Just when you think you’ve seen everything that football has to offer, along come Ipswich Town.
Amid another morale-sapping defeat that all but sealed their relegation from the Premier League, Ipswich, with a little help from their opponents, Wolverhampton Wanderers, served up the maddest two minutes of Premier League action you are likely to see this season.
A backpass, a mistake, a save, a free kick, a melee on the goal line, a thudding shot and a point-blank block… there was nothing technically proficient about any of it, but it was memorable. Are you not entertained?
For the uninitiated, this was all about the backpass law, introduced to football in 1992 with the aim of making the game less dull. In the main it has been a huge success, and it certainly was at Portman Road on Saturday.
The rule prevents goalkeepers from handling the ball if it has been passed back to them intentionally by a team-mate and it was conceived to stop teams wasting time, as they often did in the 1980s by passing the ball repeatedly back to their goalkeeper.
It has made goalkeepers learn to play with their feet and usually only comes into play when a goalkeeper loses concentration and picks up a ball after forgetting where it has come from.
Alan Shearer scored for England when Georgia were punished in 1997, Cristiano Ronaldo did so for Manchester United against Aston Villa in 2009 and Bayern Munich even sealed a Bundesliga title in 2001 after Hamburg were punished for one.
But Saturday was very different, a whole lot more entertaining and fairly comical — not least because it threw up a situation that clearly neither team could have prepared for.
In the 36th minute and with Ipswich 1-0 ahead in a game they effectively had to win to keep alive a chance of avoiding relegation, the Republic of Ireland international Dara O’Shea rolled a routine backpass towards his goalkeeper and former West Bromwich Albion colleague Alex Palmer — the fact two former employees of their bitterest local rivals conspired to almost hand them a goal would not have been lost on many Wolves fans.
It was so routine, in fact, that Palmer forgot to do part one — controlling the ball — before turning to part two — deciding what to do with it.
Palmer literally took his eye off the ball, allowed it to roll under his foot and glorious chaos ensued.
The Ipswich goalkeeper did the only thing he could do and scrambled back into his goal, diving and just about clawing the ball away before it crossed the line for the most embarrassing of own goals.
It was touch and go, but Palmer saved his own blushes.
But using his hands forced referee Peter Bankes to award a foul.
Had an outfield player used his hands to claw the ball off the line, it would have meant a penalty and a red card for denying a goalscoring opportunity.
But the backpass law makes an exception for goalkeepers, so Palmer got away with an indirect free kick a few yards out.
An indirect free kick means that two players must touch the ball before a goal is scored — the player taking the first touch cannot shoot directly from the free kick. If the player taking the indirect free kick were to score with the first touch, a goal kick would be awarded to the defending team.
The players on the defending team must be at least 10 yards from where the free kick is being taken, unless they are on their own goal line and between the goalposts.
In the meticulous world of modern Premier League football, coaches prepare teams for almost every eventuality but this was one that was hard to envisage.
So Ipswich resorted to putting every one of their 11 players on the goal line — like a scene from Braveheart.
As for Wolves, in the absence of any cleverly thought-out short free-kick routine, they simply rolled it to their biggest, most powerful centre-back and asked him to whack it as hard as he could.
Emmanuel Agbadou made a firm enough contact but the free kick was so close that Sam Morsy — born and raised in Wolverhampton but now captaining a club 170 miles away — had time to charge out of Ipswich’s defensive army and charge it down with his shin.
The ball ballooned up and away to safety to complete one of the season’s most bizarre passages of play.
So Ipswich got away with a comical error but it was not enough to save them as Wolves fought back in the second half to win 2-1 through Pablo Sarabia and Jorgen Strand Larsen.
Ipswich fans will remember the game for another late giveaway that virtually confirmed their return to the Championship.
The rest of football will remember it for two minutes of craziness.
