My favourite Bristol City player: Paul Gainey on the balletic brilliance of Paul Cheesley

The latest in our series celebrating the Robins' greatest players, icons and cult heroes, through the eyes of the fans

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Each time a different Bristol City supporter selects their favourite player to have worn red, and the unique reasons behind their adoration. This week, it's the turn of Paul Gainey, a City fan of the last 47 years ...

Way back in the earliest years of my football-loving life, super striker Paul Cheesley was this fledgling’s first footballing superhero.

The player who everyone wanted to be in the school playground, self included,  the one whose name would have been adorned on the back of hundreds of replica kits were such things in vogue at the time.

A man at the peak of his game in the promotion season of 1975 and a certainty to play for England the way he was playing, no question.

A heading machine; whose pace, strength and conviction gave him the mascot status and made him a supporters favourite. He was supreme, his art conceived in joy, performed at apparent leisure.

Cheesley, began his career with Norwich City, for whom he made his debut as a substitute on November 17, 1971 against Chelsea in a League Cup tie at Carrow Road and went on to make 24 appearances, scoring just one goal on 15 December 1973 in a 1-1 draw against Liverpool before being snapped up by Bristol City manager Alan Dicks for a fee of £309,000.

He turned out to be the fabled missing piece of the promotion jigsaw.

During City's promotion season of 1975/76 he formed a lethal strike partnership with Tom Ritchie which saw them score 33 goals; Cheesley getting 15 of them.

Paul Cheesley rockets away from a tackle by Fulham's Alan Mullery(Image: PA Archive/PA Images)

The opening fixture of the season back in the First Division since 1911 was away to Arsenal at Highbury. City won the game by a goal to nil and Cheesley scored the winner - a header from a Clive Whitehead cross from the right.

Calm and controlled as ever, he rose to thunder an unstoppable header past Arsenal keeper Jimmy Rimmer into the top left-hand corner from eight yards.

In this balletic pose, Cheesley resembled a stage dancer – a kind of young Nureyev at the Kirov. What took my breath away when he scored the goal at Arsenal wasn’t his posture, but the height he attained when he headed the ball into the goal. He almost hangs in the air.