Someone mentioned Maradona, and it just got me thinking.
Why don't players beat the Keeper any more? Maradona used to dribble it around the keeper and run it in to the net, now everybody panics and shoots straight at them. It's a damn shame.
My favourite goal ever is actually a Maradona goal. The opposition just scored after an age of hard tackling football, with them all sweating bullets, charging around the pitch, making every inch count, scrapping the ball around in the box for minute after minute after minute. They eventually began to wear themselves and their opponents down, two gladiators squaring off each other until finally, heroically, they broke the deadlock and scored. Ecstasy was on the opponents face, they had broken the deadlock against a brick wall and surely would now go on to win the game. Whilst their muscles ached tomorrow and the sweat poured off their brows today, in the years to come they could put their hands on their heart and declare that they gave everything; their heart, their soul and every ounce of energy and fight to come out victorious. Maradona's team was deflated, they could see it in their faces, they knew that they had lost. Nobody can expel that much effort, sweat that much blood for their cause and turn the game around. All was lost, and the crushing defeat means that their hopes of glory lay shattered on the pitch, crystallised in the faint dew of the grass as an aching reminder of true failure - the type where you have given your all and still come up short. A proud failure. The game was over and everybody knew it, the fans were leaving with their head down in desperation, sulking to the exits. Maradona's team almost didn't want to continue, but they were legally obliged to kick off, so with a defeatist flick of the boot, the other forward slowly tapped the ball to Maradona to begin the last ten minutes of their game. Their proud failure. Their abject failure.
Then Maradona flicked it up and lobbed the keeper from the halfway line to equalise.
Ok, so it didn't quite happen like that, but that's the way I tell it to my nephews. He really did flick it up off a kick off and lob someone, though I may have slightly embellished the story for dramatic effect.
