This Week In Football History: Trevor Sinclair scored one of the greatest overhead kicks ever

Trevor Sinclair celebrates scoring his most incredible goal

Zidane, Maradona, Pele - all scorers of some of football's most beautiful goals. But Trevor Sinclair? Today, Adrian North looks back on a FA Cup tie from 1997, and one of the greatest goals ever, scored by the former West Ham and QPR man...

January 25, 1997 - QPR 3-2 Barnsley, Loftus Road: I still can't believe Sinclair actually pulled this off.

To most football fans who weren't old enough to watch Trevor Sinclair regularly, he was simply a workhorse of a winger whose finest moment came as one of England's key players at the 2002 World Cup despite only being a late call up due to injuries to Steven Gerrard, Danny Murphy and Owen Hargreaves.

A tireless winger who would often fill in at both full-back and as an emergence striker, Sinclair was undoubtedly a very talented player, but was not usually thought of as a scorer of great goals.

My reaction, and surely the reaction of everyone else of the 20-25 age demographic when we first saw a video of his goal against Barnsley from the 96/97 FA Cup was of utter disbelief.

"Trevor Sinclair once did that??!! How is that possible, let alone from Trevor Sinclair of all bloody people!?" was my initial thought when I first saw that goal on Soccer AM one Sunday morning. And still to this day the most jaw dropping reaction of disbelief I've ever had as a football fan was of the first time I saw this goal.

If I were to make a list of the greatest bicycle kicks of all time Sinclair's is put into a category with Wayne Rooney, Marco van Basten, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Rivaldo.

A colleague of mine affectionately refers to Sinclair as 'Sir Trev', and he was even in the Loftus Road crowd on January 25, 1997 when Sir Trev pulled off his masterpiece.

Queens Park Rangers would finish ninth in the First Division during the 96/97 season and would be knocked out of the FA Cup in the Fifth Round by Wimbledon. But it was their 3-2 Fourth Round victory over Barnsley that made anything else Sinclair would do that season completely irrelevant and unmemorable.

QPR were 2-1 up in the early moments of the second half when John Spencer hoisted an aimless cross and Sinclair, 20-yards from goal executed one of the best overhead kicks ever. Sinclair ran off to the dugout screaming in ecstasy.

He couldn't believe it, no one at Loftus Road believed it, and I still don't believe that yes, Trevor Sinclair, the solid but unspectacular winger I grew up watching in the early 2000s can enter into conversation with Zidane, Bergkamp, van Basten, Maradona and Carlos Alberto when discussing the greatest goal of all-time.

This goal is nowhere near as iconic or important as the goals scored by those players mentioned above, but in terms of pure technical difficulty, Sir Trev has one goal as good as any that's ever been scored.