The Joy of Six: free-kick specialistsPosted by Rob Smyth Friday 28 August 2009 12.28 BST
[img=www.guardian.co.uk]http://The Guardian[/img]
1. Zico"Make the goalkeeper work." So plead legions of pundits, who themselves couldn't hit a cow's arse with the proverbial one during their playing days, every time there is a free-kick within range. Zico certainly did. He worked a goalkeeper like a cameraman works a model. It is hard to believe that anybody hit the target so often – and not just the main target, but a target within the target. Zico could hit either top corner or either bottom corner as if to order. This was not just a gift of nature; he nurtured his sublime talent through incessant practice. After training he would hang a shirt in each top corner and challenge himself to take one of them down from 20 yards. (His former team-mate, the Milan manager Leonardo, reckons he did so 30-35 times out of 50 each day.) He had a metal silhouette made to simulate the wall. And he analysed his craft forensically, placing huge importance on the standing foot.
He was amply rewarded for his hard work. In his first season in Serie A, with Udinese in 1983-84, Zico seemed to score a free-kick a week. That said, free-kick isn't really the right word; with Zico it was more a free-pass. He would stroll up and, with his body leaning back like a broken Subbuteo player, simply caress the ball with the instep where he wanted. Gravity always wins - even Jaap Stam's penalty came to earth last week – but it never won as quickly as with Zico's free-kicks. He was masterful at getting the ball up and down to score from 18.000001 yards – an art that is now lost, probably because of today's lighter footballs. He was so good that defenders inevitably tried to reduce the 10-yard gap; in one game against Juventus, a free-kick took between four and five minutes because the defenders kept encroaching desperately.
Zico had one other special ability: a combination of mental strength and quick-wittedness that enabled him to play chess with the opposing goalkeeper. If it's notoriously bad practice for a penalty-taker to change his side, it is the opposite for a free-kick taker. Before one match in 1984, the Fiorentina goalkeeper Giovanni Galli decided to sledge Zico, announcing to the media that he knew Zico would put any free-kicks in the bottom-right corner. With delicious inevitability, Zico stuck one in the bottom-left corner while Galli danced around like a cat on a hot tin roof in the centre of his goal, scared to put his weight on either foot lest he be made to look a complete fool. He was anyway; after all, if you come at the king, you best not miss. Zico certainly didn't. Physically and mentally, nobody worked a goalkeeper quite like this.
2. Ronald KoemanGiven how significant a part they play in games, it's surprising how few direct free-kicks have been scored in World Cup or European Cup finals, never mind decided them. Consequently, Ronald Koeman's exquisite howitzer for Barcelona against Sampdoria in 1992 will always have a special place in football history. We tend to associate Koeman with that particular type of free-kick, where he would lace the ball in a manner that was paradoxically sledgehammer rather than silk, yet if anything he was more adept at the seductive, shorter-range curler. As with his penalties, when he would charge towards the ball like a man with murder in mind only to tap it gently into the net, part of the skill was in the deception. With Koeman, there was more than one way to skin a defensive wall; as all Englishmen know well, he could flippin' flip one as well. And while there is a very powerful argument that the greatest Dutch free-kick taker of all is Pierre van Hooijdonk – a Dutch magazine once calculated that he had scored over 50 in his career – there is no doubt who scored the most important.
3. DidiGiven the advancements in football over the last century or more, it's surprising how few innovators are formally recognised: we have the Cruyff turn, the Makelele role, the Panenka, but there aren't as many as you might expect. One player who certainly qualifies is the Brazilian genius Didi, the first man to bring artistic life to a dead-ball situation. Didi patented the folha seca (dry leaf), or what would become known as the banana free-kick, first demonstrating it to the world at the 1954 World Cup. It's routine stuff now, but then so are the Beatles' songs. At the time such invention was unthinkable. Brazil has become the spiritual home of the free-kick, and as well as the obvious names this list could easily have included the Corinthian pair of Neto or Marcelinho Carioca. But in this particular sphere, it was a man from the tail end of football's Corinthian age who really set the ball rolling. And dipping and bending into the top corner.
To read another Brazilian genius, Rivelino, talking about his country's free-kick prowess, click here
4. Alan SuddickAny reflection on British free-kick expertise tends to begin and end with the golden ball-striking of David Beckham, but that is an insult to a genuinely rich history. Liverpool's Donald McKinlay was an outstanding exponent either side of the first world war, and Peter Lorimer, Bobby Collins, Ted Phillips, Cliff Holton and Matthew Le Tissier are all worthy of mention. Yet none can compare to Alan Suddick or Blackpool and Newcastle. Suddick was a free amigo who, though he had a wonderful, maverick talent that was compared to that of George Best by the Newcastle legend Bobby Moncur, was best known for his outrageous free-kicks. He would crouch down so that the keeper could not see him, and then bend the ball so viciously that it was a surprise Uri Geller didn't claim credit for it. This, too, with the old leather footballs that barely deviated off the straight in a hurricane.
He didn't so much make the ball talk as sing like a canary. "Suddick took one from the edge of the penalty area and it was the most remarkable 'banana' kick I have seen," wrote Paul Fitzpatrick in this paper in 1968. "Didi himself would have watched it with awe." Suddick became so known for his banana kicks that, when he passed away earlier this year, his old team-mate Glyn James laid a banana-shaped wreath behind the goal at Blackpool.
5. Sinisa MihajlovicAfter Blackpool, we have the big dipper. Sinisa Mihajlovic would charge in off his long run to take his free-kicks, which would set off like a space exploration vehicle only to descend absurdly as they homed in on goal. There have been more visceral left-footed free-kick takers, mainly because Mihajlovic eschewed the outside of his left foot – we're thinking of that famous goal by a Brazilian left-back here* – but none as remorselessly effective. We're not sure that anybody else has scored a hat-trick of free-kicks, as Mihajlovic did for Lazio in 1998, with either foot. And we're certain that nobody can match his record of 27 free-kicks in Serie A.
Nor has anybody lived for free-kicks quite like Mihajlovic. Towards the end of his career at Internazionale, it was sincerely suggested by some that he was basically being picked to take free-kicks. A few years earlier, Mihajlovic told some bald bloke that "I don't know if I'd play football if there were no free-kicks". His skill was honed from childhood, when he would drive neighbours to distraction by practising at all hours, smacking the ball against the metal yard gates. By his early teens his free-kicks were so powerful that his father had to replace those gates every few weeks. Rarely has money been so well spent. Every time he dipped into his pocket, he gave Mihajlovic the chance to hone the big dipper that would make his name.
* Don't you dare say Roberto Carlos was a great free-kick taker. Don't you dare
6. Juninho PernambucanoMost free-kick specialists are like Olympic sprinters: they have an optimal distance and are notably less successful when taken away from that. David Beckham, for example, is less effective from 20 yards, and Ronaldinho from 30. Juninho Pernambucano is more like Usain Bolt: whatever the distance, or indeed the angle, he is almost equally devastating. No player has been so eclectically electric from free-kicks. His range is the same as that of most English males on the prowl at 1.45am on a Saturday morning: 18-45, with no real preference either way. He also takes all manner of free-kicks. Booming, swirling strikes with the instep; gentle, placed curlers; head-down blasters that are past a hapless goalkeeper before he can say Juninho Pernambucano; and, of course, the wobbling knuckleball that he, ahem, copied from Cristiano Ronaldo. He has allied this variety to a remarkable consistency: in eight seasons at Lyon he scored an absurd 44 goals from free-kicks. Few specialists, in any sphere, have been quite so special.
