Ronnie Radford: Hereford Hero

The great thing about the FA Cup is that its exalted status hasn't come about solely because of the Final. The Final is merely the the cherry on the cake, the signature on the masterpiece. The reason that the words 'FA Cup' have become so venerable is because of the goals and the memories that are gathered each year, all the way from the first qualifying round to the conclusion at Wembley. Some goals add to the legend, whereas some become legendary in their own right.

If ever the dreams and the aspirations of everyone that's ever kicked a football were made manifest in a single moment, it must surely be the one that resulted in Ronnie Radford scoring against Newcastle United in 1972. Radford, a part-time player and a joiner by trade, had helped his Hereford United side earn a draw at St James' Park in the Third Round of the FA Cup in February that year. The replay became Hereford's own Cup Final - the culmination of a campaign that had begun in the Fourth Qualifying Round and now, in its seventh match, saw them play Newcastle United of the Football League First Division.

Hereford United were a Southern League side at the time, no match for the likes of Malcolm Macdonald, Frank Clark, Bobby Moncur and their ilk - or so it was thought. Ronnie Radford was just one of the white-shirted brigade for whom football was not a means of generating an income. It was a game, an engaging challenge for the mind and body that provided a release from the day job once a week, every Saturday.

What happened in that Third Round replay has cemented the name of Ronnie Radford into the foundations that today's FA Cup is built upon. His goal, as relentlessly accurate as an archer's arrow hitting the dead-centre of a bullseye, is rightly repeated and relished often and without apology. It is the goal every man Jack of us would've wanted to score, a thirty-yard bullet that crushed the spirit of Joe Harvey's men in an instant. It sent the game into extra time, whereupon Ricky George delivered his own fatal blow to finish off the Tynesiders.

It is a rare occasion when the simple actions of one man make him a local hero forever, but Ronnie Radford has managed to keep his feet on the ground ever since. Humble but grateful, he retains the air of a man who knows how lucky he was to let fly with that thunderbolt shot 43 years ago and rightly allows himself the beaming smile he earned that day whenever he sees it.

Evidence of Ronnie Radford's enduring humility can be found in a short film that's just been released which is well worth seeing. 'The Ballad of Ronnie Radford' catches up with the Hereford hero as he reminisces about that day in February 1972 and features music from the critically-acclaimed album 'Songs About Other People' by Harry Harris. All in all, it's a delightful reminder of why football can enrich your life with great memories and why the FA Cup itself is such a fine institution.



'Songs About Other People' is out now, and Harry Harris will be touring Ireland in June with fellow collaborator Anna McIvor, after headlining the final night of Home Farm Festival on the Folkroom Records stage.

The Ballad of Ronnie Radford

Directed by: Francis Newall & Matt Diegan
Produced by: Matt Diegan
All Music: Harry Harris
Grade: Steve Atkins
Sound Mix: Robin Clarke

http://www.harryharrismusic.com
http://www.moralhangover.co.uk

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Fantasy Nostalgia: Fantasy League 1971/72

Well, there may only be a few weeks of the 1971/72 Football League season left, but we're quietly confident that our Fantasy League team's going to romp home to victory.

Oh alright then - here's who we've picked... It won't do any harm to tell you now...

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Golden Goals (1972)

When I was a kid in the early 1980s, a trip to the local petrol station in my Dad's car didn't provide much in the way of excitement for me. Having filled up the tank and handed over his money in the forecourt shop, he'd return to the car with nothing more than a bunch of tokens for a free whisky tumbler and very little else. Had we been doing the exact same thing in the late 1970's, I might have been handed a small plastic Smurf as a special treat, or at the beginning of the Seventies, even an Esso World Cup Coin.

It seems I largely missed out on the petrol/football tie-ins that were so prominent in the early-70's. Everyone always thinks of Esso as being the masters of marketing where that's concerned (and rightly so), yet one little-known company had a go at cashing in on football fervour too - and made a decent job of it.

I say 'little-known company' - in fact it was a regional petrol company that was owned by Esso, not that anyone was really aware of that at the time. Cleveland Petrol had started out in the 1930's selling ethanol fuel in the north-east of England, but just before their forecourts were fully rebranded to Esso, they had the chance to embark on one or two football-related trade campaigns.

Golden Goals just happened to be a tie-in of sorts with ITV's The Big Match and it followed a familiar format. In the traditional manner, customers spending £1 on petrol at Cleveland stations were offered a free gift; in this case, a packet containing a solitary sticker. It doesn't sound like much, but the sticker was quite large and often split into two or three separate smaller images. Those images could then be stuck into an accompanying album (price: 20p) which doubled up nicely as a hardback reference book for the discerning young football fan.

If you lived in London or the South East back in 1972, you'd know that Golden Goals was The Big Match's answer to Match of the Day's 'Goal of the Month' competition on the BBC. Luckily for fans of 'Shoot' (the ITV football show in the north-east of England), they got to see The Big Match often during the 1971-72 season. That's because the Tyne Tees cameras were often sent away to cover horse racing at Redcar or Newcastle, so to fill in, they'd broadcast The Big Match instead.

