Neil Mellor: Remembering Liverpool's One-Hit Wonder Who Scored That Goal in Front of the Kop

28 November 2019 16:13

​On Neil Mellor's Twitter feed this week, the Sky Sports presenter posted a picture of himself interviewing Liverpool's Alisson Becker, with the goalkeeper shown smiling at something on a phone.

The image is captioned: "When I had to google myself to prove to @Alissonbecker I used to play for LFC," followed by a laughing emoji and plug for Soccer Saturday.


It might just be a bit of self-deprecating humour but it's not hard to believe that was a real exchange between the two Liverpool stars, past and present.

Fans who came to Premier League football after 2005 may have absolutely no recollection of Mellor as a player and view him only as a face that occasionally pops up on Sky and other broadcasters.


Retired at 29 back in 2012, Mellor spent the majority of an all-too-short playing career in the Football League with Preston, before injuries forced him to hang up his boots after only 10 seasons as a pro. 


Prior to forging a path as a reasonably effective, if injury-ravaged, forward in the Championship and League One, Mellor had managed 22 first-team appearances for ​Liverpool - the club he came through as an academy player - over three seasons.


Now, earning a living for any length of time as a professional footballer at any level is in and of itself an incredible achievement, while playing for a club like Liverpool even only once would be the stuff of dreams for many kids. Yet, from an objective perspective, it seems a little like Mellor's career was fairly unspectacular. Certainly not really worthy of the tag of a 'legend', or, for example, being voted into 90th position in Liverpool's famous 100 Players Who Shook the Kop poll back in 2006, as Mellor was.


For many, Mellor's career - no matter the knee problems, the highs, the lows, the expectations and disappointments - would forever be remembered by one night, exactly 15 years ago - when Alisson Becker would've been about 12.

With 92 minutes on the clock and near-30 yards out, 22-year-old Mellor connected with the ball on the bounce and watched it swerve and dip past Jens Lehmann in front of the Kop to give the hosts an uber dramatic 2-1 win over Premier League champions Arsenal.

With one goal, a place in Anfield lore beckoned.

As Mellor himself put it in an interview with ​Liverpool's official site: “The ball went up, me and [Patrick] Vieira challenged for it and missed it, [Harry] Kewell got pole-axed by a couple of Arsenal defenders and it just fell nicely for me to hit. 

"I wasn’t renowned for scoring many long-distance goals but it was there to be hit and it was an instinct to hit it.

“My family were all in the crowd, it was against the best side around, the winning goal, in front of the Kop: it was something that I’d always dreamed about." 

Neil Mellor

It is often said of great goals that the scorer need do nothing else for the rest of their career and still be remembered as a hero. There are few examples that put that theory to the test better than Mellor.

Less than a month after his wonder-strike against Arsenal, Mellor scored again and then set up Steven Gerrard (he is the originator of 'lovely cushioned header...') for that goal against Olympiacos in the all-important Champions League group decider. However, after that Mellor faded away.

In March of 2005, injuries stopped him playing any part in Liverpool's famous Champions League success (he did get a medal, but only a discarded runners-up one from a Milan player, according to legend) and was relegated back to the reserves upon his return to fitness the following season. Manager Rafa Benitez - never the biggest zealot for youth development - had brought in Fernando Morientes and Peter Crouch in Mellor's position in the interim. 

There was little outcry about Mellor's exclusion under Benitez. The team - now the European champions against all the odds - was progressing well, with fans swept up in the baffling euphoria of Champions League success. 

Incidentally, during the trophy parade after the final, Mellor, along with several other young players, was forced to watch on TV, having taken a separate plane back from Istanbul than the first-team squad.

Knee injuries continued to plague Mellor's career, stopping him from playing more than three times during what was supposed to be a six-month loan at Premier League surprise package Wigan in 2006. "There were times when I was in so much pain that I couldn't even run for the ball," he is quoted as saying.

Neil Mellor,Sean St Ledger

Now no longer a hot prospect, Mellor was sold for an undisclosed fee to Preston that summer. It was a disappointing end to his time at Liverpool for a player who had been a top scorer for the Under-19s and reserves, and who promised much for a club who had recently seen homegrown stars like Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Michael Owen break through. 

There's little doubt that Mellor would trade any of the careers of those three for his own given the chance. However, there are thousands more professionals, nearly-professionals and not-so-nearly professionals who would trade theirs for Mellor's. Not many people can say they've scored an injury-time winner in front of the Kop after all.

“Growing up, you want play as many games as you can and win as many trophies as you can, but you want memories as well that you can reflect on after your career and for me, that is one of those moments," he said.

Source: 90min