The World Cup is the ultimate global showcase of the beautiful game. On the pitch, it’s the pinnacle of hundreds of careers every four years. The purity of international football is unmatched.
It’s also a commercial behemoth operating at the apex of sport and sponsorship, with official partners investing heavily while the sun shines and a bottomless pit full of brands big and small completely missing the point.
Watch any commercial break during a World Cup game and you’ll see an avalanche of football fakery: fake fans doing fake fan things like absolute lads – nobody watches England in the pub wearing war paint – and stylised football that bears no resemblance to the real thing.
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Celebrating the scorpion kick
You’re likely to see some outlandish manoeuvres in football-adjacent advertising. Counter-attacks routinely end with bicycle kicks for some reason, and players riding slide tackles using a bizarre array of toe drags.
You might even see a scorpion kick, portrayed as a normal skill deployed by players to frame them as something a bit special. It’s not normal. Most football supporters around the world will make it from birth to the grave without ever seeing one in the flesh.
But the thing about the scorpion kick is it is, at least, a real thing. It does happen, and when it happens it’s both a useful improvisation and a visually jaw-dropping technique.
There are two different kinds of scorpion kick.
The first, the one that’s represented in the otherworldly environment of football-based ads, is very occasionally used by an outfield player to pull off a shot on goal where none appears possible.
With the ball in the air, above waist height and behind the run of a player facing towards the opposition goal, the ambitious attacker chooses to throw themselves forward and hook a foot upwards behind their back.
The player’s foot strikes the ball towards goal while behind the back and higher than the head, a move referred to as the scorpion kick because it resembles the curled tail of a scorpion poised to sting.
Dominic Solanke, Olivier Giroud and Henrikh Mkhitaryan all scored variations of the scorpion kick in the Premier League, while Zlatan Ibrahimovic made it look standard while playing for Paris Saint-Germain.
The second type of scorpion kick and perhaps the one best associated with the term, belongs wholly to the legendary Colombia goalkeeper Rene Higuita, who took the skill to a whole new level during a dreadful international friendly against England at Wembley in 1995.
Higuita, sporting a very heavy-duty pair of tracksuit bottoms, dived forward and watched a mis-hit Jamie Redknapp cross float over his head before hooking both feet upward behind him and clearing the ball off the line.
It was a beautiful moment of stunning skill often said to be in vain because the target of Redknapp’s cross might have been offside.
It was later revealed that the goal would have counted if the cross had drifted in directly, with the referee not having blown his whistle as reported.