The Golden Goals book was 'compiled by Jimmy Hill and Brian Moore', and following a brief foreword by The Bearded One, there were regular references to the Big Match goalfest throughout. More than 70 pages of illustrations were provided, showing how various important goals were scored and the players that were involved in scoring them. Coupled with the words of Martin Tyler, those aforementioned stickers completed many of the pages, showing the interplay between players, their positioning on the pitch and the importance of the match itself - three things that Jimmy Hill was always excellent at explaining on TV.

The 1966 World Cup Final and the following tournament in 1970 were, as you'd expect, still fresh in the memory when the book was created, but they were by no means the be-all-and-end-all of this interesting compendium. A wide range of subjects - and great goals - were explored and explained in full colour and fine detail, from FA Cup giant killing to the great strikers of the 20th Century.

Specific teams were also given special treatment. Manchester United's 'goal power' looked at the awesome strike partnership of Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and George Best, while Arsenal's route to double-winning glory was also brought into sharp focus. There was even room to look at local rivalries within British football and the great teams of international football - neither of which had anything directly to do with great goals, but were beautifully illustrated all the same.

The concept of Golden Goals as a book along with its accompanying stickers was beautifully executed in a very subtle way. Whereas Panini and their ilk introduced the concept of albums containing many hundreds of stickers in a single collection, Cleveland's version had only 41, yet there's never a feeling of 'if only there were more' about it. The stickers are not intrinsically vital to the book because the book is a fine piece of work in its own right. And yet although the stickers only played a complementary role, you still got that feeling of joy when your Dad handed you a pastel blue packet at a Cleveland Petrol station, and you still had the pleasure of sticking your stickers into the book, thereby making it even better than it was.

This 'less is more' approach showed how Panini might have developed their collections in later years, and may even have avoided their demise of the early 1990's had they done so. By producing a hardback book packed with lots of information and far fewer stickers, Cleveland showed cleverness in creating something more substantial than a basic sticker album yet still had the allure of building a collection within it.

And while everyone was waiting for the video recorder to be invented, what better way to remember great goals than to study them in illustrated form, page by page? This book had them by the dozen and celebrated them with real flare and integrity. Oh, and the petrol came in quite handy too.

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Lion comic t-shirt ad, 1972

It's the gift that every football-loving child of the early 1970's wanted - a t-shirt featuring the face of Kevin Keegan with a black eye. And yours for only 92p!

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The Esso Collection of Football Club Badges, 1972

Football club badges somehow seemed to matter more in previous decades. Pick up any book or magazine and they were everywhere, as if it was your duty as a young child to memorise and appreciate the graphic identity of every team. This was never more apparent than in The Esso Collection of Football Club Badges from 1972.

Esso had already achieved incredible success with the now-famous England World Cup Coin Collection of 1970 but were keen to reinforce their position as the favoured petrol supplier for English fans everywhere.

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Observer's Book of Association Football, 1972

Around the age of ten, I could often be found at the Thames View Library in Barking, Essex. It wasn’t because I yearned to absorb every ounce of knowledge from the hundreds of books that lay before me; moreover, my sister worked there and I often popped in on my way home from school to say 'hello.'

I’d linger a while, ambling up and down the aisles between the wooden bookshelves that matched me for height. Such were the frequency of my visits that I seemed to recognise many of the books purely by spine alone. Few of the titles were tempting enough for me to pick them up and read them, but the small ‘Sports’ section had an altogether greater appeal as that was where I’d find the football books.

One book always seemed to catch my eye. It was small with a white cover and was clearly born of a bygone age. It was called The Observer’s Book of Association Football and had a picture of Bobby Charlton on the front playing for England in the 1970 World Cup.

Though the book seemed a little antiquated even back in the early 1980’s, it retained an unusual allure. Inside this pocket digest were pages and pages featuring potted profiles of each Football League club including Barrow and Workington, whoever they were.

There were also summarised histories of some of the world’s greatest football clubs and outlines of every great player in the international game back in 1972, the year the book was published.

Yet to be honest, the many informative and enlightening words written by Albert Sewell were not my main interest. Whenever I removed the book from its shelf with all the inevitability of a moth drawn to a light bulb, I would turn instinctively to the small group of colour pages a fifth of the way through. Upon those pages were illustrations of virtually every shirt worn by league clubs in England and Scotland, and I couldn’t be more fascinated in them.

As you can see by the composite picture below, there were countless colours and designs to wonder at, all in long sleeves and none bearing so much as a club badge or a manufacturer’s logo. Some of the shirts looked familiar, like Arsenal’s famous red-white-white-sleeves combo or the Blackpool shirt upon which my school football team’s identity was based. Other designs already looked dated, such as Crystal Palace’s claret and blue vertical bands, but somehow it was of little relevance. These were my formative years in which the recognition of a team’s colours were key to my education and appreciation of a club’s history. All knowledge was good knowledge.

I could go on about the World Cup competition section near the back of the book or the black-and-white photo section in the middle, but there seems little point. This miniature encyclopaedia, the 47th in a series covering topics as diverse as ‘House Plants’ and ‘Freshwater Fishes’ was always my favourite book out of all those in my local library.

Though the building has long since gone, the book remains and I’m reassured to find that even now as a nostalgic 40-year-old, I still find that colour section just as appealing as ever.

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