Saturday the 14th November 1970 saw the arrival at Upton Park of fourth placed First Division rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers for a game that was to be played in torrential rain in front of a 23,978 crowd.
The fixture saw the return to the side of captain Bobby Moore who had missed the previous match with a hairline fracture of the big-toe on his right foot. Such was the Injury crisis at the time - there were 14 first-team players nursing injuries and thus unavailable for selection - that Bobby played with his toe encased in protective padding which required him to wear a size bigger boots than normal. As he explained afterwards, with a typical Mooro tongue-in-cheek comment: "The boots belonged to Billy Bonds (who happened to be serving a suspension at the time) and I had to move faster than usual to keep up with them !"
Perhaps the first remarkable incident to happen that afternoon was the fact that Bobby himself scored one of his rare- but always spectacular-goals. The second was that he scored from a shot hit with that borrowed boot on his injured RIGHT foot. With the score at 1 -1; Clyde Best had headed a brilliant equaliser in the 33rd minute from a Geoff Hurst cross; the ball was played back to the England maestro, following a goalmouth scramble, in the 50th minute. From fully 30-yards out Moore hit a fiercely stunning volley that caught Parkes, the Wolves goalkeeper, completely off-guard.
Some 24 minutes later, Best added his second, with another header from yet another Hurst centre, to give his side a 3-1 lead.
With ten minutes to go Wolves won a corner. From the resulting kick the ball was fired into the Hammers area but it was met by Bobby Moore who swiftly intercepted to head the ball away. His clearance flew straight into the face of referee Mr. John Gerrard Lewis who was standing virtually right in front of him. The referee was poleaxed by the force of the impact.
Mooro, often accused of being deadpan and unemotional by those who did not really know him, bent over to assist the official. Seeing Mr. Lewis unconscious, Bobby took his whistle from out of his hand, stood up in the correct referee's posture and blew it to halt the game. Bobby then called on the Hammers trainer - Rob Jenkins - to revive and tend to the dazed official who needed several minutes before he was able to restart the match.
When play finally did resume, it was the Hammers who seemed suddenly dazed. First Wolves striker, Jim McCalliog, crashed home a curving shot from the edge of the area and then with three minutes left a header rebounded off a post for Bobby Gould (who was to later join the Hammers) to sweep the ball home from close range to equalise. Suddenly the whole tempo of the game had changed and the final whistle could not come quickly enough for Moore and the Hammers who held on to salvage a point.
After the match Bobby shrugged off his whistle blowing action by simply saying: "It was just instinctive," but his manager, Ron Greenwood, paid him the following tribute: "Bobby has a sense of occasion. One of the secrets of his success is that he does the right thing at the right time."