Mark Ricketts might not have played in the biggest game of his long career – the one that will surely define him. The Boreham Wood captain had been out for almost four weeks with a knee injury and he had trained only once, and pretty lightly at that, on the day before the club’s FA Cup fourth-round tie at Bournemouth on 6 February.
The 37-year-old was simply not fit. But he did play, he scored, he ran himself into the ground until his substitution on 87 minutes and Boreham Wood won 1-0 to set up a fifth-round trip to Everton on Thursday night. The fourth round was already uncharted territory for the National League promotion chasers. They are now into a glorious kind of crazy.
