IT was a question that everyone in the room was almost at the point of silence. “Who is holding the record for the best league goal scored by an overseas player on the best flight of British football in a single season?”
For the vast majority of my adult life, I felt that I had to know the answer about sports. But I didn’t. There, I appeared as a guest at the Brighton branch of Sporting Memories, a UK charity, a UK charity that encourages elderly people to meet and remember by talking about sports, and I was apparently exposed to a complete fraud.
A few trained estimates were initially made by 20 members gathered to hear that I was talking about my last book before the weekly Monday morning exams were more serious.
Thierry Henry? Cristiano Ronaldo? What about Dennis Bergkamp? Or Luis Suárez?
Our QuizMaster, former England Rugby Union International, Cricket player and BBC publisher Alastair Hignell, has hit every wrong answer (Mohamed Salah, if you are wondering), including my own shooting to recover some professional pride (if you are curious).
Slowly, the suggestions were slightly more than shooting in the dark. Robin van Persie? Gianfranco Zola? Ricky is not a villa, of course? Robert Pires? Following David Ginola, the well of potential candidates fell in front of the group and the group.
Perhaps it was the existence of the old Wales and Newcastle United goalkeeper Dave Hollins in the room, but a blue person found a name, the right name – George Robledo.
George Robledo! Yes, yes! … And everything is back.
About 20 years ago, during Bobby Robson’s rule of administration, I was dealing with a Newcastle United match in St James’ Park, instead of working in football, he referred to as one of the most beautiful men in which he walked the world. After the match, the press conference ended, but Robson continued to talk to some hackers about his heroes that were not on a deadline. Jackie talked about Milburn – I knew it. He talked about Joe Harvey – I knew him. But then Robson said to me that certainly means nothing. This name was George Robledo.
Robson, who clogged a few empty expressions in our environment, gave us George Robledo briefly. I wasn’t taking notes, I wasn’t just listening carefully, but I remembered it so much I came to Yorkshire as a child, worked as a professional footballer and scored a lot of goals for several clubs (including the winner of Newcastle against Arsenal in the 1952 FA Cup final, a picture that was painted by John Lennon. A picture would emerge. Walls and bridges). I also say that he saw plenty of George Robledo in Shearer, who took Robson. Indeed, praise, as everyone who remembers Shearer in the conflict will accept.
When I came back to my house in Cardiff, I thought of a lot about George. Here in the first part of the 1951-52 season (or the Premier League in today’s money) Newcastle for 33 league goals were someone who scored. The player who was registered abroad, a foreign -born player had not reached this number before, and since then, the player who was registered abroad, did not reach this number (although Mohamed Salah is doing his best level to change it). During my visit to Brighton (January 2023), Norway International Erling Haaland from Manchester City was in a course to break George’s record, a success has been able to play planet football since then. But then he was born in Haaland Leeds, as a highly canceled member pointed out by Sporting Memories Group. Like in Leeds, England, where his father once played football. According to geography rules, George still has a record while writing. Divide the hair? Maybe, maybe not. Everything depends on how right or perhaps you want to do pale.
After the bulletin promotion
In both cases, there were two undeniable realities about George Robledo. First, he was clearly an extraordinary football player. And the two seemed almost completely forgotten in the adopted country. When I reached Cardiff, I fired my laptop to see if a book was written about George, because I partially wanted to read one and partly (more, more, of course) I felt a sudden search and dreamed of going myself.
There was no such book. That’s why I went, at that stage, I decided to reveal the treasure that was blind but George Robledo for exactly what I was doing at that stage. The capture of revealing a long hidden thing, as itard Carter describes the content of Tutlukhamun’s grave at first sight, you may have a chance for all the “wonderful things” as well as abundant heart. And so he would prove it with George. At the age of six, he and his two brothers were abandoned by their father on the day when the Robledo family was sailing from Chile to start a new life in England. TED, who will be a professional footballer and sign for Newcastle, was later killed in the mysterious conditions in the Middle East, his body was thrown into the bay from an oil tanker. He did not know that George was the result of a secret meeting in Hull between his mother and father, who came out of his life in the fall of a hat in Chile years ago. The baby was abandoned by his mother and grew up in a child’s house.
And nevertheless, George never saw himself as a victim, surrounded by poverty and worked in a Yorkshire mine during the Second World War. As a young man, for Barnsley, Inside Forward, his creative features turned him into a local hero and transferred to Newcastle in 1949. The following year, when he met at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, he became the first football league player from the British Islands from outside the British Islands. In 1951, George defeated Newcastle’s Blackpool 2-0 in Wembley, while he became the first South American to play in the FA Cup final. Twelve months later, Magpies scored a single goal as he saw Arsenal to protect the cup. In 1953, with the desire to travel and the maximum wage that is still in force in British football, George returned to Chile to sign the country’s most successful club Colo-Colo to double its weekly income.
George’s only child to quote Elizabeth Robledo: “For someone born in the Atacama Desert, probably the most dry, most unusual place in the world and I don’t think my father missed it.”
Postcards from Santiago – Spencer Vignes’s George Robledo Story was published by Biteback (£ 20). Buy a copy to support the Guardian and the observer Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may be valid.
