https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHNiamEhdjY
One of them was from the attacking team, the other from the defensive side. One of them worked, the other failed quite miserably.
We’ve seen enough ridiculous free-kick routines in JOE Towers that we could write a book about them at this stage; suffice to say they have to be very good, very bad, very strange or very funny to make much of an impact around these parts and two set-piece routines we came across today certainly ticked at least one of those boxes.
The first one comes from Japan (see above), where Kyoto Sanga staged arguably the most over-elaborate free-kick routine you’ll ever see from an indirect free-kick just outside the area, with three players dummying the ball completely before a fourth laid it off with the slightest of touches in the direction of a fifth player, who smashed it into the back of the net.
The second free-kick comes from Brazil and while the ball also ended up in the back of the net, it did so despite the incredible lengths Brazilian side Ponte Preta went to in order to prevent it from doing so in a recent encounter against Parana.
With the free-kick awarded at the edge of the penalty area, a Ponte Preta player lay down directly behind the wall so there would be no chance of the free-kick taker, Parana’s Lucio Flavio, of putting it under the wall in a manner similar to Cristiano Ronaldo against Bayern Munich last week.
Undeterred by the lengthy delay before he able to take the kick, Flavio simply dinked it over a wall populated by a large group of players from both sides and into the top corner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CczPSU7EH9A
Ponte Preta will argue that they were abiding by Roy Keane’s famous ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail mantra’ but surely this was taking the p*ss.
