The Premier League doesn’t have much hidden treasure. All the great stories, goals, games and meltdowns are on show in an inescapable digital museum. But there are a few unnoticed gems, particularly from the years before virality and saturation. One of the best came in the first week of the Premier League, on 19 August 1992, when Mark Robins scored a goal that even a perfect technician like Zinedine Zidane could not have bettered.
There was no goal of the month back then (that resumed in September 1992), no player of the month (August 1994), no Sky Sports News (1998), no football on the internet. Even so, it is still slightly odd that Robins’s goal went under the radar because many of the great goals of the first Premier League season are regularly replayed. Dalian Atkinson and the fella with the umbrella; umpteen marvellous team goals from the criminally underrated Ron Atkinson’s criminally forgotten Aston Villa; Ryan Giggs leaving even the great Barry Davies lost for words; and Eric Cantona playing a game of his own.
Perhaps it was because it was little Norwich, relegation favourites, and particularly because the season had not really got going. Even the newspaper coverage was sparse – most of the broadsheets did not have a match report of Norwich’s 2-1 win over Chelsea at Carrow Road.
Natural born finisher
The story of Robins, Sir Alex Ferguson and the FA Cup doesn’t need to be told again. What is also worth recalling is that, later on in that 1989-90 season, he scored five goals in the four consecutive wins that probably saved United from relegation. There was considerable excitement about Robins’s eerily calm, almost supernatural finishing; some suggested he should be taken to Italia 90 as a wildcard. That didn’t happen but in June he was part of the England under-21s team that won the prestigious Toulon tournament. Their campaign included a 7-3 victory over France, winners of five of the previous six tournaments, in which Robins scored five (F-I-V-E).
Ferguson liked Robins and called him the best finisher at the club, but he preferred multi-purpose strikers such as Mark Hughes and Brian McClair, and a team that spread the goals around. In Ferguson’s first 15 years at United, before he signed Ruud van Nistelrooy, only two players scored 20 league goals in a season: McClair in 1987-88 and Dwight Yorke in 1999-2000.
Apart from a short spell at the start of 1990-91, when Robins was picked ahead of his boyhood hero Hughes, he never again had a decent run in the side. Ferguson had not yet pioneered squad rotation across all competitions and in 1991-92 Robins played only two league games. He asked for a transfer and, after almost joining Dynamo Dresden, eventually went to Norwich for £800,000 just before the start of the Premier League.
Norwich, tipped for relegation by most, put together the most charming and intrepid title challenge. Although comparisons to Leicester are legitimate, there was one enormous difference. Whereas Leicester are streetwise and cagey, Norwich were a passing team who had the naive innocence of the American tourist in Trainspotting. They suffered a few beltings as a result, most notably a 7-1 defeat at Blackburn, but their attitude also enabled them to come from behind to win on a number of occasions. In the first month of the season alone they recovered from 2-0 to win at Arsenal and in the return with Chelsea.
Robins scored twice in both games, the first at Highbury on the opening day of the season, when he came on as a substitute and changed the game. After that match, Mike Walker, the Norwich manager, compared his “awareness and execution” to those of Jimmy Greaves and Gerd Müller. His finishing had precision, serenity, swagger – and flair. His second goal at Arsenal was an outstanding chip after Tony Adams was caught in two minds because of the new backpass law.
At United, Robins had demonstrated a liking for chips and lobs and finishes with the outside of the foot. Four days after the win at Arsenal, in the home win against Chelsea, he went one better with a delicious volleyed lob with the outside of the right foot. It was a masterpiece of technique that belongs alongside similar goals from Alessandro Del Piero, Xavi and Juan Sebastián Verón.
It is not just the skill that stands out but the certainty and the conceit. This, remember, was a time when there were hardly any overseas players, and using the outside of the foot was liable to earn you a yellow card for getting ideas above your station.
The story of Norwich’s 1992-93 season – of the birdshit kit and finishing third with a negative goal difference – doesn’t need to be retold either. Dan Brigham has kindly written the definitive piece for us. Robins scored 11 by the start of December, including Sky’s first live Premier League hat-trick, in a 3-2 win at Oldham in November. At that stage United were 10th, with 14 goals from 15 games. Robins had scored nine on his own.
When he scored again in a 2-1 win over Wimbledon at the start of December, Norwich were eight points clear at the top. But they lost their next match 1-0 at Old Trafford, the first of five games without a goal. Although they recovered and were top at the end of March, Robins’ goals dried up: he scored only four in the league from December to May. That drought continued at the start of 1993-94, to the point where he was dropped. He had just won his place back when he suffered a bad knee-ligament injury during the famous 2-1 win at Bayern Munich. Robins limped off after 15 minutes, having fallen awkwardly in a challenge with Jan Wouters.
He did not play again until April, and found the world had moved on in his absence. Walker, his No1 fan, went to Everton, and Chris Sutton and Efan Ekoku had emerged as a powerful strike partnership. Walker’s replacement, John Deehan, did not rate Robins as highly and sold him to Leicester later that year.
Robins was never quite as sharp or confident after his knee injury, and when Martin O’Neill took over at Leicester he preferred muscular forwards such as Emile Heskey, Steve Claridge and Ian Marshall. (Heskey and Claridge, by the way, produced another bit of unnoticed treasure against Manchester United in the Coca-Cola Cup in 1996-97.) Robins helped Leicester to win the Coca-Cola Cup that season: he scored the winner at Ipswich in the quarter-final, when O’Neill had a hunch that an old Norwich boy might do something, and came off the bench in both the final and the replay against Middlesbrough.
He was an impact player at best, however, and continued to drift around the leagues at home and abroad until, in his 30s, he had a very happy spell at Rotherham. Robins scored 24 league goals in his first season to help them into what is now the Championship, and added 15 the following year to keep them up. For one of his last tricks, he scored the goal that all but ended Ipswich’s play-off hopes in 2003. After spells at Sheffield Wednesday and Burton, he retired at 35 and went into management two years later.
With hindsight, and particularly a knowledge of what happened with squad rotation, he regrets not waiting at Old Trafford. “To be honest I don’t think I properly grew up until I was 30 and I used to have kneejerk reactions to things like being left out of the side, which didn’t help me at all,” he told United’s website in 2006. “If I had my time all over again there would be a lot I would do differently. I know how difficult it was – especially as Mark Hughes and Brian McClair were always fit – but I should have stuck it out for another two years to see what unfolded.”
At least the move to Norwich gave him some of the happiest memories of his career – and one of the Premier League’s great forgotten goals.
