Is La Rocca's own goal the A-League's worst ever?

There is, of course, nothing worse. Nothing more harrowing, more tangibly damaging to one’s team, more overtly in violation of the collective intention. Own goals – some more so than others – are always horrible.

Last night we saw one so galling, it may well be held up as the exemplar from now on. Iacopo La Rocca leaped, swivelling in the air, stretching every sinew, forcing blood through every pound of muscle, to deliver a perfect header into the goal. His own goal.

It was, suffice it to say, a strange moment. In the half-second that followed, everyone in the ground, as well as those watching intently at home, questioned their own reality.

All this during Defender’s Round, no less.

La Rocca was not wearing purple, and yet every physical action we had just seen executed indicated he should have been. Then, as the remainder of the second ticked by, the full ignominy unfurled itself; it was, for Adelaide and La Rocca, a moment of utter calamity.

It appeared as though La Rocca had attempted to flick the ball over his left shoulder, past the far post and out for a corner. As was pointed out by the match-call team, this was by far the most difficult option; a stern header back in the direction of the cross, or a glanced backward-nod would certainly have been more advisable.

As it was, the ball struck a combination of his head and shoulder, and the result was a textbook striker’s finish, aimed and propelled perfectly.

Perth hadn’t won an away game in their last eight attempts, and hadn’t won a game in Adelaide for more than 1800 days. La Rocca exited the match injured just 20 minutes later, making things far worse, and had given the Glory an inappropriately generous gift.

Perth would race out to a 3-0 lead before the respite of halftime arrived. But where does La Rocca’s aberration rank in the A-League’s fetid history of own goals?

It isn’t the funniest, that double-edged sword was placed, in knighthood, on the shoulders of Eugene Galekovic, who was watching last night’s match on from a stadium box, injured.

In April, 2015, Galekovic was the architect of an own goal that had three separate acts, a tragi-comedy that tumbled from suspense, into confrontation, then eventually to grief.

Our protagonist, caught in an impossible situation, with the striker set to meet the cross, was forced from the refuge of his penalty area. The ball applied the first eye-poke, bouncing awkwardly, forcing a ballooned kick. Then, with Galekovic set to redeem himself, fate applied a swift slap, as a bungled catch spilled horribly toward goal.

Lastly, as a final, Lars von Trier-esque emotional nose-swipe, Galekovic palms the ball into his own thigh, carrying it irreparably across the line. For Eugene it was horrid. For everyone else, rounds of snickering had begun a while ago.

It isn’t the silliest, that was offered up, in sublime slapstick, by Chad Gibson in 2006.

As a long ball is curled toward his marker, Gibson must have heard a shout from his goalkeeper. It was the gloveman’s to claim, thankfully, thought Chad. My work here is done, having shielded the attacker ably out of the equation. At that point, Chad took a little look, just to make sure his teammate was arriving on the scene in time. A second later the ball, an inanimate object with better comic timing than the majority of the Melbourne Comedy Festival, struck an unwitting Gibson on the head, bamboozling the keeper, and spinning with cruel hilarity into the goal. Bravo.

It wasn’t the most athletic, Milan Smiljanic holds that title. Just last December, the Perth Glory midfielder severed his terrestrial tether, launching into a superb diving header, a torpedo of pure catastrophe.

Diving towards your own goal, inside your own box, to head a speared cross, isn’t something one should make a habit of, and yet the way in which the ball looped, in snorting defiance of intuitive physics, inside the far post was truly breathtaking. A horizontal, airborne error is still horizontal and airborne, and golf claps were had all around.

It wasn’t the funkiest, as that mantle was sashayed onto by Andreu Guerao. Boogieing with a certain bootyliciousness, last season the Spaniard buttocked the ball directly into his own goal direct from a corner, never once abandoning his derriere-first choreography and, as the telling impact came, garnishing the performance with a flourish of the heel.

Somewhere between Beyonce and Michael Jackson, if you look closely, the turf beneath Guerao is actually smouldering due to the pure heat of his moves.

But there is, in all these other contenders, a common quality; they all have, at the critical moment, a sense of disarray, of pressure applied at exactly the worst juncture, forcing the error in part.

No such quality exists in La Rocca’s, who was totally unmarked and free from any meaty physical presence nearby.

His team ended up losing 5-0 – Adam Taggart should really have made it at least 6-0, too – set on their way down a well of defeat by his own clanger. It was the heaviest loss in this fixture in A-League history.

The champions were eviscerated, and, for the Reds, La Rocca’s Hall of Infamy moment might be the enduring image of 2016/17.