SPARE a thought for Crystal Palace’s Michael Olise, if you will.
On Saturday’s Match of the Day, Gary Lineker described Olise’s stunning strike in his team’s defeat at Luton, as a “Goal of the Season” contender.
A few hours later, Manchester United’s Alejandro Garnacho did his wondrous thing and suddenly Olise had not even scored the goal of the weekend.
The question now is whether Garnacho’s magnificent bicycle kick against Everton was the greatest of the 32,000 goals ever scored in the Premier League.
And like all good bar-room debates, there is no correct answer, merely an excuse for another pint to lubricate the argument further.
There is always a temptation to instantly crown something so wonderful as the “greatest of all time”.
But in the cold light of the following day, Garnacho’s banger truly stands up as possibly the worldiest of all worldies.
As a like-for-like bicycle kick, it was technically better than Wayne Rooney‘s famous strike against Manchester City in 2011.
I was at that Old Trafford derby and Rooney’s effort certainly possessed the fundamental quality of the truly great goal.
That’s the “F*** me!” factor which forces everybody inside the stadium to utter an expletive and damn their own eyes for deceiving them.
FREE BETS – BT BETTING OFFERS AND BONUSES NEW CUSTOMERS
But Garnacho’s was better. There is the extra dimension of difficulty involved in the Argentinian needing to back-pedal in order to meet the flight of Diogo Dalot’s cross.
The splendour of the technique is key.
And if context matters, then the timing of that third-minute goal, in a Goodison Park stadium gripped by the unique fury of a Premier League club having just been stripped of ten points, makes it more special too.
United, bang-average all season, has been widely expected to melt in a cauldron of hate.
But with beauty in the eye of the beholder, what makes a truly great goal, when there are so many different varieties?
Pep Guardiola or Arsene Wenger would probably argue for outstanding team efforts – perhaps so that they, as coaches, might claim an “assist”.
And the build-up to Garnacho’s strike, including a cross-field Hollywood pass from Victor Lindelof, was none too shabby either.
A more straightforward thunderous volley can look just as good as a bicycle kick.
Consider the balletic grace of Paolo Di Canio’s masterpiece against Wimbledon and the ferocity of Tony Yeboah’s strike against Liverpool – accentuated by the ball crashing in off the underside of the bar.
Both of those make my personal top ten Premier League goals list, although by tomorrow I might have changed my mind and included the Paul Scholes howitzer against Bradford or other renowned beauties from Matt Le Tissier or the late Dalian Atkinson.
Others might prefer the spectacle of an individual dribble – Diego Maradona in the Azteca, Ricky Villa at Wembley, Ryan Giggs at Villa Park – although I can’t think of a Premier League effort to quite compare with those three, which all settled huge matches.
Some will canvas for the subtlety of Dennis Bergkamp or the long-range audacity of David Beckham.
The best goal I’ve seen live was by Mario Mandzukic for Juventus against Real Madrid in the 2017 Champions League final.
The brilliance of the Croatian’s finish was allied to exceptional teamwork, with the ball passed between four players without touching the ground. It is a thing of utter majesty.
But does it matter that Juve lost 4-1? I don’t think so but let’s have another pint and we can argue the toss about that.
The greatest Premier League goal I’ve seen live was by Fulham’s Pajtim Kasami at Crystal Palace in 2013 – the Swiss winger chests the ball near the touchline, swivels and volleys into the far corner from a range and angle which defies mathematics.
Yet it wasn’t even Match of the Day’s Goal of the Month – an Arsenal passing move finished by Jack Wilshere that October would end up as Goal of the Season.
Oh and Kasami wasn’t all that good. The Swiss winger scored only three times in 38 games for Fulham, so you can argue his finest moment was a fluke.
In a recent conversation with Lineker – who knows a thing or two about goalscoring – he told me Real Madrid’s Mexican maestro Hugo Sanchez used to score five or six bicycle kicks a season.
There’s an argument there about whether there is a freakish element in most such goals.
Lineker suggests Sanchez scored them so frequently that his goals could never be considered happy accidents.
So might Garnacho’s strike have ended up in Row Z? Perhaps, but it didn’t, so who cares?
Anyway, fancy another pint?
