Part two of a personal tour of the grounds that matter: a muddy February in Hereford, a song at Anfield, and a tour guide in Rotterdam who refused to let two lost Englishmen miss a thing.
A fortnight on, I am picking up my stadium ramble where I left it. In part one we went from Leighton Town’s Shed End to Kenilworth Road’s back gardens and then followed Coventry City on their long, sad wander round other people’s grounds. This time we drop back into non-league, climb all the way to the top of the English game, and then cross the North Sea. First stop, a city near the Welsh border.
Edgar Street: a phoenix, some mud, and a young man with a microphone
If you head south-west from Coventry for an hour and a half, you get to Hereford, very nearly in Wales. Keep going into the middle of the city and you reach Edgar Street. It is a ground I have been to many times, and it is one of those places where a single afternoon has soaked into the brickwork.
Today Edgar Street is home to Hereford FC, a phoenix club. Their own history page is honest about how they came to exist. The old club, Hereford United, had a proud past, including the cup run of 1972 and several spells in the third tier, but “off-the-field issues” led to it folding in December 2014. The new club was put into the Midland Football League for 2015/16, kept the Bulls nickname and the white shirts and black shorts, and, crucially, kept the ground.
What followed was a run that most clubs would sell their souls for. The same history describes a league and cup double in that first season, broken attendance records, and 21,000 supporters taken to Wembley for the FA Vase final. Then the Southern League South and West title with 107 points. Then the Southern League Premier title with another 113 points, completing three promotions in a row and taking the club into the National League system. I am not sure any of that happens without Edgar Street. A new club in a new ground is a start-up. A new club in the old ground is a resurrection.
The ground’s future is now settled too. In April 2024, the club announced a deal with Herefordshire Council to stay at Edgar Street until 2070, with the old Blackfriars End stand to be demolished and a plan for Edgar Street to become, in the club’s words, “a four-sided stadium” again. Forty-six years is a long lease. For a club that nearly lost everything, it must feel like for ever.
Radford, the mud, and the giant-killing
Everyone who goes to Edgar Street knows why it is famous. On 5 February 1972, part-time Hereford United played First Division Newcastle United in an FA Cup third-round replay. The BBC’s obituary of Ronnie Radford sets the scene: 14,000 fans packed into Edgar Street, a muddy pitch, and Newcastle apparently on their way through after Malcolm Macdonald scored in the 82nd minute. In those conditions, a top-flight side with Supermac up front did not usually lose to a non-league team.
Three minutes later, Radford changed everything. He told the BBC in 2015 how it happened: “I went in for a tackle with John Tudor on halfway and came up with the ball. I turned, saw Brian Owen and played the ball up to him. He gave it back and it sat up just right. I didn’t think about the distance, I just thought: ‘I’ve got to hit this.’ It could have gone in the car park. But it didn’t.” The BBC describes it as a 35-yard first-time shot. John Motson, who was there, later remembered it as a 40-yarder. I am not going to settle that argument. The car park is a nicer measure anyway.
The crowd poured onto the pitch. And above the noise came a voice the country had not really heard before. Motson, then 26, was commentating. The BBC quotes him: “Oh, what a goal! What a goal! Radford the scorer… and the crowd are invading the pitch.” For a moment he was not a commentator at all, just another person who could not believe what he had seen. That, for me, is what great commentary is. It is not similes and clever lines. It is being swept along by the moment and letting people at home feel it too.
Radford’s goal only made it 1-1. The match went to extra time, and substitute Ricky George scored the winner. The BBC notes that Hereford became the first non-league club to beat a top-flight side since 1949. Radford was mobbed, the changing room went wild, and Radford and George celebrated together afterwards. Radford died in November 2022, aged 79. Hereford’s tribute said: “Ronnie is not just a part of Hereford United folklore, he is a part of football history.” Newcastle’s own tribute was generous: “Though against us, a goal forever written into FA Cup folklore.”
