Watersplash. A famous name for a famous game.

In hindsight, Saturday, 11 May 1968 would have entered rugby league folklore anyway. As the dark skies opened high above Wembley's old twin towers, producing freak conditions more suited to water polo than rugby, no one had ever seen anything like it.

Come kick-off, great pools of water covered the pitch. The players, trying doggedly to beat the elements, aquaplaned through puddles the size of Lake Windermere.

The saturated and slippery ball went to ground with frustrating regularity, where it stuck stubbornly to the sodden surface like a crouton on soup. On any other day, the match would have been postponed. This, though, was the Challenge Cup final.

London's Empire Stadium was booked and paid for. Some 87,100 paying customers, including fans of the competing teams, Leeds and Wakefield Trinity, had made their pilgrimage south for their sport's annual day in the sun.

The journalists were in the press-box, the commentators at their microphones. And nationwide thanks to the presence of the Grandstand BBC TV cameras – their 11th year of covering the event – a television audience of millions sat waiting in their living rooms. Torrential rain or no torrential rain, the show must go on.

In such atrocious conditions, it was a miracle that the teams put on as entertaining a show as they did. In terms of open, running rugby, the game was by no means a classic – how could it be? – but the performance of one particular player stood head and shoulders above the rest.

His name was Don Fox, as tenacious and versatile a footballer as ever pulled on boots, with skills forged in the small West Yorkshire coal-mining village of Sharlston.

Though his 32-year-old legs had seen better days, Fox gave a towering display that belied the extreme conditions, prodding and cajoling his team-mates towards what should have been a famous victory.

His tactical kicking and organising influence put Leeds time and again on the back foot. Indeed, so heroic was his contribution that he was awarded the Lance Todd Trophy as man of the match. Then, as the seconds ticked down on a remarkable contest, came an incident that would both unfairly define the career of Don Fox and produce one of televised sport's most memorable commentary moments.

Trailing 11-7, Wakefield closed to within a point of Leeds with a second try by Ken Hirst, who capitalised on an error by Bernard Watson to hack a loose ball towards the posts and beat Bev Risman, John Atkinson and the rest to score.

The winning conversion and an astonishing 12–11 victory were a formality, surely. Yet fate had one more trick up her soggy, mud-spattered sleeve.

Looking down from the heights of the Wembley commentary box, and trying to make sense of it all for the viewing public at home, is Eddie Waring.

"Forty minutes gone and if he kicks this goal... some of the Leeds players won't dare look," says Eddie. "It's not a hard shot, but it's always a hard shot when the match depends on it.

"And in this weather, he is taking all the time in the world because he's allowed to kick it, he (the referee) can't blow time until he's kicked it. It's all on the goal. What a grandstand finish this is." And then, as the ball, horrifyingly, is sliced wide: "He's missed it, he's missed it! He's on the ground... he's missed it! Well, and there goes the whistle for time. What a dramatic... everybody's got their head in their hands... and he's sure in tears, he's in tears is the poor lad."

Later that same year, in an interview in the Sunday Times, Eddie recalled: "I just shouted at the top of my voice, 'He's missed it'. And then straight away I said, 'The poor lad'.

"Now at a moment like that I could have said anything. I could have said he was a clot or he was anything stupid. But I just came out with 'poor lad' and I think that's because I reckon I am not a bad sort of bloke. I was giving a decent bloke's reaction."

Certainly, Waring's instant empathy was appreciated by those closest to Fox himself. 'His brother, Neil, called Don all the names under the sun,' said Eddie, in a Radio Times interview some 13 years later, 'but when he rang home, obviously in tears, his sister and mother said, "Well, don't worry, you've got all the sympathy of the village, because Eddie Waring said, 'poor lad'. We all felt sorry for you and we cried."

Soccer has Kenneth Wolstenholme's 'they think it's all over'; rugby league has Eddie Waring's 'poor lad'.

On the back of just a few seconds of off-the-cuff live commentary, for Eddie Waring an already productive career path took an even more astonishing turn. In tandem with a then little-known show called 'It's a Knockout', in which Eddie had begun to appear as a judge the year before, Watersplash set forth the wave that would carry Eddie to the light-entertainment heavens.

