Blues season ticket holder Sean Hedges-Quinn says he’s absolutely thrilled to have been chosen to sculpt the statue of Blues legend Kevin Beattie. After only two days of fundraising the total has already passed the £12,000 mark.
Led by the EADT and Ipswich Star in conjunction with BBC Radio Suffolk and TWTD, The Beat Goes On was launched on Tuesday on what would have been Beattie’s 65th birthday.
The campaign aims to raise the £110,000 required for the statue and additional associated costs.
"I’m absolutely thrilled to be doing Beat because he is the greatest Ipswich Town player,” Hedges-Quinn, known as Coach and who sculpted the Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson statues already at Portman Road, told Mark Murphy’s BBC Radio Suffolk breakfast show (39mins 42secs).
"There have been numerous polls over the last 10 or 15 years and he always comes out on top, and quite rightly so.
"His footballing colleagues and managers, Sir Bobby Robson obviously felt very, very highly of him and I think in a way we kind of took him for granted at the time.
"But now we realise, especially with the predicament Town are in at the moment, what a great, great player he was and what would we do to have him on the side now?”
The Beattie statue is likely to be placed on the corner of Portman Road and the entrance to the Cattlemarket car park, diagonal to Sir Alf Ramsey and just along from Sir Bobby Robson.
Sean, 50, who sits in the upper tier of the Sir Bobby Robson Stand, says the statue of Beattie will be in a pose which brings out the type of player Beattie was with photos such as the one on the cover of his 1982 testimonial against Dynamo Moscow seen as epitomising the nine-times-capped England international.
"It’s relatively easy to get quite a good likeness of a footballer but what you’ve got to bring across is their character and everybody knows that the Beat, he obviously wasn’t short of skill, but what people do remember about him is his strength, his agility, that he could leap like a salmon,” he reflected.
"So it’s important to try and portray that in the statue to truly reflect who he was and the type of player he was.
"You need him going up, leaping up like he did above the cross bar with his neck right back, the veins on his neck showing, the muscles in his arms, his seventies/eighties perm flying in the wind, which will be quite a challenge in itself.
"But it will all be about Kevin Beattie the footballer rather than just the likeness of Kevin Beattie.”
The hope is that the statue will be unveiled on December 18th next year, which would have been Beattie’s 66th birthday, and Sean says that's a realistic aim.
"I think so,” he added. "Usually it takes me around six to nine months to do a statue. I visualise this statue of Kevin taking more like the nine months because of the complexity of pose, he’s jumping up.
"But definitely by next December, that will be my target. If you want to get a job done you need a target, don’t you?”
"It’s been an absolute pleasure for me [to be given the commission] and I’m looking forward to doing a wonderful job for Ipswich Town, all the fans, and the Beat, of course.”
You can make a donation online via the Go Fund Me page or send a cheque made payable to ‘The Beat Goes On’ to Kevin Beattie Statue Appeal, EADT, Portman House, 120 Princes Street, Ipswich, IP1 1RS.
There are also collection buckets at reception at the EADT’s offices and at BBC Radio Suffolk. A number of events and other fundraising activities are planned for the months to come.