Tricks

HOOOOOOOOOO-K. What the hell have I just witnessed? The YouTube title told me that Cesar Martinez of the Venezuelan side Zamora was going to make the ball levitate, and I guess I don’t know what I was expecting, because I wasn’t expecting to watch him actually make the ball levitate. When did soccer become another edition of David Blain Street Magic? The only magic I’m supposed to see on the pitch is done with feet and is easily discernible in slow motion. This magic celebration, it’s something else entirely. 

Sometimes an idea comes to you on the pitch and you just gotta go with it. Great players all over the world will tell of how certain plays they make come down to muscle memory, or that they weren’t really sure how they knew what they were doing was the right thing at the time they were doing it. Of course, they know what they are doing the vast majority of the time, but they do sometimes act completely out of instinct.

Literally two seconds into this video, you get hooked. One guy nutmegs Man City, and it is amazing.  

When Real Madrid played Espanyol two weekends ago, no one expected anything other than a commanding Madrid victory, and that’s exactly what happened. No one player was a bigger manifestation of that dominance than Cristiano Ronaldo. He scored 5 goals that day, ending the season’s first prematurely controversial goal drought at just 2 games. He would go on to score a hat trick three days later in the Champions League.

We have no actual proof that freestyle world champions Laura Biondo and Andrew Henderson are actually a couple. We only have a youtube video called “soccer relationship goals,” and the fact that watching the two go about their business is one of the most unique displays of chemistry that we have ever seen. 

We have never seen anything quite like this. The concentration involved in this video of a boy juggling a soccer ball while solving a Rubik's cube is simply staggering. 

And here we are having trouble patting our heads and rubbing our stomachs at the same time.

Seriously, someone give this kid a job. If he has the powers of concentration to do what he does in this video, he can surely revive America's stumbling economy or cure cancer or something. Child labor laws be damned, we are looking at the savior of humanity here. Or he's just a kid who can do a cool trick.

Youtube user Footballskills98 has been in the trick shot game for quite some time. We at The18 first saw him and his pristine looking backyard in a trick shot video that was nothing if not creative. Then we saw him take the cross bar challenge to a whole new level.

Ronaldinho brought unpredictability to back to the beautiful game. Because he did so, he singlehandedly defined an era for soccer fans. If you started watching soccer between the years of 2004 to 2006, Ronaldinho was IT. He made the English seem boring, the Germans predictable, the Italians rigid. HE MADE THIS COMMERCIAL. 

And today all that is gone.