When was the last time you thought, “I’ve never seen that before” while watching a football game?
As Manchester City’s first team prepared for Arsenal’s visit to the Etihad last Sunday, City’s under-17s were competing in the Future Cup, an annual youth tournament hosted by Dutch club Ajax , their opponent last Saturday.
At the Etihad Stadium, there was little room for unpredictability and spontaneous genius as Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta micromanaged their teams to a 0-0 stalemate, dubbed ‘one of the worst games of the season’ by talkSPORT radio presenter Jeff. Stelling. Only if you had never seen a football match before would you come away inspired by something new and unique.
Luckily for us, in Amsterdam, City youngster David Chigwada was freed from the creative shackles of what many had touted as a Premier League title decider.
With City leading Ajax 1-0 in the 33rd minute, Chigwada chased the ball towards the left touchline with his back to goal. With no one in a City shirt in sight and an Ajax defender on his tail, the 16-year-old’s options were limited: keep the ball in the corner and wait for reinforcements; hook a pass 20 yards down the wing toward a teammate near the halfway line; or produce a moment of magic to lose your man and move towards the goal.
He chose the latter. Let’s break it down…
It will be a sleepless night… 👀🥜#FutureCup pic.twitter.com/1RNMIRlXiB
– ESPN NL (@ESPNnl) March 30, 2024
The England youth international takes a quick glance back and realizes he doesn’t like his options. He then prepares to play a pass in that direction, causing his marker to lower his body weight slightly toward his left foot while standing. This leaves the defender with his legs wide open, providing a route to goal for Chigwada if he can pull off a sharp, smart turn.
With his marker a meter away, he prepares to roll the ball away from the goal, seemingly moving away from danger.
But most importantly, he begins this maneuver by lifting his standing left foot off the ground and behind his right. Instead of rolling the ball away from the goal or doing a “Cruyff trick” made famous by Ajax legend Johan Cruyff, Chigwada rolls the ball back with his right foot to his left while pulling his marker towards him by his jersey.
Then, in a brilliant move, he turns and hits the Ajax defender with the outside of his left foot. The backspin of the ball means he is almost stationary when he catches it.
His body momentum from this skill pushes him backwards and he takes the defender in that direction, but he shows great power to push off his left foot and sprint past his opponent to collect the ball and direct towards the goal.
It must be recognized that the defender caught Chigwada and helped cancel out City’s attack.
The first response to ESPN Netherlands’ tweet regarding a snippet of the skill translates into English as: “If I were to do this move, my cruciate ligaments would be behind the billboards.” »
We asked some experts what they thought.
“What strikes me is the freedom and the personality of trying something like this,” said Harry Brooks, director of RH Football, a football coaching, mentoring and analysis company tailored to football players. the academy. “If you asked any football player to perform this skill in isolation, they would be able to do it. It’s not that difficult, technically. But the instinct to do it in the moment and make it happen right then and there is what impresses me the most.
It seems fitting that the turning point would reach his next stage of evolution on the Ajax academy pitch, where Cruyff went from a prodigious talent to one of the greatest players in football history. Although he later said he did not practice “tricks” – in his view the Cruyff turn was intuitive and natural – it was fertile ground for generations of technically gifted Dutch talent, from Cruyff to Dennis Bergkamp to Frenkie de Jong.
“I never did tricks in training or in my free time,” Cruyff said, recounting his trick against Sweden at the 1974 World Cup. “I saw something, I saw it. did and it fired. There was an opponent there, and I had to outplay him, and (Cruyff’s trick) was the easiest way.
It remains to be clarified whether the same applies to the “Chigwada spin” or the “Chigwada chop” – we welcome better suggestions in the comments section. Nonetheless, given the complexity of this three-part process, it is fair to conclude that there is something more deliberate about the process in this case. Chigwada may have taken inspiration from Yannick Bolasie, one of the Premier League’s most maverick tricksters and artists of the last decade.
“There are two things that stand out about this skill,” says FA-qualified coach and analyst Ricky-Lee Griffiths. “First, how fast he moves his body to face the opposite direction, then how fast he moves his feet. Reminds me of Bolasie when he was at Crystal Palace. He would be backed into a corner but would manage to move so quickly that defenders wouldn’t have a chance.
Playing for Palace against Tottenham Hotspur in December 2014, Bolasie initiated the eponymous “Bolasie Flick”, where, while on the half-turn near the touchline, he dragged the ball from his right foot towards his left and sent it to Christian Eriksen. at the waist level.
🌪 Bolasian film 🌪
Skill of the decade, but #PalaisMomentdelaDécade?
You decide 👉 #CPFC pic.twitter.com/ypbBsIQypH
– Crystal Palace FC (@CPFC) December 19, 2019
“Every once in a while you’ll have a player who thinks outside the box, with a coach who allows him to do those kinds of things,” Brooks says. “That’s what Bolasie had and that’s what I’d like to think happened here.” Nowadays, these skills aren’t always the most natural and fluid, because coaches want players to try things in certain areas and stick to certain roles. This can harm a player’s ability to develop resourcefulness.
“We don’t always see this freedom, even among young people. But every now and then you’ll come across personalities who can go beyond that.
Bolasie later claimed that he first demonstrated this trick in a secondary school playground and was encouraged to use it in the Premier League by a former classmate.
Chigwada, who joined City from Blackburn Rovers in 2022 and is still at school, will surely have been asked to repeat the trick on his friends this week in a five-a-side pole vault match. We hope he continues to be encouraged to display this trickery on the field as he advances through the ranks of college football.