Footage of Marlon Harewood’s miss against Oxford has emerged online. ANDY WARREN looks back at it.
I’ve been searching for this for years.
It may seem ridiculous, but I’ve longingly typed ‘match highlights Ipswich Oxford 1999’ into Youtube on an annual basis, hoping to strike gold.
But I never have.
It wasn’t included on the end-of-season video either so, even if I did still have a VCR player, I wouldn’t even be able to watch it there.
It’s like it doesn’t exist, like it never happened. We have still images in our photo archive which offer a snapshot of how bad it was, but it doesn’t show it in all its glory.
But I and thousands of others know it did. All we have are those memories from February 20, 1999, as we witnessed the most staggering of misses.
Until now.
What I’m talking about is footage of loanee Marlon Harewood’s awful goal line miss against Oxford, which appeared on Twitter last week. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who was absolutely delighted.
And the best thing is, even 20 years on, my fading memories had exaggerated nothing. It really was an awful miss. I can’t think of many worse at Portman Road.
You can watch it on the video yourself above but, quickly painting a picture, a long ball forward from Richard Wright bounces, is lashed up in the air by an Oxford defender and leaves Harewood with the most open of open goals to place the ball into.
The goalkeeper’s nowhere to be seen, the ball is almost certainly dropping into the net without any extra help. But Harewood’s touch divert it onto the post. Oh dear. The ball did come to him from a great height but that’s surely no excuse.
Thankfully it meant little. No harm done – Ipswich were already ahead and won the game 2-1 thanks to goals from Matt Holland and Mark Venus inside the first 10 minutes.
But this is what Harewood’s loan spell – actually quite respectable, with one goal in six games as Town won five and drew one – will be remembered for.
Of course he went on to make an impact at Portman Road, firstly as a visiting Nottingham Forest player in the early 2000s before starring for West Ham in the East Londoners’ two play-off victories over Town in 2004 and 2005.
Harewood hung up his boots in 2016 and now runs a business providing cars for some of the game’s leading players.
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