At number 36 we go back to a David Kelly goal that is remembered for many reasons.
Kelly is a bit of a cult hero at JOE. In fact, he is a bit of a cult hero anywhere he played, just ask Newcastle fans. They revere most of their great number nines like Malcom MacDonald, Jackie Milburn and Alan Shearer, but David Kelly is up there with those legends of the game for firing the Magpies back into top flight.
Kelly shouldn’t even have been able to play football. At the age of four he fell out of a tree, fractured his leg and was diagnosed with Perthe’s Disease which meant his left leg was a full four inches shorter than his right and he needed crutches to walk until he was 10!
He never hobbled on the field, though, demonstrating cobra-like striking skills – he’s still the only Irish player to score a hat-trick for the national side on his debut, against Israel in 1988.
A favourite of Jack Charlton’s, he made the squad for our last European Championships in 1988, but didn’t play.
As mentioned earlier the match against England at Lansdowne Road in 1995 will always be memorable for other reasons, as the video below shows.
But as the grand old man of Irish soccer journalism Peter Byrne says, when Kelly scored we knew we would have hammered the old enemy. And no-one, anywhere, can say with certainty that that would not have happened. For that, at least, we can thank the hooligans.
Today marks 36 days to go until the start of Euro 2012, so stick with us every day as we present another memorable Irish soccer moment.
