Long before the days of wall-to-wall coverage of football, just over 60 years ago, Peter Osgood scored one of Chelsea’s best-ever goals in a win up at Turf Moor. Well, at least that is what we’ve been told. Unless you were one of the 23,825 fans in attendance that day, you’ll just have to take our word for it…

Sometimes the pure majesty, skill, technique, teamwork or drama involved can embed a goal so powerfully in the memory that it is instantly recalled when the occasion demands.

It is Monday 18 August 2014, the start of the second season of Jose Mourinho’s comeback reign, a little after 8.20pm, and Chelsea are drawing 1-1 with hosts Burnley. Eden Hazard picks up the ball midway into the Clarets’ half, weaves past two players and is baulked by a third, beats two more off balance and squares to Branislav Ivanovic on the right. The Serb looks up and loops a cross to Cesc Fabregas inside the ‘D’.

On his debut in royal blue, the Spanish midfielder shapes as if to inject power but in contrast meets the ball on the half-volley and produces the deftest killer pass you’ll ever see. It is centimetre-perfect for the inrushing Andre Schurrle, who finishes clinically inside the six-yard box and wheels away to be mobbed by his team-mates.

The Blues eventually won 3-1 to kickstart a fifth title success, and people have purred over that Schurrle goal for days, months, years. Not least on a Burnley fans’ chat page thread entitled: ‘The best goal ever scored against Burnley.’

The demographic in the internet’s various forms can be self-selecting towards youth, and many eulogised about Schurrle’s recent offering. ‘That was the one that jumped straight into my head. It was an amazing ball, and great one-touch finish,’ wrote one. ‘The Fabregas pass is the best I’ve ever seen on the Turf,’ suggested another. ‘Chelsea goal with Fabregas pass probably still the best I have seen personally,’ someone concluded.

Yet tucked away among the pages were offerings of a different goal for the Londoners in that corner of Lancashire, of a totally different vintage. One for the Facebook, not Twitter (now X) generation.

‘Peter Osgood on t’Turf early 60s,’ someone recalled. ‘Carried the ball from the edge of his own area and beat six or seven players before scoring from the edge of our area.’ ‘Got to say it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen from an opposing player. Fantastic goal,’ agreed another older supporter.

Ossie’s sensational strike happened 60 years ago, on 29 January 1966, in a 2-1 victory. (Oddly, it was the fourth of five straight wins, home and away, by the same scoreline.) Decades later there were Burnley fans at Turf Moor, like those in the chat room, happy to regale visiting Chelsea fans: ‘You’re too young to remember the best goal I’ve ever seen by a visiting player…’

Sadly no footage has ever emerged, yet it is part of the stadium’s folklore, gradually fading. For those who were not there – and only 23,825 witnessed it live in 1966 – we have to look to the archives for help on what the goal actually looked like.

First, though, let’s think about the player himself. Ossie was only 18 years old at the time and making his 19th appearance in Tommy Doherty’s ‘Diamonds’ side. The Turf Moor goal was part of his second career brace – the first, in the League Cup, had come on his debut, 100 miles further north, at Workington 14 months earlier.

As 1966 began he was already being described as ‘England’s finest discovery for many years’, by Scotland’s Sunday Post, no less. A year earlier, the same correspondent had witnessed Chelsea Juniors thrash Drumchapel Amateurs of Glasgow 9-2 in a friendly – Ossie accounting for five of our goals.

Now he listed the developing attributes of this ‘lanky youngster’: a terrific shot with both feet, ability in the air, perfect balance, a rare turn of speed, and willingness to fight for the ball. Ossie’s Scottish manager Docherty reckoned he ‘has more natural talent than Tom Finney’ – a reference to the famous England superstar, a former team-mate of Doc’s at Preston.

As veteran football reporter Ken Jones put it, Osgood could ‘illuminate the game with his genius.’ In fact, his precocious game intelligence, sashaying, fire, vigour and eye for goal encapsulated the glamour of the game, and epitomised the brio of mid-Sixties Chelsea.

So, back to Turf Moor and an injury-disrupted first half in a match that would last a very modern 99 minutes. Just before the break, home full-back John Angus nipped in and opened the scoring. Then Ossie stole the limelight: ‘He scored two goals, and one of them will never be forgotten,’ observed John Leonard in the Sunday People.

