This paper addresses the problem of joint time of arrival (TOA) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in impulse radio ultra-wideband systems with a two-antenna receiver and links the joint estimation of TOA and DOA to the sparse representation framework. Exploiting this link, an orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm is used for TOA estimation in the two antennas, and then the DOA parameters are estimated via the difference in the TOAs between the two antennas. The proposed algorithm can work well with a single measurement vector and can pair TOA and DOA parameters. Furthermore, it has better parameter-estimation performance than traditional propagator methods, such as, estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques algorithms matrix pencil algorithms, and other new joint-estimation schemes, with one single snapshot. The simulation results verify the usefulness of the proposed algorithm.