The Alston Turn: How a Socceroo Beat Cruyff by Five Days

The facts of this one have been in order for fifty years. Almost nobody outside Australia has ever heard them.

The story happens on a Friday night in Hamburg, in a stadium that’s more empty than full, in front of a crowd of roughly 15,800 people who have mostly come to have a look at the curiosity from the bottom of the world.

It’s 14 June 1974. Australia are playing their first match at a World Cup, against East Germany, at the Volksparkstadion. They’ll lose 2–0. Col Curran will put through his own net just before the hour, in circumstances still argued about by people who were there, and Joachim Streich will finish the job around the seventy-second minute. Nobody will write a song about it.

Then, somewhere in the middle of that game, Adrian Alston — a Preston-born striker who had come to Australia six years earlier and stayed — receives the ball with his back to a defender, shapes as if to strike it, drags it behind his standing leg instead, turns 180 degrees and goes the other way.

Five days later, in Dortmund, Johan Cruyff will do the identical thing to a Swedish defender named Jan Olsson, and the move will be named after him forever.

01The man in the egg-packing factory

Adrian Alston was born in Preston on 6 February 1949, which is about as English a set of coordinates as you can get. He came through the youth ranks at Preston North End, where his older brother had already made a hundred-odd appearances, and by his late teens he was going nowhere in particular. Luton Town’s club historians note that he was working in an egg-packing factory at the time, which is the sort of detail you couldn’t invent and shouldn’t try to.

Then a man named Jimmy Kelly, who had spent four seasons playing in Australia and was planning to go back, took a look at him at non-league Fleetwood and made him an offer. Alston was on about five pounds a week. Kelly offered thirty, and a place at South Coast United in the New South Wales league. Kelly also told him the heavy English grounds didn’t suit a player who wanted to run with the ball, and that he’d end up playing for Australia. Alston has said he thought that second part was a joke.

He landed in Australia on 28 January 1968, telling his fiancée Doreen he’d give it a season. Three weeks later he wrote and told her to come and see the place for herself. They married quickly. She wouldn’t see her family for around six years. If you have ever moved a long way for football, or for someone who moved a long way for football, you’ll recognise the shape of that decision precisely.

The nickname arrived at St George, courtesy of teammate Attila Abonyi, and it was about heading, not hair — “Noddy”, for a tall, rangy striker who attacked crosses and lived off the long throws Ray Richards launched at him. That’s the part most people get wrong when they hear the name. He was not a novelty. He was a target man with unusually good feet, which is exactly the combination that makes what happened in Hamburg less surprising than it sounds.

02A team of part-timers, and the group from hell

The 1974 Socceroos were not professionals in any sense a modern player would recognise. Under Rale Rasic they had qualified the hard way — through a qualification path where topping your group was the only thing that counted, ending with Jimmy Mackay’s thunderbolt against South Korea in Hong Kong. Then they were drawn into Group 1 with the host nation, East Germany and Chile.

At the time of the World Cup, Alston was on the books of Safeway United — South Coast United, renamed after a takeover by a motor company. He was a semi-professional in a state league, about to be marked by men who played eighty-odd internationals.

Australia lost to East Germany, lost 3–0 to West Germany in Hamburg with Overath, Cullmann and Gerd Müller scoring, then drew 0–0 with Chile in West Berlin — the match in which Harry Williams came on as a substitute to become the first recognised Indigenous player to represent Australia at a World Cup.

Three games, no goals, one point, and home.

It should have changed Australian football forever. It didn’t. Football went back to its parallel universe of ethnic clubs and state leagues and waited another thirty-one years.

03What actually happened in Hamburg

Alston’s own account is consistent across every interview he has given about it, and it’s refreshingly unromantic. He used the trick occasionally, he says — not often. He tried it a couple of times against East Germany, and on one of them it came off. He turned his marker inside out.

And then, in the way of 1974 football, the defender simply chopped him down.

The marker was Konrad Weise of Carl Zeiss Jena, who would go on to win 86 caps for East Germany and was, by any measure, a serious defender. Alston has described him as one of the best markers in European football at the time, which is his assessment rather than an official ranking, but it isn’t a wild one.

