A guilt-ridden footballer organised a rematch between two primary schools 50 years after he scored a "dubious" equaliser to help clear his conscience.
Graeme Jones, a former Royal Navy training instructor, admitted shoving a goalkeeper with his hands on the ball "five yards" over the goal line to earn a controversial draw in a match played in September 1972.
Mr Jones, 60, said he was determined to "put right a wrong" when he learned of the result's lasting "impact" on his aggrieved local rivals, and spent 18 months assembling the same line-up from the Gayton primary school team who took on St Peter's C of E school in the Wirral.
Mr Jones's former PE teacher, Alan Jones, who had awarded his team their contentious equaliser, was given the honour of observing the coin toss before officiating the match for the first five minutes of play on Saturday.
The teams recreated an old squad photo that had appeared in a local paper when they were ten years old and after the 60-minute match, Mr Jones's rivals finally settled the score with a 6-2 win at Heswall football club's ground.
He said: "We got stuffed because they had to bring on a couple of ringers. But my demons have been put to bed and my conscience is clear now, and we would have still lost regardless.
"As I said before, if we lose, we lose, and I wanted to turn a wrong into a right. It was very, very surreal to do the official photo as we wanted to capture it more or less exactly as it was at school, 50 years apart.
"And when we walked onto the pitch, we formed up in our original positions as well."
Mr Jones, from Gayton in the Wirral, Merseyside, came up with the idea for the match during the first lockdown in 2020 after finding his old team portrait.
He was surprised when his neighbour Craig Allen - who scored the opposition's only goal - told him that he not only remembered the match but had never forgiven him for the foul.
And the two teams played with a raffle set up to help buy Mr Jones's old school a new team kit.
Mr Jones said: "I felt guilty about the fact that the game finished, but I wasn't aware of the impact.
"I was a centre half back in the day, and I just came up and bulldozed my way through, and Alan, our PE teacher, gave the goal. You wouldn't get away with it today."
He added: "I had to bully a few people into doing it. And then it was a case of 'I've got these guys, you've got to play - you're irreplaceable, I need you there', and I got all 11.
"The opposition got a team together, but I gave them some leeway on their side in terms of age.
"I was amazed to find that Alan Jones is still alive and is fit and healthy in his early to mid-80s."
Although the team of golden oldies wouldn't attempt another match, Mr Jones said they would continue to meet up and renew their bonds now their long-awaited grudge match had been played.
