operating table, having a testicle removed.

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From the start to the end, Bobby and Tina Moore never mentioned the word cancer. It was an age in which celebrities did not speak openly about fighting disease. No talk-show confessionals, no inspirational books, no mention of illness, or the raw courage it took to fight and beat it.

“Don’t tell anyone what I'm in here for," Moore told his wife as he was admitted to hospital.

He did not know if he would live or die. He did not know if he would ever play football again. Tina said, "What had happened struck at his livelihood, his masculinity, his very existence on the planet." Returning from hospital, the young husband and wife held each other, watched Top Of The Pops, and cried their eyes out.

Cancer kept Bobby Moore out of the game for just three months. Three months! These days footballers have longer out for twisting the cruciate ligaments in their poor little knees. The following year, Moore captained West Ham when they beat TSV Munich 1860 in the European Cup Winners' Cup final at Wembley. And one year after that, he was holding aloft the World Cup.

His wife, who met him at the Ilford Palais in Essex when she was 15 and he was 16, summed him up for all time with the three little words that went through her head as her 25-year-old husband held aloft that World Cup. Only she – and his doctors and nurses – knew that in just 18 months Bobby Moore had gone from a desperate fight against cancer to the eternal glory of that summer's day in 1966.

"What a man," she thought. "What a man."

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For five years, all through the peak of his career, Bobby Moore had regular checkups, and waited for the cancer to come back. Every ache and pain felt like the rumour of his premature death. But the public never knew about Moore's cancer until long after his death, when the disease — cancer of the colon this time – claimed him at the age of 51. Yet there were clues.

When he was in remission, there were blue crosses on Moore's back, so his radiotherapist would miss his kidneys. Yet nobody ever said a thing.

Almost unbelievably, no journalist ever asked Bobby or Tina Moore about the real reason for those three months out of the game. In Moore's lifetime, his greatest triumph of all, that successful battle against cancer as a 23-year-old, would never be spoken of.

Already private and guarded, Moore became even more isolated after the cancer. In that world of communal baths, he bathed alone. The word got around that he had lost a testicle in a training injury, but it was never really the subject of gossip, or dressing room levity. For there was something about Bobby Moore – a reserve, a poise, a seriousness – that did not encourage locker-room banter. And he was hard. With his blond hair, blue eyes and dimples, he had the face of a Botticelli angel, but the body of a bare-knuckle fighter. He may have looked like a film star, but Bobby Moore was made of East End concrete.

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Even on that summer's day in 1966, Bobby Moore seems somehow apart from his team-mates. Bobby Charlton in tears. Nobby Stiles cavorting. Many of them are overwhelmed with exhaustion and emotion. And yet even at that great shining moment, Bobby Moore is immaculate, composed, as though climbing this Everest was a walk in the park. There is no mistaking that broad, dimpled grin, and the pure joy of the moment, and yet, unlike the rest of the boys of '66, Bobby Moore does not seem overcome.

“He wasn't like us,” said Jackie Charlton. “He was one of us but he wasn't like us."

That composure recalls the way he performed the classic Moore tackle – down on one knee, stealing the ball with the other foot, the perfection of his timing uncanny. Or the way he broke up an attack by chesting the ball down, then looking up and around and biding his time before finally releasing the ball – as he did to set off Geoff Hurst for that fourth and final goal in the 1966 World Cup final.

From one end of the Sixties to the other, Bobby Moore was always in complete control.

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Bobby Moore was from the other side of the Sixties. The Sixties of suits and ties, of always looking smart, always looking clean. Moore liked the sharp, lean lines of the mod look, and later Turnbull & Asser shirts, and big, fat Windsor knots in his ties. But if you were from this side of the Sixties, you would not be ready to grow your hair for another ten years. Moore finally grew it in the Seventies, but it never really worked with his tight, blond curls. Born in 1941, the Sixties coincided almost exactly with his twenties, and they were his time.

Long hair didn't suit him. Neither did the Seventies.

