September 6 – A Sting in His Tail

MOST seasoned football fans think they’ve seen it all before. Stepovers, keepy-uppies, fancy back-heels – it’s all old hat. But just occasionally someone comes up with something new and we remember why we fell in love with the game the first time. Today in 1995 madcap Columbian ‘keeper Rene Higuita wowed the football world with his famous ‘scorpion kick’.

England were hosting the Columbians in a friendly at Wembley Stadium when Jamie Redknapp hoisted an aimless cross-shot into to the Columbian goalmouth and instead of catching the ball Higuita cleared the ball by jumping on his hands and acrobatically clearing the ball with his feet.

The 20,038 brave souls that dared turn out for the most pointless of games – an England friendly – were rewarded for their loyalty as they saw what was recently voted as football’s greatest ever trick in a recent online poll. “My philosophy is to enjoy myself and to entertain”, said Higuita, who used to do it whenever he could playing back home in Columbia for the likes of Atletico Nacional and Millonarios.

England manager Terry Venables was also suitably impressed: “I have only one word to describe it, extraordinary,” he said, before using more than one word to describe it. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They tell me he does it all the time in his own country, that’s probably why his last three managers have had heart attacks.”

England’s World Cup winning ‘keeper Gordon Banks wasn’t as convinced, saying that: “if he’d done that for England it would’ve been his last cap. Bobby Moore would have had a quiet word and Jack Charlton would have punched him on the nose.” Spoil sports.

The scorpion kick wasn’t the only form of hi-jinks that the Columbian, nicknamed ‘El Loco’, got up to on the football pitch. Fans around the world were introduced to his eccentric style in the 1990 World Cup, when he seemed to be playing a jumper-for-goalposts style ‘rush-keeper’, charging out of goal with the ball at his feet, only to be tackled by Cameroon striker Roger Milla who scored to knock Columbia out.

His personal life ticked most of the boxes of a stereotypical Columbian mad man. Higuita was sent to prison in 1993 for being implicated in a drug cartel kidnapping when he was acting as a go-between for Pablo Escobar and fellow drug baron Carlos Molina. A positive test for cocaine followed after his release and in 2005 he appeared on the Columbian version of Survivor.

See Higuita showing that he has the skills to pay the bills below and check out what else was happening today here. We’ll be back with more tomorrow, but if you’re not down with waiting for your daily football fix, then get your hands on our new On This Football Day book, available here.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...