Erik Lamela’s exquisite rabona is already being hailed as the goal of the season but he isn’t the first to pull off football’s best party trick. Football Acca, home of the best footy banter online, has uncovered some more choice examples…
Europa League Thursdays aren’t noted for their tendency to thrill but last Thursday White Hart Lane witnessed a moment that far surpassed the tepid banalities associated of the early stages of European football’s less revered club competition. The moment in question (though Harry Kane’s calamitous cameo between the sticks after banging in a hat-trick ran it surprisingly close) was of course Erik Lamela’s audacious 20-yard rabona.
For those unfamiliar with the lesser-spotted rabona it is one of the game’s most sumptuously indulgent skills and entails striking the ball by wrapping the kicking foot behind the standing foot in a counter-intuitive, visually bewildering act of football theatre. Like this:
Pretty special eh?
But is Lamela’s sublime slight of foot the finest rabona of all time? Here’s the competition:
Angel Di Maria
Another brilliantly skilful Argentine with a big price tag to live up to. Although Di Maria’s rabona moment came back in 2009 when he played for Benfica. In truth this effort is laudable for it’s dedication to showmanship (he really didn’t have to apply a rabona finish) but a tad scruffy.
Pablo Aimar
The rabona it seems is something of an Argentine speciality. Perhaps it has something to do with the tango… In this example Pablo Aimar, surely one of the most sublimely gifted players of his generation (even if his talent never quite reached its potential), attempts a truly befuddling narrow angle rabona that arcs over the keeper only to rattle the far post and trickle across the goal line. Did he mean it? Only Pablo knows.
Andrés Vasquez
Who’d have thought perhaps the most audacious rabona in history would have been scored in Sweden? Unsparingly it was a South American who did the honours. Peruvian Andrés Vasquez had no right to even attempt this beauty but there’s little doubt that he meant it. Not sure what’s happened to him since mind.
