The Run of Play is a blog about
the wonder and terror of soccer.

We left the window open during a match in October 2007 and a strange wind blew into the room.

Now we walk the forgotten byways of football with a lonely tread, searching for the beautiful, the bewildering, the haunting, and the absurd.

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Ronnie Radford Shocks the World in the 1972 FA Cup

On a day when Newcastle fans are celebrating the return of Kevin Keegan, here’s a memory from an afternoon when they had nothing much to celebrate. In 1972 Hereford United were a non-league team drawn to be Newcastle’s sacrificial victim in the third round of the FA Cup. Somehow they forced a draw at St. James’ Park, and the match replay took place on the muddy pitch at Edgar Street, Hereford, on February 5. Newcastle’s Malcolm Macdonald gave his team the lead, after a rough, inconclusive match, in the 82nd minute. Then Hereford’s Ronnie Radford, a part-time carpenter, struck one of the most famous shots in the history of English football.

Hereford went on to win in extra time, sealing the FA Cup’s signature upset. This is Ronnie Radford, in the third-round replay of Newcastle-Hereford in the 1972 FA Cup, and this is your historical goal of the week.

UPDATE: And wouldn’t you know it? After today’s third-round FA Cup replays, Newcastle are on to the fourth round…and so are Hereford United.

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Ronnie Radford Shocks the World in the 1972 FA Cup

by Brian Phillips · January 16, 2008

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