Thirty years of thunder

“And his right foot is his weak one!” said Wimbledon manager Joe Kinnear after witnessing Tony Yeboah not only bag a hat-trick against his side, but also score one of the greatest Premier League goals of all-time. You know the one. It went like this: chest, left knee, left foot, right shin, wallop. Off the crossbar and into the net.

Most Leeds fans can visualise that goal, such is its popularity. Along with the volley against Liverpool, it’s the reason why so many kids grew up screaming “Yeboah!” any time a football presented itself as eminently bootable. It’s been thirty years since Yeboah left poor Paul Heald helpless in the Wimbledon goal and it remains a culturally significant moment for the Premier League and Leeds United.

I often wonder if a band knows that it has written an all-time hit the minute they finish recording. Surely they have to feel some sort of inkling, whether it’s in the riff or an iconic lyric. The same can be pondered about Yeboah’s goal. It wasn’t even the first goal he’d scored like that in the 1995/96 season, never mind in his career, but surely he must have felt a certain aura around himself after the Wimbledon finish.

The Yeboah story at Leeds began in January 1995, when the relatively unknown striker arrived in the pissing rain dressed as though he were there to buy the club, not simply play for them. All that Leeds fans knew about this guy standing in a suit and overcoat, sporting a club umbrella, was that he scored loads of goals in Germany — 89 of them in 156 matches to be exact.

It didn’t take long for Leeds United fans to understand just exactly who Yeboah was. Leeds manager Howard Wilkinson eased him into the team with substitute appearances against QPR and Blackburn, plus a FA Cup fourth round win against Oldham. The following round brought Yeboah’s first goal, a consolation in their 3-1 defeat to Manchester United. It might have been futile, but it was the moment that turned the tap on, inspiring a furious burst of thirteen goals in sixteen matches that took Leeds to a 5th place finish and back into European football.
Yeboah had played UEFA Cup football at Eintracht Frankfurt already, an indication of his pedigree and the feeling going into 1995/96 was that Leeds had something special on their hands.

The opening day of the new Premier League season showed a different side to Yeboah. Leeds fans wouldn’t have associated him with overwhelming power prior to the start of 1995/96, when he scored both goals in a 2-1 win at West Ham, one a header and the other a volley so powerful that ‘keeper Ludek Miklosko looked at Yeboah as if to say it was unfair he hit the ball that hard. No blasters, Tony! The closest he had come previously to exotic goalscoring was a shit bicycle kick against Coventry City that bounced into the ground and off the ‘keeper back in March 1995.
Yeboah was a cultured centre-forward, one who showed the grace and composure of someone like Thierry Henry before his time in England even began. Goalkeepers were used to protecting themselves from being chipped or skinned by Yeboah. They weren’t ready for whatever the hell it was that he’d done to poor Miklosko, who would have needed a full set of teeth replaced if he’d got himself in front of Yeboah’s volley.

Two days later, he scored That Goal against Liverpool at Elland Road under the lights. Everyone knows That Goal. There are uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest who could explain That Goal to you in vivid detail. They might not remember Yeboah’s second of a hat-trick in Monaco in the UEFA Cup, but the Leeds fans who made the trip and goalkeeper Fabien Piveteau won’t forget. Yeboah drifted off the right wing and curled a powerful shot around and over Piveteau, and lobbed him shortly after to make it a 3-0 win for Leeds.

But it was on 23 September 1995 that Yeboah’s legacy in Leeds — and Premier League — folklore became enshrined. Any half decent player can score one screamer, but only one. Remember Patjim Kasami? Of course you don’t, but look up his goal for Fulham at Crystal Palace. There’s a reason Leeds fans young and old all know the name Yeboah. Part of it is the Liverpool goal, a vicious volley that David James couldn’t comprehend until he heard his crossbar reverberate. But the moment that made Yeboah the cult hero he is came at Selhurst Park, scoring the hat-trick that befuddled Joe Kinnear in a 4-2 victory. Very few people know that he scored three goals, or that Carlton Palmer managed to untangle his gangly legs for long enough to score what might have been Premier League goal of the month if Yeboah hadn’t stolen his thunder.

Yeboah infuriated Wimbledon fans so much that one launched a tirade at loudmouth chairman Sam Hammam, who handed him some cash in return for the fan’s season ticket book, which he tore in typically ceremonious fashion. Perhaps the fan had told Hammam he wanted a seat at Elland Road to watch their number 21 thwack the ball past helpless goalkeepers.

That majestic solo strike was the second of Yeboah’s goals that day, but his third even justified the torn paper that once was a ticket, a tidy half-volley from the edge of the box. “He is world class, but I feel sorry for Carlton,” Wilkinson after the match. Palmer still has to live with the fact that his clumsy effort — no matter how brilliant — will never compare to Yeboah’s core memory moment. It’s not as though kids would be queuing up to get ‘Palmer 4’ on the back of their itchy Asics shirt, but he was certainly an afterthought on the day where Yeboah scored a goal that would be replayed in Leeds and Premier League highlights packages for all eternity.

It never got better than that for Yeboah at Leeds, even though he did score a brilliant goal against Manchester United in a 3-1 victory on Christmas Eve a couple of months later. He scored 27 goals for Leeds in the calendar year of 1995. Given that by the time Hamburg picked up a very unhappy Yeboah in September 1997 his Leeds tally totalled 32, it shows just how prolific he was that year.

It’s hard to argue that any one Leeds player has had such an intense impact since. Nobody has burned quite as brightly for a mere twelve months as Yeboah did and few have looked so utterly peerless, with Raphinha perhaps an exception.

When Souleymane Doukara crashed a sweetly struck volley past Nottingham Forest in January 2017, fans immediately compared it to Yeboah’s against Liverpool. Obviously comparing the two footballers is like trying to equate a Ferrari with a wheelbarrow, but the cultural impact is clear. If you score a thunderous volley, it’s ‘a Yeboah’ in the same way that scoring one from an angle is a Van Basten, and if you twat it out for a throw in from the edge of the box, it’s a Morison — after, of course, Steve The Shift.

I’m sorry to say we’ll probably never see another Yeboah and if we do, he’ll cost £60m and everyone will hate him because, ultimately, he won’t be as fun or exciting as Tony Yeboah. ⬢

This article is free to read from The Square Ball magazine issue two, 2025/26 — get your copy here.