Zinedine Zidane
“Hamit Altintop’s thunderously crisp volley against Kazakhstan earlier this week was one of the finest strikes seen for quite some time and, with a nod to The Guardian’s “Joy of Six“ feature, got me thinking about some of the game’s greatest volleys. So, without further ado, here is a selection of some of the cleanest strikes ever witnessed. If you’ve got any more suggestions then please add them in the comments at the bottom of the page.” (The Equaliser)

“One of the greatest blights of modern football is that it looks the same wherever in the world you go. Teams from Addis Ababa to Zurich play with equipment made by the same handful of manufacturers and, with this, we have lost something. The global game has become homogenised and stripped of a couple of the layers of its colour and panache, and perhaps the most visual aspect of this on the pitch are the goalposts and netting themselves. Almost all clubs and countries now avail themselves of the now ubiquitous free-standing box net style of goal, with two poles holding the nets up and out of harm’s way.” (twohundredpercent)

“Glossy, shiny wonderful thing, sat on the newsagents shelf, ready to be plucked and digested. More sales than ever you say? but are you ok? really? IBWM editor Jeff Livingstone worries for a favourite publication. I was a little concerned to read recently that publishers IPC are looking to offload/sell World Soccer magazine.” (In Bed with Maradona)

“From Mr Fallrueckzieher to Roger Boli, via Mark Hughes, here are half a dozen of the best acrobatic belters ever” (Guardian)

Pozzo is held aloft as Italy claim the 1934 World Cup
“A name that has unfortunately faded into obscurity in recent years, Vittorio Pozzo is undoubtedly one of the greatest managers of all time. One of the most relentlessly successful international coaches the game has ever seen, Pozzo led Italy to two World Cup triumphs and Olympic gold during his twenty years in charge of the Azzurri in three spells between 1912 and 1948.” (The Equaliser)

“As well as upping weekend revenue for DIY stores everywhere, the international break produced two hat-tricks — one each for Jermain Defoe (England) and Klaas-Jan Huntelaar (Netherlands). Variety, technique, a dollop of selfishness, they all go into the mix to score a treble at this level, and competitive international hat tricks are getting harder to come by — the last three World Cups have produced about a quarter of the total produced by the first three. Argentina striker Gonzalo Higuain bagged one this summer with the same cool exterior as his predecessor Gabriel Batistuta, but an international hat trick of tournament-changing magnitude, of tear-jerking quality or just of eyebrow-raising novelty is a rare thing indeed. Here’s a list of memorable ones…” (SI)

“Some teams play to win trophies, but there are others who play for the sake of entertaining the fans. These teams rarely win titles, but they are often remembered more fondly than champions. We take a look at five such ‘fun’ teams.” (TheHardTackle)

“Brazilian Roberto Carlos’s 1997 free-kick against France curved so sharply that it left goalkeeper Fabian Barthez standing still and looking puzzled. Now, a study published in the New Journal of Physics suggests that the long-held assumption that the goal was a fantastic fluke is wrong. A French team of scientists discovered the trajectory of the goal and developed an equation to describe it.” (BBC)

“I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace’s essay on Roger Federer, the famous one that ran in the New York Times’s now-defunct sports magazine, Play, in 2006. If you don’t remember it for the argument, you might remember it for the title, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience,’ which even back in ’06 felt like a strange combination of terms. It’s a little hard to remember this now, with Federer’s career having settled into its gentle downward glide, but at that point Roger Federer was annihilating sports.” (Run of Play)