There have been many tumbles from grace down the seasons. It happens to the best of us, of course. There may be a day, for example, when you cheerily bump into an old colleague you’ve not seen for ages but they seem far more decrepit than they used to be and you mutter to yourself “crivvens, ah hope ah’ve aged better than that” before jarringly realising that it’s not an old colleague at all, but your own saggy, wizened reflection in the pub optics. The fact you’ve also been talking to yourself only heightens the crushing reality.

According to musty old nursery rhymes from times of yonder, Humpty Dumpty endured a quite calamitous topple from his modest majesty. I say modest because, let’s face it, he was an egg.

Anyway, the attempted salvage operation in the immediate aftermath of this well-documented plunge off the dyke was an utter shambles. Sending all the King's horses and a vast legion of his men to the aid of one, fragile, shell-encased clump of slootery yolk and albumen, for instance, was a disastrous deployment of resources. Thundering hooves, blazing muskets, blaring bugles, clumping military boots? Good grief.

Old Dumpty had merely suffered a skint elbow and a bit of dunted pride and was in the process of picking himself up until that well-intentioned yet spectacularly reckless battalion came careering and trampling on to the scene.

In the rough and tumble world of football, meanwhile, there remain plenty of clubs who are struggling to put themselves back together again. This scribe was reminded of this when I realised it’s now 30 years since Coventry City won the FA Cup in 1987. That’s how boring an existence one ekes out.

Here in 2017, this floundering team sitting at the very bottom of League One, and riven by the kind of financial ravages that would make Albert Steptoe look like Warren Buffett after winning a miss-sold PPI claim, could be on their way back to Wembley having battled on to the semi-finals of the, ahem, Checkatrade Trophy the other night. But that’s not really the point of this meander.

The reasoning behind this dredging up of Coventry’s greatest day is really quite simple; to revel in the glorious grandeur of Keith Houchen’s diving header which helped them to a 3-2 win over Tottenham Hotspur. Spurs had the backing of cockney coupling Chas & Dave belting out “Hot Shot Tottenham” but, in some administrative cockney up, the name of the club’s sponsor, Holsten, didn’t appear on every shirt. Coventry’s managerial double act, meanwhile, included John Sillett, who looked a bit like Roy Hudd. And the team were sponsored by Granada Bingo. Houchen’s heid hit the jackpot.

It’s hard to say when the diving header was first executed. Perhaps Percy Melmoth Walters of the Old Carthusians flung himself at an inviting cross against Clapham Rovers back in 1879 before having to have his side parting surgically re-attached? Whatever its history, the lunging, louping magnificence of this instinctive piece of footballing acrobatics never loses its lustre.

“I think all football is instinct and the only way I could get on the end of the ball was to throw myself,” recalled Houchen. “It all finishes up as perfect timing; the perfect ball, the perfect run. But in a lot of ways it's a fluke. When it is all perfect timing, it is like a dance.”

For those of us who have attempted an ill-advised, outstretched flyer on the harrowing turf of the municipal pitches, that particular dance tends to resemble the tangled, flailing absurdity of Laurel & Hardy trying to perform the Dance of the Little Swans.

Back in the Christmas of 1987, I was gleefully given the BBC’s 101 Great Goals, a video of memorable and occasionally average Match of the Day moments. You can easily watch it on the internet in this instantly accessible, technologically advanced era which makes the VHS recorder look like something that should be housed next to the cracked pots, smocks and turnips in the Museum of Medieval Serf Life.

On it, there’s the classic, soaring header of 1972 from Bournemouth’s celebrated Invernesian, Ted MacDougall, who manages to take flight with enchanting, aerodynamic aplomb despite the Villa Park terrain underneath him looking like it had just been used for the West Midlands Potato Stomping Championship.

But Houchen’s iconic leap for the ages is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, the very last goal in this televised anthology of net-busters is Clive Allen’s glance off the napper in the same cup final. Pesky producers eh? Couldn’t they have just shoved Keith’s cracker in and flogged it as 102 Great Goals?

If the moon landings were a small step for man, then Houchen’s heider was a giant leap for footballing mankind.