Chasing Ronnie Radford
I wasn't even born when he scored that goal against Newcastle, yet in many ways I feel like I was there
We were all impressionable youths. There are some things we come across in our childhoods that are destined not just to shape who we are, but to never leave us. Like that first pocket-money purchased album that you forced yourself to love with an onslaught of repeat listens, or the comedic dialogue that first made you lose control of your internal organs with laughter. They are embedded and mostly dormant, always accessible via a single neural pathway right up until our faculties do one and abandon our fragile human skeleton. Goals have that power too, and there are some that transcend our mere personal favourites and bind us all. If the congregation would please rise and join us in today’s reading:
‘There’s tremendous spirit in this Hereford side, they’re not giving this up by any means. Radford. Now Tudor’s gone down for Newcastle. Radford again…oh, what a goal! WHAT. A. GOAL! Radford the scorer! Ronnie Radford! And the crowd…the crowd are invading the pitch…and now it will take some time to clear the field.’
John, 71:72
On a brisk afternoon in Herefordshire fifty years ago, Ronnie Radford scored the most important goal in the history of English football. To date no spurious equation has been invented (please, don’t) that can be used to masquerade as empirical proof of this claim, but it passes the scales test. When you weigh in everything that Radford’s goal has going for it – the strike itself, the context, the back story, the cultural value and hell, just how good it makes you feel – it’s impossible to find one that can achieve equilibrium with the Exocet from non-league Hereford United’s humbling of the mighty Newcastle United on 5 February 1972.
The purity of the hit alone is astonishing, given how awkwardly the Mitre ball bobbled into Radford’s path. On that pudding of a pitch, and with just five minutes left, Radford roused his knackered legs and launched the ball into the top corner from some 25 yards out with his right foot. The camera operator maps the flight of the ball perfectly to its destination, like a nature documentary tracking a flock of migrating birds. The air of inevitability about Radford’s shot going in from the moment it left his foot is wonderfully captured by the BBC commentator John Motson, who calls the goal before the ball has beaten the flailing arms of Newcastle goalkeeper Willie McFaul.
The goal would win the BBC’s goal of the season award for 1971-72, with Motson’s memorable commentary launching his fledgling career into orbit and on course to his status as a national treasure. The ensuing celebration of it, then and now, is also instructive of Britain’s innate desire to root for the underdog. The tall poppy to be taken down was not so much Newcastle but their cocksure striker Malcolm Macdonald, who held up ten fingers to the crowd before kick-off to back up a boast he’d made in the media regarding how many he expected to score that day. By contrast Radford’s own story is heartily infused with everyman pluck. As a teenager he was released by Leeds United in the early sixties, missing out on their halcyon days under Don Revie and going on to carve out a career as a part-time player in mostly non-league football, supplemented by working as a carpenter and a joiner.
Radford’s goal cancelled out Macdonald’s opener three minutes earlier, and it was left to substitute Ricky George – the Buzz Aldrin of that landmark day – to seal one of the great FA Cup shocks in history in extra-time. Hereford’s victory conforms perfectly to a narrative which is heartily consumed by the public every January; this is the magic of the FA Cup, and anything is possible. That’s a nice idea, but it’s evidently not true. The infrequency of such seismic upsets is what makes them register so powerfully. Hereford’s victory was the first by a non-league team over a top division side in the FA Cup since Yeovil turned over Sunderland 23 years earlier. There have only been a further five since then.
Yet Radford’s goal has a symbolic value far beyond the confines of the FA Cup and English football. The footage of this goal is a priceless cultural artefact, and a window into a Britain that has disappeared. Even though the match takes place in rural Herefordshire, it smacks of Britain’s industrial decline in the 1970s. Trudging through that Edgar Street allotment looks brutally tiring even from a distance of half a century, a gritted teeth struggle that could scarcely have been a more apt metaphor for life. The February sky is grim and brooding, and what faded green there is on the pitch is offset by the freeway of churned soil right down the centre of it. Hereford are in white shirts, while Newcastle are in their blood red away kit; both sets of players are splattered in mud.
The drabness of colour is most starkly evident in the clothing of the crowd, a collage of dreary browns, greens and greys punctuated by black and white Hereford scarves. Britain was a far more monocultural society then, with two channel television and free of the neon blizzard of advertising that characterised the decade that followed. Nothing hammers this point home more than the wild, uncontained joy of the pitch invasion that pursues Radford as he runs around Edgar Street with his arms in the air, his shrunk-in-the-wash shirt creeping up his torso to reveal his belly. The throng is composed almost entirely of primary and secondary school kids, all kitted out uniformly in the same make of parka jacket.
Motson’s evocation of the goal and its aftermath is glorious, as he shifts in a heartbeat from someone in the throes of ecstatic nirvana to an officious health and safety officer anxious to get the game restarted. The rawness of the emotion on the pitch in that moment cannot be overstated. For the town of Hereford that match – a highly anticipated replay after a 2-2 draw at St James’ Park – was an event, history being written in front of their eyes. The stands were heaving, with some fans even occupying vantage points in the floodlight pylons and high up in the branches of leafless trees outside Edgar Street. Radford’s goal doesn’t just remind us why we love this game, but why we need it. You can learn far more about English football, English culture and England generally from Radford’s goal than any of the three scored by Geoff Hurst in the 1966 World Cup Final.
As a nation, our longstanding inability to appreciate the cultural worth of football is an embarrassment. It wasn’t until 1998 that the sport was given a national museum, a telling comment on arts funding in this country and the schools and universities attended by those doling out the grants. As a vehicle for telling current and future generations the story of working class life in industrial era Britain, football has few equals. Television and pop music also suffer from this ingrained cultural snobbery. It’s horrifying to think of the ground-breaking broadcasts and programmes that had their documentation tossed into the ether with their value unrecognised, while scores of Britain’s legendary gig venues have made way for city centre gentrification rather than be retained as listed buildings. What on earth does it say about us as a country that we filled in the original Cavern Club to make way for a transport link?
Thankfully Radford’s goal endured and has ingrained itself in popular culture. It became part of the Match of the Day title sequences for a time, was a no-brainer inclusion on the seminal 101 Great Goals tape for the VHS generation and is wheeled out year after year by the BBC as, with decreasing success, they run the defibrillators over a competition that has been circling the drain for years. It’s on YouTube any time you need a pick-me-up; there’s also a view of the goal from another angle, the first experience of which is like stepping into an alternate universe.
Although Radford’s goal is a time capsule, it’s true greatness is that it is timeless. However much the football authorities tweak with the rules of this game, the visceral thrill of watching a player roof one from distance will never fade. Moreover, although it is as evocative of its time as glam rock and Wagon Wheels, it now belongs to us all, both ephemeral and everlasting. Part of me will always want to throw on a parka jacket and sprint back through the decades in muddy pursuit of Ronnie Radford, although in doing so I’d have to leave the boundaries of my own existence. Radford’s goal flew into the net a good five years and change before I was born, so effectively I’d be appropriating the youth of the tail end of the baby boom generation. I wasn’t there, man; but in many ways, I feel like I was.