Never Mind The Polloks: Vice Sports Goals of the Week

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

It's that time of the week again, when we feast upon a veritable banquet of goals. We have fasted for hours on end in preparation, and we're now ready to gorge ourselves on the most exquisite delicacies that the last few days have to offer. When it comes to excellent finishing, we are vile gluttons, happy to stuff our bellies full of goals until we are groaning and swollen, acutely nauseous with the indulgence of it all. We want goals filling our stomachs, goals dancing across our taste buds, goals running out of the corner of our mouths and down our quivering, multiple chins.

Here are the tastiest goals from the past week, then. Gobble them down, like the sickening gourmands you are.

Hanlon's goals come at 0:05, 1:15 and 2:25

In all our time writing this column, we have never featured a team from the West of Scotland Super League Premier Division. That's because, generally speaking, football at that level is absolute shite. Once in a while, however, even a Scottish non-league side can produce a moment of sheer brilliance. In this case, there have been three in one game, all coming from a lad named Tam Hanlon.

Playing for Glaswegian side FC Pollok in their Sectional League Cup match against Neilston, Hanlon managed to score a sublime hat-trick from the right-back position. First, he fired in a sweet free kick with his left foot. Then, he thumped a long-range howitzer into the top corner. While that was probably the pick of the bunch, he went on to complete his three-goal haul with another free kick, this time tucking home with his right. To repeat: FC Pollok play in the West of Scotland Super League Premier Division. This was a fucking miracle, quite frankly.

Now, we know what you're going to say here. You're going to say that the assist for this goal wasn't deliberate, and that the whole thing was a comedy of errors precipitated by a capricious breeze. In the absence of definitive proof, however, we're going to give Thamesmead Town the benefit of the doubt. That being the case, we maintain that this is one of the greatest build-ups to a goal we've ever seen.

With Thamesmead taking on Guernsey in the preliminary rounds of the FA Cup, Scott Kinch completely fucked up a shot played a sublime, curving ball into the box. We have never seen a pass get caught up in a gust of wind defy the laws of physics in quite such a miraculous fashion, having been mishit so badly hit with such finesse that it bent back in on itself and landed right in the middle of the box. From there, Thamesmead's Jack Mahoney managed an excellent improvised finish, using complete dumb luck magnificent skill to bundle home lob the keeper from close range. This was not a goal, this was art.

In the late nineteenth century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were a group of mystics and occultists. They studied all things paranormal, and tried to explain phenomena which conventional wisdom could not explain. Even they would have struggled to get their heads around this goal from Shaun Williams, because it's absolutely twatting magical.

Devoted to the study of this magnificent goal, we now inaugurate the Hermetic Order of the Golden Shaun.