February 24 – Hayter’s Hamazing Hat-trick
ANYTHING Robbie Fowler can do James Hayter can do better.
While the Scouse cheeky chappie holds the record for the fastest Premier League hat-trick at four minutes and 33 seconds, League 1 striker Hayter scored the fastest hat-trick in football league history on this day in 2004.
He managed the feat playing for Bournemouth in a 6-0 victory over Wrexham at Dean Court. He fired in his three goals in just two minutes and 20 seconds making Fowler’s effort look somewhat sedentary and his record is even more remarkable as the young forward was brought on with only six minutes left on the clock.
While the Cherries fans were rejoicing in their player’s record-breaking achievement his family showed they had all the timing of a Paul Scholes tackle as they missed the entire thing, having left the ground ten minutes before the final whistle to catch the ferry back home to the Isle of Wight.
Parents Mary and Richard and his brother Ben were as sick as a prattle of parrots (what a great collective noun – don’t say we never teach you anything) afterwards.
Ben said at the time: “I’m delighted for James but we’re all gutted that we missed it.
“We decided to leave because we didn’t think James was going to get on. We heard a cheer just as we were getting in the car and we turned on the radio and found out James had come on and scored.”
Although Hayter’s effort was faster than Fowler’s and is certainly the record in English football, it is not the fastest ever recorded.
As usual with these things there is some dispute as to who holds the actual record. It was held for a long time by James O’Connor, of Shelbourne, in Dublin, who completed his treble in 2min 14sec against Bohemians on November 19, 1967.
However some two months after Hayter wrote his name into the history books in 2004, a long forgotten man from the north of Scotland was finally having his name entered in the Guinness Book of Records, forty years after his hat-trick heroics.
On November 28, 1964, as an 18-year-old outside right for Ross County in the Highland League, Tommy Ross scored three times in 90 seconds against Nairn County.
O’Connor’s record would never have stood had Ross entered his effort at the time, but he did not enter it because he believed there had to be two official timekeepers for it to stand. On the day of the match against Nairn County at Dingwall, the referee was the only timekeeper.
“This has been going on for 40 years,” Ross said from his home in Nairn, near Inverness in 2004. “Other people have been scoring hat-tricks and I have been sitting there knowing I did it in 90 seconds. This sets the record straight at last and I am totally delighted.”
Ross does not think his record will ever be beaten because of the time taken up these days by overly elaborate goal celebrations such as Carlos Tevez producing a baby’s dummy from his pants and Emile Heskey’s rarely-seen range of golf and dj based-creations.
“There was no kissing in those days,” Ross said. “When you scored, you just ran back to the halfway line, the captain patted you on the head and said, ‘well done, son’, and you got on with it. This will prob ably be very difficult to beat because the celebrations now take at least a minute and a half.”
We could not find any footage of Hayter’s three-goal feat but we have found James O’Connor scoring what he thought was a record-breaking hat-trick in 1967.
Come back this way tomorrow for a tale of David verses Goliath, except Goliath won.
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Edin Džeko’s 12 Minute Hat-trick | The Offside on May 4th, 2009
[...] there’ve been faster. According to my good friend Wikipedia, the fastest hat-trick in history belongs to Tommy Ross, who scored three for Ross County in 90 seconds back in [...]