VICE Sports Player of the Weekend: Richie Allen

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

FA Cup upsets are sometimes called Cinderella stories. It's a footballing fairytale when a small club plays a starring role on a bigger stage, punching above their weight and making every other minnow dream that one day they can pull off a similar shock. On Friday night, Salford City FC wrote their own Cinderella story by beating League 2 side Notts County 2-0 in the first round of the fabled cup competition.

The game received significant fanfare from the BBC, who had recently aired a two-part documentary about the club. It's easy to be cynical about it all – Salford are owned by a group of exceedingly wealthy men with fantastic connections in the football world, which makes them more stable than most seventh-tier sides, and in truth the ability gulf between the two teams is not that vast. But sometimes cynicism gets bloody exhausting, and you just want to enjoy stuff that seems – on the surface at least – to be nice.

So forget what's happening behind the scenes – there were a lot of excellent performances from the Salford side on the pitch, not least their all-hands-on-deck defence. You also have to praise Danny Webber, the veteran striker who netted their first goal (and played a couple of seasons in the Premier League and several in the Championship – there's that cynicism again).

But the man who you cannot help but pick out from the Salford ranks is Richie Allen, the scorer of their incredible second goal. His 73rd minute strike had all the hallmarks of a Cinderella story.

Allen is not a high-level footballer. He's a non-league journeyman whose past clubs include Bamber Bridge, Nelson, and AFC Fylde.

Nor does he look like the sort of person who'd work well alongside a Fairy Godmother. After all, he is a semi-pro footballer. If anything he'd have a Don't-Call-Me-A-Fairy Godfather, a rotund bloke in builder's attire with a shaven head, who instead of waving a wand to grant wishes brandishes a hammer in your direction. "What you want, Richie son? Get the pints in and I'll grant you up some wishes." (There may be a fee afterwards, but it'd be strictly cash-in-hand).

Allen's wish, presumably, was to be the most gifted footballer on the planet. He was granted this. Unfortunately, magic has a shelf life (despite being by its very definition magical, and thus not governed by boring rules like time). So, just as Cinderella's ball gown turned back to rags at midnight, Allen's ability would be short-lived.

He started on the bench, arguably a waste of his temporary status as Lionel Messi's superior. But, with 20 minutes to play, joint-managers Anthony Johnson and Bernard Morley sent him on to replace Webber's knackered 33-year-old legs. Salford were 1-0 up, but really needed a second to feel comfortable.

Three minutes later, Allen did this.

This was not simply, a great goal for a non-league footballer: it was an objectively great goal, one that would still have been considered top-draw had it been scored in the Premier League. For 20 seconds, Allen was as good as he'd always dreamed. Stood amongst the crowd, his Don't-Call-Me-A-Fairy Godfather would have been proud, had he not missed the goal to text a dirty limerick to his mate Vic. It was filthy. We're not even allowed to print it.

Laboured fairytale analogies aside, Allen's goal showed that the incredible ability that earns Premier League stars £200,000 a week exists in almost of us. The difference is that while Sergio Aguero has access to it 365 days a year, the Richie Allens of this world latch on to it for just fleeting moments. If you watch non-league football enough, you'll see that many of the players can be excellent – there will be sublime touches, inch-perfect tackles, and stunning goals. They just don't pull it off nearly as often as is required at the top level. Richie Allen will never score a goal like that again; Lionel Messi will do it every few weeks.

Perhaps Allen's greatest fortune was that the game was live on the BBC, and that it was captured on camera at all. A regular league game would not have been committed to film; if Allen had done that on a Saturday afternoon against Sutton Coldfield Town, only the few hundred people present would have seen it happen. And would anyone have believed their wide-eyed descriptions of how special it was?

Fortunately, the capacity crowd at Moor Lane was joined by a sizeable TV audience, so Allen can watch his greatest moment again and again until he can see those 20 seconds of football with his eyes closed, frame by perfect frame, a reminder of the awesome talent he was momentarily granted access to. For showing us that we can all touch greatness, if only for a moment, Richie Allen is our Player of the Weekend.