Five minutes before half-time against Real Madrid on a balmy Athens night in May 1971, Ron Harris and Tommy Baldwin combined to feed Peter Osgood, who veered between three defenders and unleashed a low drive that defied the post and nestled inside the net.

Turning, arms aloft, to salute the hundreds of London fans who had stayed the extra two days to see the Cup Winners’ Cup final replayed after a 1-1 draw, Ossie dropped to his knees at the magnitude of the moment.

He had just put his side 2-0 up against Miguel Munoz’s mellowing maestros, the old kings of Europe, and pretty much laid out Chelsea’s claim to the throne.

‘When we play a 4-2-4 formation,’ manager Dave Sexton commented, ‘we are the best in Europe. No one can live with us.’ The son-of-a-prizefighter’s studiously assembled side, throbbing with power, aggression and flair, was personified by Ossie even though he predated its formation.

He had scored in the drawn first game against Los Blancos, netted in every round of the Blues’ successful FA Cup campaign of 1969/70, and brought glamour and thrills to Stamford Bridge since his debut in December 1964. He was a major reason for the Blues reaching unprecedented heights in cup competitions.

‘I always had good balance for a big lad, and I was a good weight as a schoolboy,’ Peter later recalled. ‘I was very thin, and pretty quick and good at it really.’

He captained his school team at seven, then Windsor Boys, and the county team. ‘I had a trial for Reading when I was a young lad, about 15, and nothing materialised from that. So I went and played in local football, and you normally signed apprentice professional at 15 then. But I was 16 and my uncle Bob wrote to Chelsea for a trial without telling me.

‘I got the forms back saying to report to Hendon on a Saturday at about 11.30am.’ He was taken to the Chelsea Youth HQ at the Welsh Harp by his brother and the secretary of Spital Old Boys FC, and confidently approached manager Dickie Foss.

'Mr Foss, I'm Osgood down from Windsor. Is there any chance to play in the first half hour of the trial game, because I’ve got a cup game to play for Spital in the afternoon?' relates Ossie. ‘He said, “Certainly.” And after half an hour I came off, and it was, “Can you sign here?” I actually signed for Chelsea, and it was as simple as that. He’d seen more in half an hour than these people had seen in 15 years.’

‘When I came and played in the youth team, Johnny Boyle was there, Jimmy McCalliog, Peter Houseman, Johnny Hollins. So that was the sort of side you were playing with – it wasn't too hard.’

Powered by Peter’s goals (he scored in all but one round), the young Blues reached the semi-finals of the FA Youth Cup in 1964/65. The senior breakthrough game came during that same season under Sexton’s predecessor, Tommy Docherty, and the 17-year-old scored both in the 2-0 expulsion of Workington from the League Cup that night.

He would go on to find the net 150 times in 380 appearances for the west Londoners. It is a tally that leaves him as the club’s second-highest goalscorer to emerge from the youth scheme.

In the days before widespread TV coverage, the repository of sensational goals was the memories of those present. At Turf Moor, a dwindling band of loyalists still recall one of the greatest goals they ever saw in January 1966 from Ossie, a few weeks shy of his 19th birthday.

As the Guardian reported: ‘Osgood obtained possession well inside his own half and embarked on a serpentine course towards the Burnley goal. He left Merrington, Talbot and Angus strewn in his wake and, as Blacklaw came out, drove it into the net with his left foot.’

The mesmeric dribbles and sheer exuberance of the young goalscorer had football writers eulogising. ‘He swerves and glides past centre-halves as though they were concrete pillars,’ wrote Brian Glanville, ‘lays off the reverse pass with the confidence of a veteran and takes on three or four defenders in turn as centre forwards used to before they became mere battering rams or walls to somebody else’s pass.’ He was even an outside tip to make Alf Ramsey’s England 1966 World Cup squad.

In October 1966, though, a challenge by Blackpool’s Emlyn Hughes changed his career trajectory and meant months of frustration on the sidelines with a broken leg. He returned heavier, less nimble, but with guile and feistiness as compensation.

There was a less professional side to this royal blue hero, though, and while lionised as a playboy, one of the ‘Kings of the King’s Road’, Ossie fell out regularly with Sexton. In 1971, his request for a transfer prompted lengthy demonstrations by fans outside the Bridge.

By 1973, the relationship had fractured completely and Ossie moved on to Southampton, where he would earn another FA Cup winners’ medal. A brief playing return in 1978 proved fruitless, but for many years he was an engaging matchday host in the East Stand. One of his favourite lines was that he was sold to pay for the debt its troubled construction had incurred.

We cannot tell how differently Peter might have progressed without the injury, but there was the hint of something sensational to come before the long lay-off. The player who emerged from it was brilliant enough, of course.

Equally importantly, he connected viscerally with fans, who saw him as their champion on the pitch: the first people he turned to share the emotion when he had beaten a goalkeeper. That, and the importance of his strikes, are the reasons he is the only player immortalised in a statue at Stamford Bridge.

This article was first published in 2022