It was destiny for Roger Hunt to live a life less ordinary. During the course of an emotional service at Liverpool cathedral, we learnt how his mother, Ellen, believed greatness would come her son’s way after a remarkable incident as a little boy.
When Hunt was four, he became obsessed with football. He would practice with a tennis ball around his family home in Golbourne, Lancashire, but one day he kicked it out of the front door, chased after it and ran straight into the path of an oncoming bus.
‘Miraculously, he only had bruises,’ Bill Bygroves, Liverpool’s club chaplain, told a congregation that had come to pay its respects to one of English football’s giants.