The footage exists. It has been posted, reposted, clipped and shared by everyone from FIFA’s own social accounts to the Socceroos, usually under some variation of the joke that in a parallel universe it’s called the Alston turn.

Which is the correct joke, and also — and this is where the story gets more interesting than a trivia answer — not quite the same as saying he invented it.

04Dortmund, and the version everybody knows

On 19 June, the Netherlands played Sweden at the Westfalenstadion. It was, by common consent, one of the flattest games of the tournament: 0–0, nothing much happening. Arie Haan dropped a long ball out of the sky, Cruyff killed it, and then did the thing.

Accounts differ slightly on the exact minute — some records say the 22nd, others the 24th — which is a small reminder that even the most watched ten seconds in football history has a bit of fog around it.

Olsson’s reaction has become part of the folklore in its own right. He has spoken over the years about knowing immediately that something historic had happened to him, and about spending the rest of the match hoping Cruyff wouldn’t do it again. Football is the only game that makes a man permanently famous for losing a duel, and it does it without malice.

Cruyff, for his part, was adamant to the end of his life that the move was improvised. He said it was never practised in training, that it came to him in the moment because it was the best available solution to the problem he was in. “It was spontaneous,” he said.

05The claim, taken seriously

Here’s Alston’s version, which he has told on Australian podcasts, on Football Australia broadcasts and to SBS: he did it first, on 14 June, on television; Cruyff was watching; and five days later Cruyff did it in Dortmund. He has gone further, saying that a teammate later relayed to him that Cruyff had been watching the Australia game in his hotel room and told his roommate he reckoned he could do that.

Now: how much weight does that carry? Let’s be honest about it, because the story is better when you are.

What’s solid. The chronology is not in dispute. Australia played on 14 June and the Netherlands played on 19 June; the footage of Alston’s turn exists and has been circulated by FIFA and Football Australia themselves. Within that tournament, Alston did it first. That much is simply true.

What’s an assertion. The hotel-room story is second-hand at best — relayed to Alston, years later, about an unnamed roommate. It may well be accurate. It cannot be verified, and Alston himself frames it as something he was told rather than something he witnessed.

What’s flatly contradicted. The idea that Cruyff spent five days rehearsing runs directly into Cruyff’s own repeated insistence, including in his autobiography, that he had never practised the move and improvised it on the spot. One of these accounts is wrong. There is no neutral evidence that settles it.

What Alston has never actually claimed. That he invented it. He’s said openly that he used the trick occasionally before 1974 — which means it already existed in his own repertoire, and almost certainly in others’.

Football skills rarely have a single parent. Somebody, somewhere, dragged a ball behind their standing leg on a Sunday morning pitch decades before either man was born, and nobody filmed it.

06Why the name stuck to Cruyff

The honest answer has nothing to do with priority and everything to do with amplification, and Alston — to his enormous credit — has said so himself, with a laugh.

The Dutch went to the final. Australia went home after three games. One team was the most talked-about side on earth playing the most talked-about football; the other was a squad of part-timers whose own country’s television coverage barely acknowledged them.

A move gets a name when the right person does it in front of the right number of people at the right moment in a story that the world is already invested in. Cruyff wasn’t just a great player doing a trick. He was the visual shorthand for an entire philosophy, in a tournament where that philosophy was the story. The turn became a piece of evidence for a bigger argument.

Alston’s turn, five days earlier, was a lovely thing that happened during a 2–0 defeat.

That’s not a conspiracy. It’s how culture works, and it’s the same reason a Sydney kid in 1974 could name half the Dutch team and not one of the eleven Australians who walked out at the Volksparkstadion.

07The rest of a very good career

The 1974 tournament made Alston, briefly, a wanted man. West Germany’s coach Helmut Schön reportedly told a pre-match press conference: “We have nothing to fear from Australia... apart from Adrian Alston” — a line preserved in FIFA’s own archive and one of the great backhanded compliments in Australian sport.

Offers came from Hertha Berlin, Hamburg and Eintracht Frankfurt. He agreed terms with Hertha: a forty-thousand-dollar signing-on fee, wages, an apartment while he got settled.

