On the Pitch

If this doesn’t make you want to drop everything and hop into a rondo immediately, you have no soul. Football is joy — just look at the reactions from Luka Modric and Marcelo to Cristiano Ronaldo’s reverse elastico on poor Borja Mayoral. The 20-year-old Real Madrid academy graduate doesn’t deserve this kind of brutality, but it’s definitely appreciated by all.

The game just keeps on giving, and players like Ronaldo — now fast approaching his 33rd birthday — show you that the simple joys never get old.

Leon defeated Tigres 1-0 on Saturday with Mexican international Elias Hernandez scoring the lone goal, but the game’s best sequence of action was saved for the 88th minute when winger Andres Andrade performed a dribble worthy of the club’s La Fiera moniker. 

Andrade left Tigres’ Jorge Torres splayed on the floor twice in the space of four seconds. Torres responded by attempting to slice Andrade’s Achilles, but the defender’s premeditated bit of violence only served to highlight the destruction that Andrade had unleashed.

Languishing in last place in the German third division and trailing Meppen 2-0 on Saturday, Carl Zeiss Jena scored the kind of goal that only a club staring relegation square in the face could appreciate. 

Part of what makes Luis Suarez so brilliant is that he’s absolutely insane. Occasionally this particular character trait can manifest itself poorly, but it’s also the same quirk that propelled him from Montevideo’s Nacional to the Camp Nou.

Suarez made his 2017-18 La Liga bow on Saturday and that insanity was on full display in the match’s final three minutes. With Barcelona leading 3-0, Suarez became hilariously incandescent with Gerard Pique after the defender scored Barca’s fourth in the 87th minute.

30-year-old Ross County goalkeeper Scott Fox committed one of the strangest howlers you’ll see all season during his side’s defeat to Rangers in the Scottish Premiership over the weekend. 

A poor back pass invited pressure on Fox, but the experienced keeper displayed some great footwork to evade the challenge and create some space for himself. But in the four seconds to follow, Fox appears to suffer from a severe brian fart — a brain shart or even brain diarrhea. 

It was a dream start for FC Levadia in the third round of the Estonia Cup on Tuesday. Hosting fellow top division side Paide at the Kadriorg Stadium in Tallinn, the visitors kicked off proceedings and promptly put the ball into the back of their own net after stringing five passes together.

You should admire Paide’s emphasis on trying to build their attack from the back, they just need to iron out a few minor details like communication, awareness and basic positioning before they advance into that middle block.

Thinking about the Chinese Super League is something like remembering Y2K, the year time turned 2,000 years old (fact). Worries built up ferociously directly before the turn of the century, but the dropping of the ball confirmed that everything would be okay.

The CSL, for a few months, seemed capable of its own global disruption, and the belief that China would simply buy anyone and everyone for exorbitant sums hit its peak when Shangong Luneng made Graziano Pelle the fifth-highest paid footballer on the planet in 2016.

With six delicate touches, Leonardo created this masterpiece in 1995 while playing with Kashima Antlers in the Japanese J1 League. Still in the prime of his career, the attacker joined Kashima after the 1994 World Cup as a 24-year-old.