For April 14th I'm going back 30 years to 1991 and the FA Cup Semi-Final between Spurs and Arsenal at Wembley.
If I think back down the years across all the football matches that I have attended and think of all the goals that I've seen (over 6,800 of them), how many can I actually remember? Not many. Certainly not much more than 100 or so. The details of matches, for me at least, disappear from the mind pretty quickly. What lingers are memories of journeys, companions and, above all, feelings. Yes feelings. Joy, elation, sadness, devastation. Such feelings linger long after memories of a game or a goal have gone. Is it just me?
However, here's a match where I can pretty well guarantee that everyone reading this who has an interest in football will be able to picture THAT goal without resorting to the video attached to my blog because it's been repeated on TV ad nausea ever since. The goal in question was scored by the greatest player I ever saw. I have had the pleasure of seeing Maradona, Messi and Christiano Ronaldo in the flesh but I'm not talking about fleeting one-off glimpses of the world's greatest players. I'm talking about a player who was an English genius and who I saw regularly for a few glorious seasons. That player was Paul Gascoigne. He scored two goals in his career that I would describe as being iconic. One was in this game.
At this point I'll hand over to one of the great BBC commentators: Barry Davies. "Is Gascoigne going to have a crack? He is you know. Oh I say! Brilliant! That is Schoolboys Own stuff. Oh I bet even he can't believe it". Gascoigne, or Gazza as he is more popularly known, struck a free-kick from thirty yards past Arsenal and England goalkeeper David Seaman right into the top corner. Seaman did get a hand to it but he couldn't keep it out. Davies commented that it was "one of the finest free kicks that this stadium has ever seen" and it's difficult to argue with that view. Incidentally, Davies was showing his age with his reference to Schoolboys Own which was a comic book from between the wars filled with tales of rip roaring adventure and heroes with a bit of derring-do.
It's worth remembering the context of the game too. Arsenal were going for the League and Cup double and were huge favourites on the day. I remember them being very confident going into the game. Gazza's goal rocked them and Tottenham's scruffy second goal, a toe poke from Lineker gave Arsenal a mountain to climb. It was a mountain that looked scalable however when Alan Smith pulled a goal back with a header just before halftime. I recall massive tension amongst the Spurs fans throughout the second half. We had seen Arsenal snatch late goals in a Semi-Final against Spurs as recently as 1987 and Spurs did have that tendency to be, well, "Spursy" just when you thought that they might be about to win something. But on this particular day the Lillywhites held out! Lineker got his second and Tottenham's third thanks to Seaman's butter fingers and Tottenham knew they would be coming back to Wembley the following month to play in the Final itself. Utter joy!
CRB Match No. 714
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