Welcome to MUNDIAL’s Goal of the Month. The rules are pretty simple. Every four weeks, we will be delving into the memory banks and picking our favourite goal scored during that month at any point in footballing history. We can pick from any league, from MLS to the Combined Counties. Any player, from Lionel Messi to those we play five-a-side with, and from any year. Got it? Good. Enjoy December’s edition.
It’s 7.13pm on the ninth of December, 2006. Clouds are darkening over the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán, and the temperature is dipping into the low teens. It’s cold, cold, cold for Seville, and the 45,000 fans who have bundled themselves into the stadium are packed tight together, watching and waiting. A familiar figure stands in a familiar stance on the far left over a dead ball sitting perpendicular to the sixteen-yard box. He takes a step back before taking precisely one, two, three, four steps forward, planting his left foot next to the ball as he goes to strike it, leaning back, arm coming up across him like he’s just launched a discus while his right boot goes the other way, about to launch sweet hellfire towards goal.
You will all have an image in your head of a David Beckham free kick. They’ll come bubbling up to the surface of your memory easily, mainly because there’s rarely been a player who has looked as good when striking a football, who offers such a distinct visual aesthetic, an idea of perfection in your mind’s eye. That this is what you should look like when taking a free kick. Pick a moment, any moment, and there’ll be a Becks for it. Greece, 2001, skinhead and national hero. Barcelona, 1998, floppy blonde Keira Knightley curtains. Ecuador, 2006, faux-hawk with Posh Spice and Cheryl Cole watching on. All of them dispatched into the net, all of them ending with him screaming at the crowd and being mobbed by his teammates. He was a generator of hyper-vivid memories, moments of technicolour produced by technique years and years in the making.
This free kick, against Sevilla for Real Madrid in a winter fixture that already feels like a winter fixture, like nobody really wants to be there—especially not a Madrid side who have had their coach bricked and nearly set on fire on the way to the game—goes the same way as the others we remember. The ball curves in an out-to-in parabola that deceives goalkeeper Andrés Palop with its speed and spin, who sticks his hand up too late and falls on his arse with a crash, humiliated while Becks has Raúl and Roberto Carlos jump on him.
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