Moore came from the side of the Sixties that believed in gin and tonic, not LSD and bombers, early marriage and children, not groupies and sexual experimentation. Bobby Moore floated through the Sixties on a river of alcohol, but it was hedonism from the old school. His was the Sixties of enduring respect, of happily dipping your head to your monarch. When Bobby Moore climbed the steps of Wembley Stadium to receive the World Cup, he noticed that the Queen was wearing long, white gloves, and so he wiped his sweaty, muddy hands on the velvet lining of the royal box. In that moment of deference to his Queen, Moore looks like an English hero who has more in common with Wellington and Nelson than he does with any footballer of our own time.

But it was another age. The West Ham trio of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters that won the World Cup all lived in suburban Essex, a few miles from each other, a few miles from Upton Park. Even when they were being shot for Vogue, Tina Moore thought of herself as a “Gants Hill housewife".

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How impossibly down-home it all seems now. After winning the World Cup, the celebration dinner was at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington High Street, London. The wives were not invited, and the WAGs hadn't been invented. The wives – most of those young men in their twenties were already married, already fathers – were fed in the Bulldog Chophouse in another part of the hotel. “It was stag," says Tina Moore.

She met her husband at midnight and they went to the Playboy Club on Park Lane. Burt Bacharach asked Victor Lownes, Hugh Hefner's right-hand man in London, to introduce him to the young England captain. Then young Mr and Mrs Moore went home to Gants Hill in Essex. Bobby Moore was restless the next day, couldn't settle to anything. Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero, mowed his lawn.

These were the early days of corporate sponsorship. Ford Motors gave the Moores an Escort, but it had a picture of a cartoon lion, World Cup Willie, the leering mascot of 1966, on the side, so they never went anywhere in it. And yet, for all the ordinariness of their home life, Bobby Moore became a global superstar on that summer's day in 1966, and for the rest of his days, although there would be disappointments and money worries and failure, he would always be fêted as a true hero.

“You don't often hear a man described as beautiful," said Tina Moore in her book - about her ex-husband. “But that's what Bobby was – he looked like a young god who happened to play football. He was a complicated young god.”

The footballers of the Premier League make more in a year than Bobby Moore made in a lifetime. And yet it feels as though every one of them is living in his shadow. Who ever looked better in Vogue than Bobby Moore? Whoever came anywhere near what he achieved on that summer's day in 1966? Whoever looked more perfect for the role that history had chosen him for?

What was true of Elvis Presley is equally true of Bobby Moore. Before anyone did anything, Bobby Moore did everything.

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The one lasting side-effect of that first bout of cancer was an insomnia that stayed with him for the rest of his life. As Swinging Sixties England danced until dawn, or watched Ken Dodd and then went to bed, Bobby Moore slipped out of his striped pyjamas, got dressed, and wandered the streets of Essex all night.

After the World Cup, his life went from the back page to the front page. And yet there was a part of Bobby Moore that was always unreachable, and his wife said that he hid, "behind a wall of politeness". Moore was rarely impressed by the celebrities he met, apart from his brief meeting with his idol Frank Sinatra, and the photo of them together shows Bobby looking as starstruck as any young West Ham fan in the presence of their golden captain.

Like Sinatra, Moore was the only child of working-class parents. He lacked for everything, apart from all the things that matter, and grew up with a belief that he could do anything. Bobby Moore had a mother who ironed his football laces, and perhaps these torrents of unconditional love got him from the testicular cancer in 1964 to the World Cup in 1966.

In Barking they played their football in the streets – there were no cars – and it was here that Moore honed his curiously erect, ramrod-straight style. Terry Venables, friend and neighbour, remembered, “You had to learn to stay on your feet on concrete."

Didier Drogba would have been fucked. Moore was always aspirational – he did not have the laughably fake posh accent of Sir Alf Ramsey (in reality another East End boy), and yet his was not quite a cockney accent. Moore was well spoken, as they said in those East End/Essex borderlands. So was his wife. The child of an ambitious single mother, and the only girl in Dagenham with a pair of riding britches, Tina had had elocution lessons, and the young couple's hunger to better themselves chimed perfectly. The young Bobby Moore discovered and tore through smoked salmon, French cheese and Italian wine as though they were conquered countries. “He always had lovely manners," remembered Tina. “It was in-built. But it became more polished. He watched people."