In hindsight, of course, Eddie Waring's incomparable commentary style was always likely to attract attention. How could it not? For one thing, there was his distinctly odd way with proper nouns, wherein unnecessary emphasis would be placed on the final syllable – WarringTON – as though that was the point at which he was no longer fearful his false teeth would drop out.

Then there were the gaps, the hesitations, the yelps of excitement, the rolling of consonants and the strangling of vowels, as in his trademark 'Rrrrregby leeeggga' or, putting one in mind of a camel-coated Tony the Tiger, 'Grrrrreeeeaaat BrrrrrrriTAIN'. To Eddie, although rules should be explained for the uninitiated, dry tactical analysis and statistics were best avoided, with an emphasis on player personalities and small human stories to the fore.

Eddie himself always insisted that the idea of rattling off light-hearted tales of players' hobbies and family lives did not come along until later. "I do remember one match and it was terrible; nothing happening," he once told an interviewer.

"And I thought of all these millions watching. I could see them turning off the sets and somehow or other I started making comments about the game, perhaps humorously, and it came off."

There are sports commentators and sports commentators; and then there is Eddie Waring.

Just how does a writer get that extraordinary voice down on the page? Words like 'unique' and 'peculiar' scarcely do it justice, and though many a journalist has tried down the years, most have failed to get anywhere close to capturing its idiosyncratic rhythms.

Using varying degrees of creativity, the majority of feature writers have charted a path between imagination and cliché, with results guaranteed to raise the hackles of the most thick-skinned northern Englander.

Writing in the Daily Express, for example, Geoffrey Mather declared: "To the five basic vowel sounds of the English language, Mr Edward Marsden Waring has added several more of his own choosing," before adding, "they all trip readily from his lips equipped with tiny clogs."

Arthur Hopcraft, in the Sunday Times Magazine, heard Eddie's dulcet Yorkshire tones as a "West Riding coarse weave, flecked with strands of pulpit oratory, alternately emphatic and neglectful with aspirates, a thing of substance and attraction."

In the Express & Star, Gerry Anderson said that while Eddie had dismantled the English language into a large heap of syllables, "he has rebuilt it nearer to the heart's desire, screwing the pieces together into memorable Meccano phrases, and despatching kangaroo sentences that flow and pounce and lurch'.

For this writer, while there is something in all of the above, it is The Listener columnist Jack Waterman who comes closest to finding the Eddie Waring so often lost in translation.

Weighing up the Waring style, Waterman decided that "there is a cartoon element... accentuated by the indefatigable bounce of the delivery, and the voice – with the random harvest of aitches and odd mispronunciations – that sounds like a good, earthy turn from the old Argyll, Birkenhead, trying to be slightly pound-noteish."

And there the thing is in a nutshell. For, whatever else it is, Eddie Waring's accent is by no means your traditionally flat and dour West Yorkshire monotone.

In and amidst all those unexpected verbal tics, mixed metaphors and offbeat nuances, lurching along as if pitched on the waves of a faulty tuning fork, tonsils clanging back and forth like the clapper on an old chapel bell, is the unmistakable twang of social aspiration.

This is a voice clad in its Sunday best. It rises and falls like the Dewsbury hills of Eddie's boyhood. Its tones are those of a run out to Ilkley or Harrogate and afternoon eclairs in Betty's tea shop, of excitable, yapping little Yorkshire terriers and what Alan Bennett's class-conscious 'mam' might well have described as having "a bit too much off."

It is the heightened and almost feminine sound of essential decency, dignity and harmless decorum, and of a perhaps subconscious yearning for escape. Maybe that's why all those middle-aged ladies in Brighton and Basingstoke loved Eddie so much. Rare was the newspaper feature that did not, in its opening few paragraphs, allude to Eddie Waring's appeal in areas of British society where such a rough, tough activity as rugby league might not more widely be expected to thrive.

Being Eddie Waring by Tony Hannan is published by Mainstream Publishing (Edinburgh) Ltd. Save £2 on published price of £14.99. Yorkshire Post readers' price is £12.99 plus p&p £2.75. To order your copy ring 0800 0153232. To order by post send a cheque/postal order made payable to Yorkshire Post Bookshop. Send to Yorkshire Books Ltd, 1 Castle Hill, Richmond DL10.