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Football: Come in number 500,000

Independent, The (London), Aug 8, 2006 by Nick Harris

They have come in all forms, from 30-yard screamers to goalmouth tap-ins, from own goals to penalties, from audacious halfway-line lobs to last-gasp relegation-saving strikes by goalkeepers. Scoring is the lifeblood of football, the very point of a game that England gave to the world in the 19th century and first organised in a League format in 1888. And tonight, almost certainly, some time after 9pm, somebody somewhere will hit the 500,000th goal in the 118- year history of the English leagues.

The half-millionth strike will be honoured by the Football League with the presentation of a specially commissioned trophy. The League hopes to present the trophy at the scorer's training ground tomorrow morning.

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By the end of the 2005-06 season, the total League goals tally in England stood at 499,855 goals from 171,599 fixtures, including in the revamped Premier League since 1992.

With 75 goals scored in the Championship and Leagues One and Two on Saturday, and another seven on Sunday, only 63 more are required to reach 500,000. An almost full League programme is scheduled for this evening and statisticians predict that the landmark strike should arrive in the second half of one of today's 32 games.

"The scoring of half a million goals is a genuine milestone for League football in this country, one that has taken more than 170,000 matches and 107 full seasons," John Nagle, the League's head of communications, said yesterday. Eleven years of League football were lost to the two world wars. "We will be recognising this achievement by making a special award to the scorer of the goal, which is likely to be scored towards the end of Tuesday night's fixture programme," Nagle said.

"This will give every player in the Football League an opportunity to earn himself a permanent place in the game's history books," he added.

In this high-tech, internet age, it seems incredible that the 500,000th goal will become the first major landmark to be synonymous with a specific person. The 100,000th, 200,000th, 300,000th and 400,000th League goals cannot be ascribed to any individual because when they were netted nobody was aware - or had the resources at their disposal - to be able to say unequivocally who hit the specific goal to reach those tallies. The closest we get is a date in each case. The 400,000th goal was scored on 29 August 1987.

Amazing though it sounds, the Football League itself never kept a formal record of scorers until three years ago, when it realised the information could have a commercial value as intellectual property. Instead, the task of collating information fell to individual archivists such as Tony Brown, now the League's official statistician, and Michael Joyce, a fellow statto whose website (www.since1888.co.uk) carries details of every player ever to have featured in a League game.

Even the first goal in League history is a subject of debate, although it is virtually certain that the landmark effort was tucked away by Aston Villa's Gershom Cox on 8 September 1888 - into his own net. Villa were playing at their Midlands rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers that day, on the first weekend of the Football League, and drew 1-1 after Cox scored his own goal and then his team-mate Tom Green equalised for Villa.

The factor that queers the pitch in identifying the first League goal is that whereas Cox's own goal was scored after half an hour, Preston's opening League goal, on the same day, was scored in the third minute of their 5-2 win over Burnley. It was netted by Fred Dewhurst, the captain of that "Invincible" side which went on to win the inaugural title unbeaten.

But the Preston game did not kick off until 3.50pm, while the Wolves-Villa game began closer to 3pm. So Cox's strike, at around 3.30pm, arrived before Dew-hurst's, at around 3.52pm. Similarly, Cox's own goal beat the goals in the day's other League fixtures at Bolton (where kick-off was at 3.45pm and Derby won 6-3), at Everton (who beat Ac-crington 2-1) and at Stoke (where West Bromwich Albion won 2-0).

Contemporary news reports do not throw sufficient light on the minutiae of timings to be any more definitive. The Preston Evening Post's Football Special carried a long report that began: "The North End played their first League match at Deepdale this afternoon, their opponents being the Burnley eleven. The weather was beautifully fine, and fully 6,000 spectators lined the enclosure. Dewhurst lost the toss and Preston played against the wind, but with the sun at their backs." Yet there is nothing to suggest that Dewhurst scored earlier than Cox, nor to contradict other sources on the 3.45pm kick-off time.

National newspapers dealt with the new League even more sparingly, with The Times on Monday 10 September carrying mere one- sentence reports from each game, mixed together in a section titled "Football" with several reports about games played "under Rugby Union rules".

Indeed, the opening - and longest - report in that section, stretching to a whole three sentences, did not feature a League match at all, but rather news of a Canadian international touring side which had drawn 1-1 in Glasgow against Rangers on the Saturday.

Football: Come in number 500,000

Independent, The (London), Aug 8, 2006 by Nick Harris

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