When I was six years old in 1972 my parents moved with us from Zimbabwe, where they'd gone after they'd married at the end of the Fifties, back to England. We exchanged the bright sun and open horizons of Southern Africa for the enclosed spaces and cloudy skies of England, and Nottingham in our particular case.
In return, the great gift I was given was English football. Such an exciting and colourful world for a young boy in the early Seventies. But in order to properly gain entry of course I first needed to assign myself to a team. Inspired by the football cards that you used to get in bubble gum packets in those days I chose Newcastle United, while my older brothers plumped for Leeds United and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Newcastle were my pick, I think because of their strip, the romance of their name and not least because of the tremendous sideburns of their marauding centre forward Malcolm McDonald.
They were a fair to middling First Division team at this point who generally had a couple of results a season to shout about but were mired for the most part in spectacular underachievement. Just before I got to England and became aware of them though they'd been a part of something for which they'd achieve some kind of greater and more lasting notoriety, though from their perspective at least, for all the wrong reasons.
In the third round of the FA Cup, which at the time was the football tournament that most allowed fans to dream, they'd been drawn against non-league Hereford United. After a two all draw at Newcastle's stadium St James Park the two clubs met again at Hereford's ground on a quagmire of a pitch on 5th February 1972. The rest is football history.
Newcastle took the lead through a McDonald goal eight minutes from the end and it seemed that would be that. But a couple of minutes later, Hereford's Ronnie Radford, a previously workaday run of the mill lower league midfielder, got the ball just inside the opposition's half, worked a one two in the mud and proceeded to send a blinding and quite unstoppable shot past Iam McFaul, Newcastle's goalkeeper into the top corner of the net.
The crowd invaded the pitch. When it had finally been cleared, two minutes later, in match terms Hereford scored again and the crown invaded the pitch again. Newcastle were dumped ignominiously out of the tournament, the first First Division team up to that point to be beaten in the FA Cup by a non-league team. Radford's goal has been endlessly replayed every year when the FA Cup comes round again, much to the grief of Newcastle fans such as me who have stuck with the team ever since through thin and thinner.
Radford himself has become thereafter a minor cult figure, particularly of course to Hereford fans, but also to the wider football public as a whole as a symbol of everything that's most romantic about the sport. The intervening years brought me to Newcastle itself where I've lived and worked for the past seven years and still follow the fortunes of the hapless and pretty hopeless football team. I'll probably never learn. Ronnie Radford meanwhile now even has a song of his own which tells its own story of how somebody running around a muddy field chasing and kicking a small ball can attain the status of a folk hero or a mythic gunslinger and achieve their own small kind of immortality given the right moment and the ability and common sense to seize it.
'He said he saw the stars and that's the truth.'
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