Soccer being nicknamed “the beautiful game” is appropriate, because when it is played at its best, no sport is as aesthetically pleasing as footy. Here, look at this bit of skill from Ajax’s Hakim Ziyech that occurred during a match on Tuesday.
https://twitter.com/brfootball/status/1163906333571198976
Pretty good! Still, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t hilarious low points, like the one that occurred during a match involving Sporting Clube de Portugal’s U-17 team.
The Portuguese side took on União Almeirim and got off to as good of a start as you can imagine. The catch was that Sporting did not touch the ball — União Almeirim kicked the game off and passed the ball around for the first 13 seconds of action. At one point, a defender tried to play the ball back to their keeper, who tried to boot the ball up the pitch but whiffed spectacularly.
It is normally bad when a player does this, but it’s especially bad when a keeper is unable to make good contact with the ball, because they’re usually standing in front of the net. As such, this happened.
Sporting Clube de Portugal's U17 team scored after 13 seconds without even touching the ball 😳 pic.twitter.com/hgL0mwcqSP
— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) August 21, 2019
Some credit has to go to Sporting, which applied pressure on União Almeirim as they were pinging the ball around and hurried the keeper into making this mistake. Still, to all the young footballers with dreams of becoming the world’s next great goalkeeper some day, study this and make it a point to never do it.
