This Week In Football History: Jay-Jay Okocha's greatest goal

Jay-Jay Okocha, one of football's greatest entertainers

Jay-Jay Okocha was everyone's favourite showboating African playmaker. Adrian North takes us back to January 2004, when the player so good they named him twice scored one of football's most powerful and unique free kicks...

January 21, 2004 - Bolton Wanderers 5-2 Aston Villa: Reebok Stadium: One of football's greatest free kicks.

English football has seen its fair share of African superstars over the past couple of decades. First came Tony Yeboah, the powerful Ghanaian centre-forward whose two insane volley's against Liverpool and Wimbledon won the hearts and minds of every football fan in 1995.

Since Yeboah we've been treated to Kanu, Yakubu, Essien, Drogba, Adebayor, Lauren, the Toure brothers and countless others.

And everybody loves these players. Sure, over the course of the Premier League era there have been a few African flops (looking at you El Hadji-Diouf) but by enlarge almost every African player to come to England has come to be adored by not just fans of their own team, but by every neutral fan too.

Everyone loves Kolo, and everybody forgave Yaya for the birthday cake shenanigans in the summer. The number of times I screamed "Yeboah!!" before promptly booting the ball out of the playground in secondary school must be in the hundreds. In a previous piece I waxed lyrical about Yakubu. and not even Spurs fans could bring themselves to dislike Kanu.

There is one player however who came to be the most beloved African to ever grace the English game - Jay-Jay Okocha.

Okocha, like every other player I've mentioned, was never seen with anything but a beaming smile on his face. A recurring theme in my pieces is that the most loved and idolised footballers are not the winners, but the entertainers. And Okocha was the Premier League's greatest entertainer.

Okocha essentially took the piss every time he played. And it's not like he was lazy or un-motivated, which are adjectives that have been used to describe the Premier League's other great entertainer, Matt Le Tissier.

For Okocha things like rainbow flicking the ball over Bergkamp's head and making Becks and Keane look like amateurs were just a logical way of playing of the game. Sure, it was showboating of the highest order, but to Okocha it was the most effective way of dealing with a situation.

The Nigerian would frequently pull off pieces of skill or score goals that made you shake your head and question the boundaries of football and it was on January 20, 2004 that the Nigerian playmaker scored a goal (linked at 0:40 below) that seemingly broke the sound barrier.

Big Sam's Bolton had reached the League Cup semi-final in 2004 and dispatched David O'Leary's Aston Villa 5-2 in the first leg of the semi. Okocha opened the scoring with a deflected free kick after two minutes and with 10 minutes left to play Bolton, leading 4-2, won another free kick on the left corner of the penalty area.

Okocha, who's not even in the camera frame charged at the ball in such a way it seemed as though he was going to aimlessly whack the ball into the crowd. Instead he whacked the ball at a speed normally reserved for massless relativistic particles, around the two-man wall and the near top corner of Thomas Sorenson's goal.

On first thought it's simply an incredible free kick, the best of that season. But once you watch it again you realise it is one of football's most unique goals. Not before or since have I ever seen a free kick on the left hand side of box struck to the right hand side of the wall by a right-footed player and into the near corner.

It kind of reminds me of that famous Roberto Carlos free kick against France, but even better.