It’s 1989 and an Argentinian man is dancing to the sound of a song from an Austrian pop group while balancing a ball on his head in the middle of a football pitch. His name is Diego Maradona and he’s warming up for Napoli before a UEFA Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich.In truth, it’s more of an exhibition than a warm-up, and made even better by the fact that Maradona hasn’t even bothered to tie up the laces on his boots. Liberated and carefree, Maradona is living his best life.
Un momento para la eternidad y la entrada en calor más épica de la historia del fútbol 👏🏼🔝
Diego Maradona al ritmo de “Live is Life”, un día como hoy pero hace 33 años jugando por el @sscnapoliES ⚽🎵#DiegoEterno 🔟♾ pic.twitter.com/NTUxcgDDr6
— CONMEBOL.com (@CONMEBOL) April 19, 2022Ball-juggling wasn’t born that day, but the footage is iconic and was inspirational for freestylers, including Woo Hee Yong (otherwise known as Mr Woo), the trailblazing South Korean who defied gravity with his extraordinary repertoire of flicks and tricks (he once bounced the ball up and down on his head for more than five hours).Legend has it that the Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho asked for Mr Woo’s autograph when the two filmed together because he was so good, and you won’t regret spending six minutes of your time watching his half-time entertainment at the Scottish club Rangers in 2004.That said, we want you learning freestyler tricks, not just viewing them. So here’s YouTuber and content creator Eman SV2, together with the king of the showboat Lee Trundle, to guide you through half a dozen skills to get you started on your ball-juggling journey, including one or two that you might even see in a game.Maradona 7Never mind learning a new ball-juggling skill, there’s a chance to get yourself a Guinness World Record certificate here.Inspired by that warm-up for Napoli all those years ago — well, pretty much any warm-up that Maradona ever did because ball-juggling was always a central part of it — the ‘Maradona 7’ requires you to keep the ball up in the air using both feet, both thighs, both shoulders and the head, hence the number seven. But you’ve got to do it in order.Master that and the next challenge is to do the routine 10 times through, as quickly as possible, without the ball touching the ground. Back in 2017, 13-year-old Tommy Boyd set a new world record (since surpassed by Aditya Srikakulam, from India) of just under 30 seconds.Maradona would have been able to do that with a golf ball. In fact, he could have done it with anything — I know that after researching ‘Maradona 7’ and getting completely sidetracked watching showreels of the Argentina legend (what a beautiful waste of time that was).Anyway, here’s Trundle.How to perform the Maradona 7Stuart JamesAround the worldRonaldinho, Nike commercials and the ‘around the world’ skill went hand in hand at the start of the 21st century.Some of you may remember ‘stickman’, a computer-generated cartoon character who featured alongside Ronaldinho, Mr Woo and several other freestylers in a 2003 Nike advert. In that video, Ronaldinho performed the ‘around the world’ skill three times in succession, prompting ‘stickman’ to buff his shoes for him afterwards.Freestyling was taking off at that time — “a new craze” is how the Guardian newspaper described it back in 2003 — and Ronaldinho, who had won the World Cup with Brazil the year before, was totally at home in the company of people who made it feel as though a football was their best friend.A couple of years later, when Ronaldinho created his own version of the “crossbar challenge” in an iconic Nike advert that broke the internet, ‘around the world’ was the first skill that the Brazilian performed after taking a pair of brand new Tiempo Legend boots out of a gold briefcase.