How Motson got home
My favourite part of the story is not even on the pitch. In 2018, as he retired, Motson wrote for the BBC about his 50 years in commentary. He said he was “still on trial” at the time and went to Hereford “thinking that Newcastle were going to have a comfortable win”. He had a lift. The man who drove him was Billy Meadows, Hereford’s centre-forward, and also in the car was Ricky George, who would score the winner. They all lived near each other in Barnet.
After the game, Motson wrote, Meadows drove them back, and they “sat in Billy’s front room and had fish and chips and listened to American Pie before Match of the Day came on and there, wonder of wonders, was my match propelled to the top of the show.” That is the most perfect thing I have ever read about football. A future great of broadcasting, the match-winner and the centre-forward, eating chips in north London and watching themselves become famous. Motson said, simply, “I didn’t look back after that.”
There is a detail in that same piece that ties the two halves of this article together rather neatly. Motson’s very first television commentary, he wrote, was “a scoreless draw between Liverpool and Chelsea in October 1971”, and he admitted it was “not a very distinguished game or a distinguished commentary either”. So the man who made his name in the Hereford mud had cut his teeth at Anfield a few months earlier, describing nothing very much. I find that reassuring. Everybody’s first go at something is a goalless draw.
He also explained why that Hereford commentary had to be so good first time. When he started, there were no instant replays of goals, because, as he put it, “the only replay machine was used for horse racing”. Commentators had to fill the gap as the players walked back to the centre circle, and then wait until the evening to find out from the edit whether they had described the build-up correctly. Think of that the next time you watch Radford’s goal. Motson called it live, once, with no second look, and got it right.
When Radford died, Motson told the BBC: “He changed his life, my life, the history of the FA Cup with a goal that came out of nowhere.” That is quite a thing for one goal to do. And it all happened at Edgar Street, which is still there, still home to a Hereford club, and still worth the trip.
A footnote. In November 2022, just days after Radford died, Hereford FC hosted League One Portsmouth in the FA Cup first round, live on BBC Two. The club’s history page mentions it and says Radford’s spirit “will forever remain at Edgar Street”. There was no repeat of 1972, but there did not need to be. Some afternoons only happen once.
The new club has had its own nights there since. Its history page recalls an FA Cup run in 2017/18 that brought League One Fleetwood Town to Edgar Street for a replay in front of the BT Sport cameras, after supporters and volunteers cleared snow from the pitch so the tie could go ahead. Hereford lost, but, as the club puts it, they “were back on the football map”. In 2020/21, with the league season cut short after 13 games by the pandemic, they reached the FA Trophy final at Wembley and lost to Hornchurch. Not every big day ends in a pitch invasion. The ground is there for those days too.
The YNWA connection
That cup tie shows how great moments and great grounds wind together until you cannot separate them. Which brings me to the song.
I have been a Liverpool fan since I was a boy, and for me singing You’ll Never Walk Alone is a very special thing. Liverpool’s own history of the song explains how it happened. It was written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the 1945 musical Carousel, and recorded by everyone from Elvis to Sinatra. In 1963 Gerry and the Pacemakers, a Liverpool band, released their version, and when it reached number seven it was played at Anfield as part of the pre-match top 10, during a game against West Brom. The fans sang along. It went to number one at the end of October 1963 and stayed there for four weeks. When it dropped out of the top 10, the club says, fans complained, asking, “Where is our song?” It has been their song ever since.
My first game at Anfield was in February 2020, an FA Cup fourth-round replay against Shrewsbury Town. Liverpool won 1-0. I will admit the only goal was an own goal. The BBC report describes Ro-Shaun Williams heading past his own keeper from a long ball by Neco Williams. It was not a classic. Klopp was not even there. With the senior players on their winter break, the under-23s boss Neil Critchley picked the youngest side in Liverpool’s history, with an average age of 19 years and 102 days, and Curtis Jones became the club’s youngest captain. Shrewsbury brought 8,000 fans, the crowd was 52,399, and James Milner sat behind the dugout to watch.
None of that is why I remember it. I was sat next to the Kop when You’ll Never Walk Alone started, and hearing it in person for the first time was overwhelming. My eyes filled up. My brain could not quite take it in. It sounds corny written down, I know, but it was a moment that will stay with me for ever. I have been back many times since, and nothing has matched that first time.
