Neil Sullivan never had an eye for fame or fortune, only leaving his hometown club Wimbledon when relegation forced the matter after twelve years of loyal service. The last thing he needed, then, was to become a footnote in the wondergoal that turned David Beckham from a promising young midfielder into a household name.

You’d want to be remembered for a gravity-defying fingertips-bar-tip or a heroic last-minute penalty save, not for facilitating someone else’s brilliance. But at least he could put the whole thing down to a horrid fluke, and accept the role of stooge as a necessary chapter in Becks’ rise to footballing royalty.

Enter David Batty. It took all of three minutes for Sullivan to experience what Alan Shearer imagined was “a nightmare” when Wimbledon visited St James’ Park in August 1996. After signing for the Toon in February, Batty had chewed up enough opponents to help secure 2nd place, Newcastle’s highest league finish in almost seventy years, pipped to the post by Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. Their hopes of doing it all again — but this time, better — were dented at the advent of the fresh season, when Everton’s Gary Speed struck the final nail into the Magpies’ opening day defeat.

It is well-recorded that Batty was never that arsed about football, so I can only surmise that his missus was trying to coax him out to his in-laws on the night after the Wimbledon game, since he can’t have been anywhere but sitting on his sofa watching Match of The Day. Here was a younger, more exciting David B, catching the eye of the newly-installed England manager, Glenn Hoddle. No one signed Batty for his goalscoring ability. To date, he’d scored a goal for every two seasons he’d played. Yet the week after that defeat to Everton, when Batty spied Sullivan off his line again, he thought there was no reason that shouldn’t change, there and then.

He owed it all to Alan Shearer, who pelted like billy-o toward a long, stray, bouncing ball. Sullivan had more faith in his own ability to scramble than his defender, at the mercy of the league’s top scorer, and so piled all his resources on the Geordie menace, leaving his goalline sumptuously exposed. It might have been twenty yards shorter than Beckham’s, but Batty’s strike was delicious, rattling the crossbar like a fairground attraction as Sullivan followed the ball into the net on the slide.

Batty had opened his account at Newcastle and got the Toon off the mark in this title-chasing campaign with an achievement that Shearer, who doubled the lead against the Dons, joked would mean a lot to the defensive-minded deviant: “David is now joint top scorer at the club and I don’t think that has happened to him before. I think he was mad at me for scoring.”

Batty had unwittingly made what had been a stroke of luck by Beckham look like an achilles’ heel for Wimbledon’s number one, who the papers called “a victim”. Commentator Tony Gubba rather thought the hapless ‘keeper was the lucky one: “And Neil Sullivan has had the closest view of two sensational goals…” Neil himself, though, well, he was next due at Elland Road, and while Lee Bowyer was sharpening up his long-range shooting, Neil stressed the incidents had hardly touched him.

“I’ve been incredibly unlucky, but I won’t be standing on the goal line all night and worrying,” Sullivan insisted. “My confidence is still high because I’ve been playing well. Both Beckham and Batty’s goals were unstoppable.” ⬢

(This post is free to read from The Square Ball magazine season 34 issue 5. Click here to read more)