The oddest goal ever scored in the Premier League is a thing to be cherished
On average, there are roughly 1,000 goals scored every year in the Premier League. Over its life time, that is well over 20,000 goals, most of which we have all seen countless times at 3am as we watch the highlights of the 2003/4 season for the 15th time.
But only one goal stands out as the most bizarre goal of the lot. We’ve seen goals from every angle, scored by every body part imaginable, but only one goal has ever been scored by an inanimate object, if you exclude the latter days of Micky Quinn’s career.
On October 17th 2009, Liverpool travelled to the Stadium of Light to take on Sunderland. At the time, the teams were in close quarters in the Premier League table, with Sunderland just two points behind a Liverpool side that wasn’t exactly flying on all cylinders.
As games go, bar the goal, it was largely unremarkable. The teams had almost equal possession (51% to 49% in Sunderland’s favour) and the home side had just one more shot on target (7-6) than the visitors.
In fact, if it wasn’t for the goal, the game would be remembered as the Premier League debut of Jay Spearing. Or, to put it another way, utterly forgettable.
But the goal did happen, and what a goal it was. If you haven’t seen it for a while, you may have forgotten just how weird it was. Just five minutes into the game the ball goes down the Sunderland right, a cross bobbles across the box and Darren Bent lashes the ball goalwards, only for it to hit a big red beach ball and deflect, billiard style, the football into the net past a wrong-footed Pepe Reina.
At the time, the reaction on the pitch was confusion. Bent celebrated as the Liverpool players protested. It was in vain as referee Mike Jones decided to allow the goal to stand, ignoring the law of the game that states that an ‘outside agent’ interfering with the ball like that should resulted in a drop ball.
For his oversight, Jones was demoted to the Championship for a week but he is still a Premier League whistler, most recently seen giving Liverpool two fairly generous penos against Leicester on New Year’s Day.
However, in the post-match interviews after the game, Steve Bruce was willing to cut the ref some slack, unsurprisingly, saying that to know the exact rule on ‘outside agents’ you’d have to be ‘a bit sad’.
Rafa Benitez was incredibly phlegmatic about the incident, saying ‘We had bad luck with the goal but the team is not doing well, there are things we have to fix and there are things we cannot control.’
Eagle eyed viewers spotted that the offending ball was a Liverpool branded one that had clearly been brought to the ground by a Liverpool fan. Eventually the person who threw it on the pitch was identified as 16-year-old Liverpool fan Callum Campbell, who bore the brunt of anger for the incident.
‘It was me,’ he told the Mirror about 10 days after the game ‘I’m the one who did it. I’m the one caught on camera. I’m so, so sorry. This is my worst, worst nightmare.
‘When I got home I went into the garden and threw up. I was physically sick – and that’s before the death threats started appearing on the internet the next day.
‘How was I supposed to know what would happen?’ said Callum. ‘It was just a bit of fun.’
Overall the season wasn’t much fun for Liverpool, who finished seventh and they parted ways with Benitez in the close season.
Sunderland finished safely in 13th and Steve Bruce stayed in the gig until November 2011 and he is now managing Hull.
Bent, as we know, had a great season in 2009-10, scoring 25 goals in all competitions. Still only 30, Bent signed for Derrby on loan from Aston Villa this week while the man he beat, Reina, is now with Bayern Munich after a spell with Benitez at Napoli.
But of all the participants, it is the beach ball that has the most revered position in the game.
Somehow, the beach ball ended up being sold at a charity auction for £411 in 2012. A Sunderland fan called Kevin Barlow bought it and he donated it to the English Nation al Football Museum in Manchester, where it sits in an exhibition on the laws of the game.
The Sunderland Echo quotes Sally Hawley of the museum at the time of the donation: ‘While we realise there is controversy surrounding this, we need to show all sides of the debate so this is a great object for us to display at the new National Football Museum.
‘This is an important object in recent footballing history because it means lots of different things to different people. While it’s a fun thing for many it has also created discussions over the rules of the game.’
Anyone hoping for a repeat in the fixture on Saturday will be sad to note that Liverpool’s club shop no longer sells an official beach ball, so Bent’s bizarro effort should remain the weirdest in Premier League history for the foreseeable future.
At least until Tony Hibbert scores (242 starts, 0 goals and counting).
