The statue of Ipswich Town’s greatest ever player, Kevin Beattie, has been finished and is now being bronzed.
Suffolk sculptor Sean Hedges-Quinn has completed his work, which has been approved by The Beat’s family, and it is now at a foundry in London.
However, a date to unveil the tribute remains undecided due to the ongoing coronavirus restrictions.
The Beat died suddenly at the age of 64, in September 2018.
Tributes flooded in from across the football world, and it led to the launch of the £110,000 Beat Goes On appeal - a joint initiative between the EADT/Ipswich Star, BBC Radio Suffolk and the TWTD website for a lasting memorial.
Blues fans stepped up to raise what was needed in just eight months, while MC Contracts and Ridgeons have agreed to provide the plinth.
Hedges-Quinn, also known as Coach and the man responsible for the statues of Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson, has been working on Beattie for the last few months at his studio near Stowmarket.
“I’m absolutely thrilled with it, the response from all the people that knew him and the people that matter in his life and the statue committee has been quite overwhelming really,” Hedges-Quinn said.
“[Beattie’s daughter] Emma was moved to tears, gave me a big bear hug and thanked me so much. But the end of the day I did it to thank Kevin Beattie because he was the greatest footballer Ipswich had and I wanted him to have the greatest statue.”
He added: “The hardest bit about the whole thing is getting the pose. The pose was extremely difficult. Normally I would have a model and he would stand and I would take photographs and I can get an idea.
“But obviously no person on earth can jump like that other than Kevin Beattie, so literally I had to sculpt the whole of his body from scratch.
“The next hardest thing was certainly his hair. He had a mullet, he had a perm, it was just all over the shop, so to try and get that right was quite difficult.”
Beattie will stand on the corner of Portman Road and the car park, across the road from Sir Alf Ramsey and diagonally opposite from Planet Blue.
An unveiling date will be decided at a later date, dependent on when the football season restarts and taking into account social distancing rules.
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