He was obsessively professional. He could drink them all under the table, even his hard-living mates George Best and Jimmy Greaves, but Moore was fanatical about his fitness, and always ran off the extra calories the day after. He was pathologically tidy about the house, a cushion straightener, meticulous in his habits. He was fastidious – when he put on his trousers in a dressing room, he stood on the bench. When he went into a bar, he would count out 12 peanuts, and eat no more and no less. It is the kind of discipline that made Moore a world-beater.

Moore was envied and loved even by the playboys, the bad lads, the other great ones. It wasn't the medals. It was the way Bobby Moore carried himself. George Best said, “If I could wish for my son to turn out like someone, it would be Bobby Moore. He had no flaws. On the pitch he was immaculate.

He was great with kids. It's a special quality. Knowing you're something special and yet not acting like you're something special."

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Bobby Moore's legend rests on 642 matches for West Ham, and three successful appearances at Wembley — the FA Cup final of 1964, the victory in the European Cup Winners' Cup final in 1965, when West Ham beat 1860 Munich, and then that summer's day in 1966. If the rest of his life was an anticlimax, then how could it be anything else?

He collected his OBE at Buckingham Palace in 1967, he had a part in Hollywood's attempt at football, Hero: The Bobby Moore Story, he rode in a Rolls-Royce. Everyone wanted to shake his hand, everyone wanted to meet him. But there were money worries, and they never really went away.

In the 1975 FA Cup final, Moore's new club Fulham lined up against West Ham United. At the end, when West Ham had run out easy winners, Moore comforted his team-mate Alan Mullery, who looked crushed by defeat. In contrast, Moore seemed relaxed, philosophical, even happy. It wasn't that he didn't care. But he did not look flattened, as he had when the West Germans knocked England out of the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. After the heights he had scaled, and the battles that he had fought, a loser's medal in his thirties must have seemed not like a tragedy, but like some small bonus.

And yet there were many more senior matches to play at Craven Cottage, and decades of bad business deals, unhappy shots at small-time management and, a year before their silver wedding anniversary, divorce from Tina. Moore – always a sex symbol but never a womaniser – fell in love with an airline stewardess called Stephanie Parlane-Moore. He married her a little over a year before his death on 24 February 1993.

The football writer, Chris Lightbown, said of Moore, “His death made you feel as though you had lost contact with a better time. A more certain time. A time when good beat bad. A time when better values probably prevailed. A time that was more straightforward. A time that was cleaner. Because he had all of that. And he personified all of that. He cut across class in a way that not many people do in this country."

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Bobby Moore was the perfect England captain, because he embodied the best of England – dignity, restraint, and a quiet kind of courage. He had the strength that never needs to raise its voice. He was as hard as teak, and yet there was a genuine gentleness about him. His son and his daughter adored him. All children adored him.

At one point in the Sixties, every woman in the land wanted to go to bed with him and yet for the best years of his life he remained a devoted family man. His wife once took off Michael Caine's glasses just to confirm that, just as she had suspected, Moore was in fact much more handsome than the young movie star.

Bobby Moore was down to earth and yet he was a hero. At the dawn of our age of cut-price fame and increasingly disposable celebrity, Moore was the real and unforgettable thing. He was loved, truly loved, by millions of people who had never met him. And we miss him still.

There are monuments to Bobby Moore. A statue at Upton Park and another at Wembley Stadium. But the real monument to Bobby Moore is the love and affection and hope that he still inspires in the hearts of every English football fan.

And if that is his monument, then his epitaph is the thought that rang in the head of his 24-year-old wife as she watched him hold up the World Cup on that lost summer's day. What a man.

Watch Tina and Bobby on ITV at 9pm, 13 January