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All Those Years Ago

'We shall go on to the end.'

- Winston Churchill

George Robledo saw the ball coming late, almost too late to do anything about it. Under normal circumstances, he would draw his head back before bringing it forward sharply to meet the heavy brown leather orb, much as a cobra attacks its prey. Doing it that way, he found, put more pace on the ball, and more pace on the ball meant the goalkeeper was less likely to react in time to make a save.

But these weren't exactly normal circumstances.

Six minutes remained in the 1952 FA Cup final, the last six minutes of what had been a long, demanding season, consisting of forty-two league games and half-a-dozen FA Cup fixtures. In the league George had notched thirty-three goals for Newcastle United, topping the First Division scoring charts in the process. Another five had followed in the FA Cup, taking his overall tally for the campaign to a thumping thirty-eight.

Now, in game seven of Newcastle's FA Cup run, beneath the twin towers of Wembley Stadium, with Winston Churchill - the Winston Churchill - on hand to present the trophy to the winning team, George was feeling tired and frustrated. Of all the opportunities that had presented themselves in his dreams to score goal number thirty-nine, only one had materialised in reality (and he'd blasted that high over Arsenal's crossbar just after half-time). Usually George would be confident that, even at this late stage, one more chance would present itself. Today, he wasn't so sure. Even if it did, would 'Pancho', as his teammates called George on account of his Chilean heritage, have the required stamina and composure to break the stalemate and score the winner?

Bobby Mitchell, Newcastle's mesmeric left-winger, reckoned he knew the answer. Tall, thin and blessed with a deceptively lazy stride that fooled many an opponent, the Glaswegian was determined to set George up with that one last chance. Sure, Mitchell could see his teammate was flagging mentally as well as physically. All the more reason to plant the ball right on George's head so he barely had to move for it.

As Arsenal's defenders closed in, Mitchell steadied himself before crossing towards the far post, where George, during a conversation in the dressing room at half-time, had told him he would be waiting should such a scenario present itself.

And he was.

That was the good news. The not so good news was the ball came towards George at speed through a crowded penalty area. With little time to react, he instinctively let it glance off his brow towards the near post, the one place he knew George Swindin in the Arsenal goal might struggle to cover. At which point, the entire stadium and everyone inside it - the players, the spectators, the officials, the press men, the photographers around the touchline, even old Winston himself - seemed to freeze. Or at least they did to George. It was as if, he would recall many years later, Wembley Stadium was a record player and some giant hand had reached down and lifted the needle, cutting the sound as well as the action in an instant.

Would the ball end up in the net to register the only goal of the game?

Would Swindin scramble across in time to make the save?

Would the ball hit the post and come back into play or go out for a goal kick to Arsenal?

.or would he faint right there and then through sheer exhaustion before discovering the answer to any of the above (more than a possibility, so his ailing body told him)?

All of this was being played out in mere seconds, which, to George, felt like an eternity.

When the giant hand eventually returned the needle to the record, it came accompanied by a roar from the Newcastle supporters among the 100,000-strong crowd. George's header had struck the inside of Swindin's left-hand post on its way into the back of Arsenal's net. For the second year running, Newcastle United had won the FA Cup and Tyneside was going to party like it was 1945. As were parts of Yorkshire, Chile and just about anywhere else connected to the Robledo family and their remarkable story.

He considered himself to be a calm, rational soul, did George. War tends to shape you that way, as does a depression, post-war frugality and thirteen months working down a coal mine. The perfect recipe, without a doubt, for a grounded personality.

And yet scoring the winner in an FA Cup final can do funny things to a person.

Did George celebrate his goal by careering around the field like a speedboat without a driver, despite his aching limbs? Yes, he did. Did he jump partially clothed into the swimming pool at the team hotel later that evening? That would also be a yes. Did he amble up and down the corridors of the train carrying the team back to Newcastle, singing songs and handing out cigarettes to strangers? Yes, yes, he did that as well. All totally out of character. But then how often does a player get to score more league goals in a single season than anybody else and the winner in a cup final? If you can't let your hair down then (and George did indeed have a lovely head of jet-black hair to go with his film star looks), when can you?

He knew what this would all mean, of course. For more than three years, ever since George had started scoring goals for Newcastle United and especially since starring for Chile in the 1950 World Cup, the lucrative offers to go and play abroad - where footballers weren't constrained by a maximum wage and could virtually name their price - had flooded in. Now there would, inevitably, be more. It was a nice problem to have and George certainly wasn't complaining. Except that moving overseas would involve uprooting the whole Robledo family - himself, his mother and his two brothers - yet again. Wherever one went, the others followed. That was the rule. All for one and one for all. George loved Newcastle and its people, just as he'd loved Yorkshire on arriving in England from Chile as a child. Leaving certainly wouldn't be easy. On the flip side, going abroad equalled financial security. The itch he'd developed to travel and experience different cultures would get scratched. As long as he kept scoring goals for Newcastle, the dilemma over whether or not to leave England wasn't about to go away.

Right now, however, George resolved to live life in the moment and enjoy himself for a few precious days. He had an FA Cup winner's medal in his back pocket, as did his brother Ted, a fellow member of Newcastle's victorious Wembley team. The fact they'd shared in the experience, having literally come so far together in their relatively young lives, made it all the more special for the pair of them. Ted had even played a part in the winning goal by passing the ball to Bobby Mitchell, stationed on United's left flank.

Part of living in the moment involved returning to the pile of newspapers that his mother had bought after the final. You know, just to make sure Swindin hadn't in fact saved his header. In particular, George found himself drawn to a black and white photograph that captured the exact point in time when the needle had returned to the record. There was teammate Jackie Milburn on the right, with his back to the camera. There was George tussling with Arsenal defender Lionel Smith, both men looking towards the goal, one in hope, the other in despair. And there, oh joy of joys, was the ball on its way over the line, the beaten Swindin helplessly observing its passage.

'As the press cameras caught it!' screamed the headline on page six of The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne's daily newspaper. 'George Robledo has done the damage. The ball, headed in, has just struck the inside of the Arsenal goalpost and is on its way into and across the goal.'

The Journal wasn't the only newspaper which featured the photograph. Most of the UK nationals carried it, as indeed did many of the other big regional titles such as the Birmingham Post and Liverpool Echo, which, like The Journal, doubled up as national papers, bringing important domestic and world news to the doorsteps of local readers.

And so it came to pass that the photograph was spotted by an eleven-year-old pupil at Dovedale Road Primary School in Liverpool called John Lennon. So taken with the photograph was Lennon, despite not really liking football, that he painted a picture of it. The only difference, besides the addition of some colour to Wembley's turf and the players' kits, was the ball hadn't yet crossed Arsenal's goal line in Lennon's picture. Instead, it hung tantalisingly in mid-air, with Swindin seemingly poised to make the save. At the top he'd scribbled 'John Lennon, June 1952, AGE 11', accompanied at the bottom by just one word - 'football'.

In the years that followed, John Lennon would become one of...