The equaliser was a point-blank conversion from a Bobby Tambling corner in first-half stoppage time. The second, 10 minutes after half-time, was much less prosaic. Think Hazard at his exhilarating best but standing 6ft 2in tall. On a ploughed field of a pitch. Against defenders with licence to fell.

‘Osgood picked up the ball in the centre circle,’ Leonard continued, ‘and cruised past three defenders in a perfectly-controlled 40-yard dash, before crashing an unstoppable shot past Adam Blacklaw.’

For Edgar Turner at the Sunday Mirror, Ossie’s goal was ‘one of the greatest of the season’ but a ‘60-yard run in heavy going. First he shrugged off Talbut, then Merrington and Talbut once again, finally to draw out Blacklaw to place his left-foot shot.’

Football sage Brian Glanville had now seen enough to wax lyrical about this amazing Chelsea prospect: ‘He swerves and glides past centre-halves as though they were concrete pillars, 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.’

A summer 1965 tour of Australia had enabled Osgood’s rise. There he proved himself enough for the Doc to move Barry Bridges to the left flank and play the youngster centrally alongside George Graham for the 1965/66 campaign.

The goals against Burnley, second in the table at the time, were part of a run of five in four games across all competitions for the lithe young centre-forward, including opener in one of only two FA Cup victories ever at Anfield. No one remembers that strike, though.

Three months later, in April 1966, Ossie was named in Alf Ramsey’s 40-man England squad for the summer World Cup, though he lost out in the cull.

The 1966/67 season started well, with six in 10 on all fronts for the now 19-year-old. Then, disaster. In October 1966, at Blackpool in the League Cup, a challenge from Emlyn Hughes left the Chelsea striker with a broken leg; he would miss the remainder of the campaign, including the Blues’ FA Cup final defeat by Tottenham.

The player who returned to action in August 1967 was a different animal. Less willowy and swift, but also wilier and more physical, especially with manager Dave Sexton’s clever tactics. He was also more a jack-the-lad showman and his antics in west London nightspots were admiringly reported. Ossie epitomised the team’s sobriquet, ‘Kings of the King’s Road’, himself becoming ‘the King of Stamford Bridge’.

A star by the time 1969/70 came along, he would score 31 times in all competitions. His elegance on the ball was such that one broadcaster juxtaposed Shirley Bassey’s version of the Beatles’ song ‘Something’ (‘something in the way he moves’) with a slow motion clip of Osgood twisting and turning round opposing defenders. That does not happen often.

Ossie disputed much of the talk about how the injury dented his game. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he once mused. ‘But at the time [of the break] I could go past players like they weren’t there. And then later you have a little bit more guile, and more about you. But I played for England in 1970 and got in the squad for the Mexico World Cup that year. And won cups for Chelsea, which was good.’

Indeed: key contributions in those silverware successes – the vital equaliser against Leeds in the 1970 FA Cup final replay at Old Trafford, and goals in the final and replay against Real Madrid in the Cup Winners’ Cup a year later – sealed his legend status.

By the time he left Stamford Bridge for Southampton in 1974, Ossie was such a part of the Chelsea firmament that when he died of a heart attack in March 2006, popular acclaim made him the first and so far only Chelsea player to be honoured with a statue outside the Blues’ stadium.

Many of the 150 times he found the net for the Londoners were screened again and again and admired by millions – not least that replay leveller that broke Leeds’ hearts, watched by 28.5 million Britons.

Ossie’s much more private recollection of the ‘greatest goal you never saw’ that winter’s day at Burnley in 1966 was of simply living in the moment. ‘The whole thing just drew me. I could feel it building up but couldn’t stop.’ Years later, much like in those chat rooms, he would receive letters from Lancashire about it: ‘I’m a Burnley supporter,’ they would write. ‘I was there when you scored the most fantastic goal ever at Turf Moor and we still talk about it today.’

And, no doubt, for years to come yet.

- This article by club historian Rick Glanvill was first published in the official matchday programme in 2024. You can purchase past and future copies of the programme here.