KAREL POBORSKY

God bless Aston Villa’s bobbly pitch. Karel Poborsky produced one of the iconic moments of Euro 96, but he couldn’t have done it without a handy bump in the Villa Park playing surface.

Poborsky was a little-known, scruffy-haired midfielder from Slavia Prague when he turned up at the tournament and mesmerised Europe with an unorthodox but sublime goal in the Czech Republic’s win over Portugal in the last eight. The grin on the face of the Czechs’ typically stern coach Dusan Uhrin said it all. Like everyone else, he couldn’t believe what he had just seen.

“I got a pass from Jiri Nemec in the middle of Portugal’s half,” Poborsky tells FFT. “There were three opponents around me but the ball bounced back to me with a piece of luck and I was suddenly running towards goalkeeper Vítor Baia, almost alone. I saw him far out of his goal so it came to my mind that the easiest thing to do would be to chip the ball.” Except that wasn’t quite how it turned out. Chipped goals were nothing new – Poborsky had scored one of those for Viktoria Zizkov two years earlier. This effort was different, as he somehow scooped the ball high into the air and over a befuddled Baia – aided by that bobble. “Not many people saw it but the ball jumped,” he says, “so it was ‘thrown’, rather than kicked in the usual way.”

That goal and his displays in the Czechs’ run to the final earned Poborsky a transfer to Manchester United that summer. He later moved to Portugal to join Benfica.

“Paradoxically, that goal helped me when I went over to Portugal,” the 44-year-old says. “The supporters didn’t forget it, but they appreciated the goal in more of a positive way than a negative one.”