Cod Almighty | Article

by Alistair Wilkinson

7 August 2025

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see a You Tube clip on their phone, Keiran Green's Miracle of Harrogate gives life to you and me.

In March 2025, Kieran Green scored the kind of goal that clichés are made of: it capped a season of rebirth and his second arrival as a footballer as he was converted from a defensive to an attacking midfielder. Couple this with the old adage, if a Premier League player had scored it, it's all we'd be talking about for years - and if it was an English Premier League player, we'd expect a call from the palace and Charles to hand out a gong or two.

Arrivals don't come much bigger than David Beckham's 1996 goal from his own half against Wimbledon. It was the announcement of his arrival as a footballing superstar and the first step on his road to a knighthood on the opening day of that season. Just 21 years old, that moment marked him as the man for a new generation of football fans who wanted to see the game on the pitch, on the catwalk and on the arm of a Spice Girl.

In 2025, a 27-year-old Keiran Green, playing for Town in League Two, in a fixture away at Harrogate, put Beckham in the shade with an even more impressive finish from his own half. While he may have been six years older, he was a man experiencing his first season of a personal renaissance after Grimsby's head coach, David Artell, had converted him from the archetypal 'Brexit 6', a classic FC25 CDM – peak stat: stamina – to a not-quite-classy-but-certainly-not-classless 10. A CAM who could get up and down the field, work the opposition, run through brick walls and still find the time and space for late runs into the box and an outside of the boot cross onto Danny Rose's head. That latter example was against Wimbledon, just to show that the footballing gods do make sure that things align when their caprice allows.

Town fans' own capricious natures were tested to the full at the end of the 23/24 season when Artell first experimented with Green in his more advanced role. Guffaws were the most common response at the end of another season that had seen another survival battle against another drop to the National League. Green's attempts to play between the lines and link up play were met with derision, and many assumed he would be one of the first out of the door that summer.

But he stayed at the club, in the first 11 and at the front of a midfield three. August saw strange times as the combative Brexiter tried to be creative, and the silky smooth but rather slight George McEachran glided around in front of the defence. Strange times indeed, but Green quickly came up to speed, making runs, finding passes and discovering that the final third does have a scruff of the neck he could grab. By the time he assisted Rose with that audacious cross in the November he was already a firm fan favourite - and McEachran would go on to win supporters' player of the year. Capricious, certainly - and that's the way we like it!

'Greeny' quickly became the player who transcended the petty considerations of winning or losing. Every game was two games: one in which 11 played 11 and another in which Green was the star of his own show. His renewal, his growth and his grit now sparkled like diamonds; a footballing Pokémon, Town fans certainly chose him, and, away at Harrogate, he evolved. How to describe that goal? A goal so wonderful, so incredible that it writes its own Shakespearian sonnet? What words are enough? Calculated, opportunistic, clever, bold. Awesome is a word too often used but fits perfectly here. And it was certainly audacious. Thrilling comes close yet is somehow inadequate. How can a pair of syllables, two tiny, clipped vowels, ever capture the flight of that ball?

Perfect fits very nicely. Like a scientist plotting a moonshot, drawing their curves and calculating their angles, a white-coated arm flashing white chalk across a blackboard, zooming blue dry-wipe ink across a shining white surface, programming a perfect consistency of light curving across a screen, constructing an arch of millimetre-perfect trajectory in a 3D simulator. Green saw, measured, executed.

Elating works too. A moment like that will make fans smile for a long time, a simple uncomplicated smile at the memory of something wonderful, joyous; another of those moments that already feel unreal, blissful, like something that was instantly a memory, a lucid dream from childhood that's as clear now as it was that night before a big day at school, a day that was huge in a fan's life, forgotten now, blanked except for that dream, that moment of perfect elation that hangs in the galleries of fans' memories.

Destructive gives it an aggression that it deserves. An arrow shot to arc over the front ranks of cannon fodder to strike at the heart of the enemy. A surface to air missile blasted from a modern military battery, Green flicking the switches to make it happen, guiding the rocket with unerring accuracy to explode in the Harrogate goal, ripping the net to shreds and burning the Sulphurites, leaving them ashen, heads in hands, shocked and awed by the devastating majesty of the strike.

Magical will perhaps be the eventual go-to adjective when we look back on this in the decades to come. There was something fantastical about the flight of the ball, hit from so far and still gaining speed, steered into the net as if bewitched, beguiled, spellbound, the ball on a broomstick, on a carpet, a dragon, a hippogriff, a phoenix rising from the ashes of the surface to air missile, leaving even the Harrogate supporters stunned, open-mouthed, hands on their heads in disbelief. Don't @ me. If ever an action deserved a mixed metaphor, then this is it.

Soaring is lovely, probably the perfect word to describe the movement of the ball, a mimesis, a seminal moment that has invented the word itself – when birds first spread their wings, Green hollowed their bones to make them lighter and blew the winds that lifted them higher; when DaVinci first sketched his designs for flying machines it was Green who sharpened his pencils; when the Wright brothers first flew, Green was waiting with their in-flight meal. Green didn't simply shoot, he launched the ball, gave it flight, gave it wings, like a god bestowing a gift on an inanimate thing, a sphere of polyurethane panels stitched together with nylon threads, a thing destined to rot, imbuing it with life for 3.4 seconds and in that succinct eternity gave it and Green immortality.

The now 28-year-old is perhaps not destined to follow in Beckham's footsteps up to the palace, the catwalk will not shudder beneath his booted feet and Spice Girls are in short supply these days, but his renaissance is confirmed and he has at the very least taken his first steps towards a new card for FC26, the letters CAM sitting proudly next to his smiling face. And surely someone, somewhere is writing a sonnet to celebrate the goal and the player.