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.
Ricketts was a young professional at Charlton, although he never made a first-team matchday squad. He played seven matches on loan at MK Dons, who were in League One at the time but, since 2006, he has been playing non-league. Three seasons at Ebbsfleet, seven at Woking and now into his sixth at Boreham Wood; all but three spent in the top tier of the non-league game.
It is difficult to overstate Ricketts’ popularity at Boreham Wood. He is generous and humble, and if there was to be a hero against Bournemouth, most people would have wanted it to be him. The holding midfielder is also not known as a prolific scorer. Before Bournemouth, he had six career goals. And so it really is a beautiful thing to hear him relive his moment – the low sidefoot after an unconvincing Bournemouth clearance that had come to him seemingly in slow motion.
“The shot went in pretty slowly, too,” Ricketts says. “It glanced off the post and trickled across the line. There was a lot of waiting. But once I saw it go in, it was just a release of pure euphoria. I can’t even explain the feeling of running off towards our fans.
“I saw my wife, Sheryll, and our daughters, Emilie and Aria, who are eight and four, in the stand, as well. My mate was next to them and he was holding Aria up above his head so she could see.
“Every time I tell the story, it makes me smile and remembering the kids being there … that topped it for me. Hopefully it will live with them forever. I’ll probably have to play it a few times for Aria on TV but I think the eldest will remember it.
“When I went to pick Emilie up from school the next day, her class had made up a little display, saying congratulations and all the kids were clapping. It’s all stuff that makes you well up. At my career stage, you start to think that moments like that are gone and beyond you. So to get it now is amazing.”
What price another one at Goodison Park? The odds are even more ridiculous, not least because Ricketts is in another fitness battle, having damaged the knee again at Torquay on Tuesday of last week. The previous time, he had an injection to reduce the inflammation but that is not an option. The injury is too recent.
“I’d be devastated to miss out,” Ricketts says, but does a veteran of 16 non-league seasons fail a fitness test for Everton? He did a bit of ball work on Tuesday, a bit more on Wednesday. “I really don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes you wake up, especially when you get to my age, and feel awful and the next day you feel a million dollars. I’m just praying.”
Ricketts’ mind goes back to the phone call he had with the Boreham Wood manager, Luke Garrard, after the training session before the Bournemouth tie, which had gone OK but not brilliantly. Garrard told him that he did not care. Ricketts would be leading the team out even if he could last only 15 or 20 minutes.
“He said it was the least I deserved for what I’d done for the club,” Ricketts says. “That sums him up. He’s an incredible man. I felt a bit emotional after that call. It meant the world to me.”
Ricketts has stories to tell from his days at Charlton, who he joined from Wimbledon at 16. Such as the time he played at centre-half for the reserves against an Arsenal team that included Robin van Persie and Nicklas Bendtner. It was Charlton’s golden era in the Premier League and Scott Parker, now the Bournemouth manager, was the star player.
Ricketts trained with the first team and played the odd reserve match with Parker, who visited the Boreham Wood dressing room to congratulate them after the Cup tie. “There was a silence among our whole squad,” Ricketts says. “There was that respect for him straight away. He’s a class act.”
Ricketts had been at Wimbledon from the age of 11 and there was bad blood when, in his words, Charlton “came in and sort of nicked me away”. It went to a tribunal and one of the settlement clauses involved any club that wanted to take him on loan having to make a payment to Wimbledon.
“That was one of the reasons why I ended up going to MK Dons [in November 2005],” Ricketts says. “By then, Wimbledon had become MK Dons and they waived the payment to take me on loan.”
Ricketts returned to Charlton in February 2006 rather than remain at MK Dons for the season, as he had the option to do. He did so mainly to try to get a club for the following season, knowing that Charlton would not keep him on. “A terrible, terrible decision,” Ricketts says. “I should have stayed at MK Dons and got more games under my belt. Finding something permanent never worked out and I ended up at Ebbsfleet.”
Ricketts has been shaped by the non-league, his mentality hardened by it. Away from football, he has become a qualified personal trainer, although he has not taken on clients since the start of the pandemic. It is partly because he is maxed out with his sixth and final year of an Open University degree in Computing and IT with Business. It is dissertation time and he is designing a web application that integrates players’ physiological data – such as that from GPS vests – with information about their wellbeing as collected via questionnaires.
The Everton tie is all that matters at the moment. Boreham Wood will wear a specially designed black away kit to avoid a clash, paid for by their opponents, and it reinforces the uniqueness of the occasion. Ricketts just wants to be a part of it.
