Footy Factor’s Best of the Decade: Free Kick Taker
2010 is on the horizon and it’s safe to say that it’s been a wonderful decade for football. We here at Footy Factor have taken the opportunity to celebrate the greatest teams, players, and matches of the past 10 years. Next up…
Free Kick Taker of the Decade
Winner: Juninho Pernambucano. Behold the greatest free kick specialist of the decade – and maybe of all time. What separates him from his rivals is that Juninho Pernambucano is deadly from any range and any position, able to curl a ball around a wall, drive it with ferocious intensity, or launch it on a precarious flight that flits and flutters unpredictably through the air. The physics behind this latter trick is something that aficionados of the “knuckle ball pitch” in baseball will well understand: Dispatch a ball into the air without any spin, and it will be at the complete mercy of the surrounding turbulence. Heaven help you if you try to predict where it’s headed.
With this devastating bag of tricks the Brazilian scored an amazing 44 free kicks during his eight seasons at Lyon. Some of those will live in infamy, like his long range blasts against Bayern Munich and Real Madrid in the Champions League. And don’t forget the several times that Juninho scored from set-pieces beyond 40 yards, including an outrageous 52-yard screamer against AC Ajaccio a few years back.
Runners Up: David Beckham Naturally. The man had a film named after him, for crying out loud. He’s a magician; his boot the magic wand. Against Greece in 2001: grace under fire. But we’ll always remember witnessing his perfectly placed long-range set-piece in a do-or-die match against Colombia at World Cup 98. We were laughing all the way back to London. Ronaldinho. In this case, England was on the receiving end. Who will ever forget the embarrassed faces – not just on David Seaman, but on all England fans – when the Brazilian knocked in that 35-yarder to send the Three Lions home from World Cup 2002? The Brazilian’s a vestige of his former self now, but for the meatier part of the decade he was simply unstoppable.
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Footy Factor’s Best of the Decade: Manager
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