Football rematch 50 years after questionable goal
Scorer replicates the primary school game with the same players to ‘put right a wrong’
A GUILT-RIDDEN footballer organised a rematch between two primary schools, 50 years after he scored a “dubious” equaliser, to help clear his conscience. Graeme Jones, a former Royal Navy training instructor, admitted that, while jumping to head in a goal, he shoved the goalkeeper over the line, to earn a controversial draw in a match played in September 1972.
Mr Jones, 60, said he was determined to “put right a wrong” when he learned of the result’s lasting “impact” on his aggrieved local rivals and spent 18 months assembling the same line-up from the Gayton Primary School team who took on St Peter’s Cofe School in the Wirral.
Mr Jones’s former PE teacher, Alan Jones, who had awarded his team their contentious equaliser, was given the honour of observing the coin toss before officiating the start of the match on Saturday.
The teams recreated an old squad photo that had appeared in a local paper when they were aged 10 and, after the 30-minute-a-side match, Mr Jones’s rivals finally settled the score with a 6-2 win at Heswall Football Club’s ground.
He said: “We got stuffed because they had to bring on a couple of ringers. But my demons have been put to bed and my conscience is clear now, and we would have still lost regardless.
“It was very, very surreal to do the official photo as we wanted to capture it more or less exactly as it was at school, 50 years apart. And when we walked on to the pitch, we formed up in our original positions as well.”
Mr Jones, from Gayton in the Wirral, came up with the idea for the match during the first lockdown in 2020 after finding his old team portrait. He was surprised when his neighbour Craig Allen, who scored the opposition’s only goal, told him that he not only remembered the match but had never forgiven him for the foul.
The two teams played with a raffle set up to help buy Mr Jones’s old school a new team kit.
Mr Jones said: “I felt guilty about the fact that the game finished, but I wasn’t aware of the impact.
“I just came up and bulldozed my way through, and Alan, our PE teacher, gave the goal. You wouldn’t get away with it today. So I wanted to turn a wrong into a right, and if we lose, we lose, but it will put to bed something that I wasn’t aware of until probably 18 months ago.”
He added: “I had to bully a few people into doing it. And then it was a case of ‘I’ve got these guys, you’ve got to play – you’re irreplaceable, I need you there’, and I got all 11. The opposition got a team together, but I gave them some leeway on their side in terms of age.”
Although they would not attempt another match, Mr Jones said they would continue to meet up and renew their bonds.