James Holden’s Eight Hat-Trick Season
Eight hat-tricks. Forty league goals. Nineteen scoring appearances. Ripley Valley’s James Holden did not just top FQPL 4 Metro — he produced the most prolific individual scoring season anywhere in The Low Block’s 2026 Queensland men’s dataset.
8HAT-TRICKSMOST OF ANY PLAYER IN QUEENSLANDA Hat-Trick Every Few Weeks
Across 22 league appearances, Holden scored three or more goals on eight separate occasions. No other player across the 16 Queensland senior men’s competitions tracked by The Low Block reached that number in 2026.
The scale of it becomes clearer when the goals are broken down. Holden scored 25 of his 40 goals in those eight hat-trick-or-better matches alone — almost two-thirds of his season total.
He also led the statewide dataset for multi-goal appearances (12) and scoring appearances (19). In other words, he found the net in 19 of his 22 league games and scored at least twice in more than half of them.
Every Hat-Trick of 2026
Holden’s hat-tricks were spread across the campaign before exploding into a remarkable finish over the final month.
Four Straight Hat-Tricks to Close the Season
The most extraordinary stretch came at the end. Holden finished the regular season with four consecutive three-goal-or-better performances, scoring 13 times across Ripley Valley’s final four matches.
No other eligible player in the statewide dataset produced a longer run of consecutive 3+ goal appearances in 2026.
Four Statewide Highs
The eight hat-tricks were not an isolated quirk. Holden sits first across four different scoring measures in The Low Block’s validated 2026 Queensland men’s data.
Most by any eligible named player.
He scored in all but three league appearances.
More 2+ goal matches than any other player.
The clear statewide benchmark.
Who Came Closest?
The next-best mark was six hat-tricks from Bribie Island’s Kaj Dennis. Four players reached five, but nobody matched Holden’s eight.
Forty of Ninety-Six
Ripley Valley scored 96 league goals as a team in 2026. Holden supplied 40 of them — 41.7% of the club’s total — as Ripley finished third in FQPL 4 Metro with a 17–1–4 record and a +64 goal difference.
That contribution was not built solely on penalties either. Thirty-five of Holden’s 40 goals were non-penalty goals.
41.7%OF RIPLEY VALLEY’S LEAGUE GOALSEight Hat-Tricks in 22 Games
Forty goals was the headline total. The eight hat-tricks explain how explosive the season really was. From March through August — and especially across the final four rounds — James Holden produced a scoring campaign nobody else in Queensland’s tracked men’s competitions matched in 2026.
Data: The Low Block validated 2026 database. Individual comparisons exclude Hidden Player and use leaderboard-eligible player records. Hat-trick and multi-goal counts use appearance-eligible player-match goal records. Minutes, minutes-per-goal and per-90 figures are shown only where Holden’s player-minute data is exact. A hat-trick is counted as any match with three or more goals.