Jamie Carragher has opened up on Darren Bent’s infamous “beach ball” goal against Liverpool back in 2009, claiming that he had no idea what had happened at the time.
Bent scored the winning goal in a 1-0 victory for Sunderland at the Stadium of Light after his shot cannoned in off a wayward inflatable ball that had found its way onto the pitch from the away end.
And the ex-Kop man has suggested that the whole thing was bizarre.
Speaking to the Athletic, he said: “It’s mad when you actually think about it.
“I never lost a game of football in stranger circumstances. I mean, what the hell was it even doing there? Who takes a beach ball to the north-east in the middle of October?
“It was just surreal. I don’t remember being that angry about it because I couldn’t really work out what had happened. I knew it was something weird but I didn’t know quite what.”
OPINION
To be fair to Carragher, there will have been countless people watching the game from a much clearer vantage point than him who were just as baffled as to what they had just witnessed during that bizarre passage of play. By rights, of course, the goal should never have stood, and the Reds were robbed, but in the years after Bent’s infamous strike, the incident has ended up going down in English footballing folklore. It was so infamous that it even formed the basis of a question on ITV’s quiz show The Chase. More than anything though, you have to feel sorry for Pepe Reina. How on earth are you meant to legislate for that kind of thing happening, and the Spanish keeper was ultimately beaten by a goal that was simultaneously one of the best and the worst ever scored.
