Last Thursday night, against Astaras Tripoli of Greece, Tottenham Hotspur's Erik Lamela scored what he described as the best goal of his career, what his manager described as perhaps the best by any of his players, ever, and what most of the people watching described as "HOLY HELL DID YOU SEE WHAT HE DID THERE?" He scored a rabona; a technique which sees a footballer wrap leg one behind the other, to hit the ball with the 'wrong' foot. Look, here's the goal:
This is obviously a brilliant thing to do. This is also obviously a stupid thing to do.
It is brilliant because it is an astounding act of physical excellence — most humans couldn't even get the leg around there; most footballers couldn't hope to control the resultant contact enough to send the ball arcing precisely beyond the keeper — but also the achievement of that act of physical excellence requires a mental contortion of similar audacity. Being able to conceive of doing something like that, in the heat of the moment, is in its own way just as impressive as actually doing it; a contortion of the imagination rather than the legs.
It is stupid because, well, it's stupid. Tottenham are on the attack, space is opening up, both strikers are peeling off their markers, and they've only got a one-goal lead. The ball could go in, but it could also go for a throw in, or a hamstring injury, or just dribble sadly away. Being prescriptive about it, and as a general principle, at any given point while the ball is in their team's possession, a footballer should do whatever is most likely to lead to a goal for their team. So: David Beckham should work space for the cross; Cristiano Ronaldo should run directly towards the opposition's net; Tony Hibbert should give the ball to somebody else and go fishing. Nobody, at any point, should wrap their better leg behind their weaker and chip the ball over the goalkeeper from twenty yards, because that's not a thing that happens.
Except it did happen, and because it happened it was brilliant. It was a poor piece of decision making, it was an unnecessary and ill-advised risk, it was indulgent, it was ill-advised, and it was absolutely wonderful. Because he pulled it off. The rabona is brilliant because it's stupid. It's part of — perhaps the preeminent member of — that class of footballing silliness that includes the bicycle kick, the chip from the halfway line, the Pele/Jesper Blomqvist dummy, the Rivelino elastico, the Rivelino moustache, and all the other things that footballers do when they get bored of playing percentage passes.
None of those things are a good idea, even the ones that work. All of those things are wonderful, in part because they are not good ideas. To see somebody abandon the percentages and lunge for the unlikely is generally admirable even if it's simultaneously unwise; to see them grab it, to see the rabona arc over the keeper and into the net, is one of the purest footballing pleasures available. Players like Lamela, like Pele, even like Blomqvist occasionally, are liberated from the need to always make the sensible decision by the fact that they can get away with that sort of thing. Whereas if a player can't, they probably shouldn't try.
Go back to the Southampton dressing room in the mid-90s. There are 10 people in the starting line-up who shouldn't be shooting from 30 yards whenever they feel like it, because that would be ridiculous. Then there's Matt Le Tissier. Talent brings with it privilege, brings a special, trusted status. A genius is permitted to do stupid things, because a genius can make stupid things work.
To go back to the earlier point about mental contortions, it is open to question quite how conscious the whole process is. What happens to the brain and whether footballers know what they're doing — in the sense of whether something like Lamela's rabona is instinctive or whether he has thought "I will do this now" — is a fascinating an unanswered question (see this Guardian piece for more). In one sense, though, it doesn't really matter; either Lamela has better thoughts than other people, or he has better instincts, thanks presumably to years of practice allied to some innate ability. Either Le Tissier's deliberate thinking through the situation was better than everybody else's, or he was able to swing a leg in the right direction, at the right speed, with the right weight, without even really thinking about it, better than everybody else. Something being instinctive doesn't become less impressive as a result.
Either way, these instincts or calculations produces the most important thing that football can produce, at least on a moment-to-moment basis: fun, magic and joy. Fun, magic and joy, however, need the context of a genuine footballing contest: a game entirely composed of attempted rabonas would be some sort of depressing exhibition match, pretty but vacant, appealing but meaningless. The key to the amazingness of Lamela's rabona is that it came in a competitive match — jokes about the Europa League notwithstanding — and emerged from what is, at heart, a fundamentally prosaic business of moving a ball around. If it hadn't been a proper game, it wouldn't have been nearly as stupid.
As it is, its stupidity is the making of it. There cannot be a single football fan who hasn't, at some point, started the sentence "What the hell are you doing shooting from there?" but never made it to the end, because the ball's gone into the net and things have kind of got out of hand. And that rabona was significantly more ridiculous in all respects than most long shots. The bigger the gap in understanding — the louder the "how? what? um? what?" — the greater the fun, magic and joy. There's probably a formula for it somewhere, but precision would defeat the object. The rabbit actually disappeared! Then it reappeared! Applaud and be happy.
Emergent fun, magic and joy, born from nothing more than a happy coincidence of means (Lamela being Lamela), motive (Lamela wanting to score a goal, along with Lamela being the kind of person who might try and score a goal like that) and opportunity (a ball rolling gently onto the wrong foot). In life, bad choices tend to lead to unhappy consequences. In football, some bad choices lead to the happiest consequences imaginable. Long live terrible decision-making.