Final whistle Golden greats left behind by TV age
WEvery goal from every match is lurking somewhere – or at least every goal from every match since 1993
atching Tanguy Ndombele’s goal for Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday was to be overwhelmed by a feeling that is increasingly unusual in modern sport: surely this was a first; no one had ever seen the like before.
The way he met Steven
Wonder goal: Tanguy Ndombele (left) watches his acrobatic volley beat Aaron Ramsdale
Bergwijn’s deftly lofted pass, falling as he did so, with an agile flick of his right foot, volleying the ball with power and direction past Aaron Ramsdale into the corner of the Sheffield United goal was so eye-poppingly unusual the immediate assumption was it had to be a one-off.
One of the consequences of modern social media, however, is that such romantic assumptions are quickly debunked. For all the brilliance of his gymnastics, Ndombele, it turns out, was not the first after all. Back in February 2005, in a snowy Carrow Road, Dean Ashton did much the same for Norwich City against Manchester City, somehow getting his foot to the ball to execute a volley beyond the goalkeeper from an angle Isosceles himself would deem improbable.
The two goals were not quite identical – Ashton’s came from a long hoof forward rather than a clever chip, he was attended by one rather than two defenders as he drifted to the left of the penalty area, and he was still standing as he shot. Moreover, his body shape did not exhibit the same level of contortion as Ndombele’s. But they were similar enough to stymie any immediate claim of uniqueness.
But there was something else about the speed with which Ashton’s goal was retrieved from the archives to offer comparison with the Frenchman’s effort. It was not just that within moments of the goal going in, someone had posted its predecessor online. It was the fact that evidence of Ashton’s goal was out there, still so easily accessible.
That is the remarkable thing about modern football: everything has been recorded for posterity, waiting for an internet nerd to offer it up to debunk any romantic delusions about seeing something for the first time. Every goal, from every match is lurking somewhere. Or at least every goal from every match since 1993.
Before that, the cupboard is frustratingly bare. For all we know, George Best, Denis Law and Johan Cruyff may well have scored a similar goal to Ndombele’s. Willie
Meredith might have done it every week. But the chances of finding out are limited in the extreme. The only place an imprint of a similar goal might exist is in the memory of someone who witnessed it.
People who saw them in action wax lyrical about the imposing strength of Duncan Edwards, about Billy Wright’s uncanny reading of the game, about Ferenc Puskas’s genius. But beyond a few wellworn moments of footage, all-toobrief snippets of high-profile matches, we have precious little available to give visual confirmation of their standing.
Not much infuriates the oldtimer more than the insistence on setting all records in a Premier League framework. We constantly hear commentators and pundits asking if Harry Kane can overtake Alan Shearer’s Premier League goalscoring achievement, or whether James Milner can better Gareth Barry’s Premier League appearances total. Well, we grumpy old fans say, football did exist before the Premier League. And, even if Kane does score more than Shearer, there are still four players with more career goals in the top flight he would need to surpass to be claimed as the best in history: Gordon Hodgson, Dixie Dean, Steve Bloomer and, at the summit, the incomparable Jimmy Greaves.
Except, try to find any filmed evidence that Hodgson, Dean and Bloomer scored so much as a single goal and you will be lucky. This is where the divide between the Premier League era and the rest is at its most stark: to paraphrase the old saying about trees falling in the wood, if there is no filmic recording, did it really happen? Because when it comes to the visual archive, it seems football really did start in 1993.