The BBC report says the young side got a standing ovation in front of the Kop at the end. I was one of the people standing.
A tourist’s conscience
Anfield has been holy ground to me for most of my life. But being a Liverpool fan from outside the city raises an awkward question about football tourism. You notice it in the newer parts of the ground, and in the quieter home crowds that get complained about. I do not have a neat answer to it. I just think it is worth being honest that I am, in some ways, part of the problem I am describing.
And Anfield is not the only place where that song is sung before kick-off. One club that welcomes outsiders brilliantly, and which also sings You’ll Never Walk Alone, is Feyenoord.
De Kuip, with a guide who would not give up
In 2015 my dad and I went to Rotterdam. We booked a tour of De Kuip through one of his Dutch work colleagues, who, funnily enough, supported Ajax, Feyenoord’s great rivals in De Klassieker. I like to think he arranged it as a test of our characters.
De Kuip means “the tub”, and walking in is quite something. On the tour we were a bit nervous, because we did not understand Dutch. The guide, who clearly had done this many times, spotted the two lost Brits at the back straight away. He kept coming back to us, telling us in English about the great figures of the club, Coen Moulijn among them, and the memorabilia, and everything else. I still think about how kind that was.
To get to the pitch, you walk through a painted tunnel under the stands. Then a hatch opens at the side of the pitch and you rise up into the bowl. On a match day, coming up into a full stadium with the noise pounding down the tunnel must be terrifying. On a tour day it was just magical.
I wrote about De Kuip’s history at more length in a separate piece on the stadium, so here are just the highlights. The official history says the chairman Leen van Zandvliet dreamed up the stadium in 1931, and the architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt went on study trips in 1934 and were most impressed by Arsenal’s Highbury. They built a steel bowl where the upper tier hangs over the lower one with no columns in the way. The stadium opened on 27 March 1937, with Feyenoord beating Beerschot 5-2. In 1941, during the German occupation, the steel was wanted for the war industry and the stadium was threatened with demolition. It survived. The Canon van Nederland records that in 1970 Feyenoord became the first Dutch club to win the European Cup, with Moulijn in the side.
The lucky visit
De Kuip has hosted plenty of great nights, including European finals. But the one that matters most to me happened not long after our visit. On 14 May 2017, Feyenoord played Heracles Almelo on the last day of the season needing to win, with Ajax one point behind. According to the BBC’s report, their captain, Dirk Kuyt, then 36, scored after 38 seconds, headed a second in the 12th minute and converted a late penalty. Feyenoord won 3-1 and were champions for the first time since 1999. The opener was his 100th league goal for the club, and they had topped the table all season.
For a Liverpool fan, Kuyt is a special case. He was always loved at Anfield for his work rate. After the title, Balls.ie reported that he sang a few lines of You’ll Never Walk Alone to the crowds at the Rotterdam celebrations, noting that Feyenoord are one of many European clubs to have adopted it. Not the best singing, the writer admitted. It did not matter.
My dad and I always joke that the real reason Feyenoord won was that we had visited. I am sure the players would disagree. But that is what grounds do to you. You go once, you get looked after by a stranger, you stand in a tunnel, and then for the rest of your life you feel that a little bit of that club’s success has something to do with you.
Three grounds, one thread
Edgar Street, Anfield and De Kuip are very different places. One is a non-league ground saved by its town. One is among the most famous stadiums in the world. One is a modernist steel bowl that survived a war. But in each of them the place and the moment are bound up together. Radford’s goal would not be the same anywhere else. The song would not be the same anywhere else. And Kuyt’s hat-trick, in front of his own people in his own city, would not have been the same anywhere else.
That, in the end, is what this whole two-part ramble has been about. The football is the reason we go. The ground is the reason we remember.
Related reading on FBH: Ian Callaghan: Far More Than a Pop Quiz Answer; Jack of all trades: footballers in different sports; The OGs: awful own goals in football history (part one).
