Marlin Coast Rangers playing coach Crios O’Hare has scored one of the fastest goals in Aussie soccer history, with a stunning strike from halfway in his team’s 5-0 victory in the Australia Cup.

O’Hare said he didn’t have the record books in mind when he saw the opposing goalkeeper off his line as the whistle sounded to get Saturday’s preliminary match between the Rangers and Stratford under way in Cairns.

O’Hare, Marlin Coast’s experienced playing coach, scored directly from the kick-off — a feat his club has unofficially timed at 3.68 seconds.

Football Queensland does not have access to records to be able to verify whether the goal is the fastest ever scored in Australia, but the goal ranks among the fastest ever scored worldwide and quicker than the Australia Cup’s record of 11.2 seconds.

“It’s something I kind of look at each game,” 38-year-old O’Hare said.

“It doesn’t come up too often but there’s a couple of us who saw the keeper off his line a little bit and thought ‘why not have a crack?’.”

Adelaide City legend Damian Mori’s 1995 strike against Sydney United — timed at 3.69 seconds — is the benchmark for Australia’s fastest ever goal, having broken the world record at the time.

O’Hare has tried the feat once before, hitting the crossbar in a Far North Queensland Premier League season opener against Leichhardt.

Goal could have been faster

Marlin Coast Rangers team manager Gavin Broomhead was keeping time at the match and said he was just starting his stopwatch when he “just saw the ball flying in the air”.

“My first reaction actually was to turn to the bench and say ‘that’s got to be one of the fastest goals in football wasn’t it?'” he said.

Broomhead said determining the speed of the goal was difficult without the goal-line technology used at the highest levels of the game.

But 3.68 seconds was a conservative estimate, he said.

The clock starts rolling when the first ball of the game is kicked to get play under way, not when the referee blows the whistle.

“I probably did 10, 15, 20, stopwatches to try and get the exact time,” Broomhead said.

“If anyone has got better technology than me, I’m happy for them to try and get the exact time.

“It may even be [faster] in fact.”

Faster goals have been scored internationally, with the English FA recognising a 2004 goal by amateur Marc Burrows as its fastest goal, at 2.56 seconds.

The quickest ever goal in a World Cup was Hakan Sukur’s strike after 11 seconds for Turkey against South Korea in 2002.

Magic of the Cup

Broomhead said the fact the goal was scored during an Australia Cup match, the nation’s domestic knockout competition, added to its significance.

“It was our first game of the season so it was actually the first kick of the whole season for the whole club,” he said.

“We always dream of something like the FA Cup where we could play an A-League team potentially down the track.”

O’Hare, who has previously played at NPL level and overseas, hasn’t ruled out an audacious attempt from kick-off again.

“If the opportunity comes up, you never know,” he said.

“I do remember my dad scoring a couple of goals growing up, very similar to that from halfway so I think I’ll have to score a couple more to get past him.”