December 21 – Thirteen Goal Thriller

LET’S get straight to the point, the Second Division game held on this day in 1957 between Charlton Athletic and Huddersfield Town was one of the classic matches of all time.

Huddersfield were managed by Bill Shankly and he was keen to keen to get his side promoted back to the top-flight from which they had recently been relegated. The team travelled down to the Valley to take on a Charlton side in a similar situation but no one involved predicted the amazing game that was to take place that afternoon.

Huddersfield right half Ken Taylor said Shanks’ pre-match team talk was pretty simple. “Bill just walked around the table, telling us how good we were,” he said. “ ‘Charlton? They’re not fit to be on the same park.’ He was a great motivator. That was his greatest quality.”

Shanks and his players were given a boost on 17 minutes when Charlton captain and centre-half Derek Ufton dislocated his shoulder and had to come off. In the days before substitutes the Addicks were forced to play the vast majority of the match with just ten men.

The numerical advantage began to show and by half time the away side were 2-0 up and looking good. As the half time whistle went some of the home fans, dispirited by the score line and perhaps thinking a come back looked unlikely given they were a man down, decided they had had enough of standing in the drizzle and went home. What a mistake.

As the Charlton players regrouped in the dressing room left winger Johnny Summers changed into a new pair of boots and was moved to play up front for the second period. It would prove to be a masterstroke and within three minutes of the restart he had halved the deficit when he scored from a miss-hit shot off his weaker right foot. Game on.

Town were obviously keen to kill the game off and on any other day they would have as they raced into a 5-1 lead to apparently crush any hopes of a Charlton come back. But the Addicks were not giving up just yet and immediately replied through Buck Ryan and another from Johnny Summers, again off his right foot and this time in off the post. 5-3. Ten minutes later, he completed his hat-trick, blasting a right-foot shot past the diving Huddersfield goalkeeper, Sandy Kennon. 5-4.

Only one thing was on Summers’ mind now and ten minutes later he scored the equaliser to make it 5-5 as the Charlton fans went bonkers in the stands. Still Summers wasn’t finished and in the 81st minute he hit yet another goal past the shellshocked Huddersfield defence to take the score to 6-5.

Huddersfield hit back on the 86th minute, scoring an equaliser on the muddy pitch to make it 6-6 as the fans of both clubs looked on in disbelief at what was unfolding in front of them, but incredibly it was not over yet.

With just seconds remaining the ball went across the field and the Huddersfield right back, Tony Conwell, moved through the mud to intercept it. “He had it all nicely covered,” Taylor said, “and he just slipped. He fell. Bang! And that was it.” Ryan met the ball perfectly and Charlton had won an absolutely astonishing match. There was pandemonium in the stands as the crowd hailed their heroes, in particular Johnny Summers who had scored five goals, and all on his weaker right foot. He told the press: “I’ll keep these boots for the rest of my life.” Sadly, that was not to be for long as he got leukaemia and he was dead within five years.

Ray Wilson, the Huddersfield left back and future World Cup winner said: “If you wrote a book about that match you’d get halfway through and you’d say, ‘What a load of b*****ks!’”

Huddersfield’s shocked manager tried to make sense of what he had witnessed: “Shankly was pacing up and down in the train,” Wilson said. “He was muttering to himself: ‘It’s just one of those things . . . It’s history . . .’ He was trying to sort it out in his mind, how it had happened.”

“He didn’t speak to anybody for days afterwards,” Ken Taylor said. “We had a good side. But when you played in muddy conditions like that, all sorts of things could happen. In many ways, football wasn’t as skilful a game as it is now, but it could be more exciting.”

But the day belonged to Charlton and the fans would not leave the ground, chanting for their heroes to reappear which they duly did to receive the applause and cheers that such a dramatic come back justified.

Phew, breathless stuff. There is obviously something in the stars that favours this date in terms of goals, as there was another high scoring match also on this day. More from us tomorrow folks, but have a look at another famous day in Charlton’s history below.