Then Luton Town came in late — they’d remembered him scoring against them on an Australian tour — and Alston, thinking about family, about Doreen, about not having to learn German, chose Luton. They’d just been promoted to the old First Division.

He has called it “the biggest mistake I ever made” ever since.

He started well — scored at Highbury, hit the post, got noticed. Then winter came, Kenilworth Road turned into a bog, and a player whose entire game was running with the ball found himself trying to dribble through mud. Luton were relegated and ran out of money, at times failing to pay him.

Beckenbauer, meeting him later in America, asked him bluntly why he’d gone to a country that hadn’t even qualified for the World Cup, where nobody had seen him play.

Cardiff City paid £20,000 for him and covered the wages Luton owed. He loved it there — scored twice on debut, became the first post-war Cardiff player to score an FA Cup hat-trick, won the Welsh Cup in 1976, and on 15 September 1976 became the first Australian to score in European competition, against Dinamo Tbilisi. Then Tampa Bay Rowdies in the NASL, where he was unveiled to the crowd by arriving in a helicopter, because it was the NASL and that’s what you did.

It ended badly, as these things often do. His studs caught in the turf as an opponent hit his knee. He was told it was strained ligaments. Fourteen weeks later, with no improvement, he paid for a Harley Street specialist himself, who told him the ligament had been torn clean off the bone.

He was in his prime and he was finished.

• Born6 February 1949, Preston, England. Arrived in Australia 28 January 1968.
• Australia1969–1977. Football Australia records 62 matches and 17 goals, of which 39 were full “A” internationals. Other databases list lower totals depending on which fixtures are counted — the discrepancy is a definition, not a dispute.
• ClubsSouth Coast United, St George, Safeway United, Luton Town, Cardiff City, Canberra City (guest), Tampa Bay Rowdies.
• CoachingWollongong (1983, 2005), Corrimal Rangers, Bulli, and 13 seasons at Port Kembla from 1991 — 26 trophies, five league titles, seven grand finals.

08Wollongong, and the point of all this

He went home. Not to Preston — he tried that, ran a hotel in Blackpool with his brother for four months, and came straight back. Home meant the Illawarra.

And then he did the thing that makes this story worth telling properly rather than as a bit of trivia: he coached local football for about two decades and won everything there was to win in it. Port Kembla, from 1991 to 2004, collected twenty-six trophies under him. He has spent roughly forty years working with people with intellectual disability, and has said it gives him as much satisfaction as scoring did.

In 2023, the journalist Philip Micallef wrote his biography — Noddy: The Untold Story of Adrian Alston, published by Fair Play Publishing, launched at Gleebooks in Glebe to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the win over South Korea that got Australia to Germany. Among the things it covers is the day Alston out-manoeuvred his own captain, Peter Wilson, to get hold of Franz Beckenbauer’s shirt after the West Germany match.

He still has it. A German museum has apparently enquired, because they don’t have a green Beckenbauer jersey from 1974 and he does.

The line of his that sits with me isn’t about Cruyff at all. It’s the one where he points out, without any particular bitterness, that a twenty-year-old Australian football fan has no reason to know who he is — that his own grandchildren didn’t quite believe he’d played for Australia until he showed them the clips.

In England or the Netherlands or Germany, men who did what he did are wheeled out at half time for the rest of their lives. Here, for a long time, we simply mislaid them.

09So whose turn is it?

Cruyff’s, and that’s fine.

Names in football aren’t awarded by a tribunal reviewing timestamps. They’re awarded by attention, and attention in June 1974 was pointed at an orange shirt with two stripes on the sleeve rather than a gold one in a half-full stadium in Hamburg. Alston knows this better than anyone; he’s the one who makes the joke about it.

But the record is the record. On 14 June 1974, five days before the most famous version, an Australian did it in a World Cup match and got kicked for the privilege. Football Australia has the footage. FIFA has posted it themselves.

It happened.

It’s almost too neat, this being Australian football’s contribution to the global vocabulary: a piece of skill that was right, was first, and went completely unremarked. We got there before anyone was watching. We’ve been doing versions of that ever since — and every so often, thirty-one years, four months and twenty-four days later, somebody finally looks up.