Brazil vs Colombia: David Luiz's free-kick - a whisper, not a screamer

RIO DE JANEIRO: David Luiz's free-kick against Colombia was not so much a screamer as it was a whisper. There was just that negligible back-lift to it. There was no follow through whatsoever.
He ran at the ball as it were a trot and struck it with the farthest instep of his right foot, the point where you tend to have the least control. At first, he seemed to have got it wrong.But it was always going in. In Fortaleza on Friday, the distance between the ball and the goal was so huge that Luiz would have needed to impart a certain amount of force, even to get some spin on it. But the curly-haired defender seemed to caress it.
And from over 40 yards out, it beat the Colombian goalkeeper, David Ospina, who had looked like someone who wouldn't be beaten by a shot from that distance. But the deceptive quality of the Brazilian defender's shot was such that it beat Ospina hands down. It looked improbable when he struck it. How he did it will remain a wonder.
With that goal, Luiz ended an unlikely drought. He became the first Brazilian player after Ronaldinho in 2002, to score a direct free-kick goal in a World Cup. Ronaldinho's goal has gained footballing cult status for the way it rose and dipped and fell beyond the reach of David Seaman, who was stranded out of his line and was made to look like a novice. English goalkeeping – once a force in the sport – has never recovered from that, but it also started a long, barren spell of Brazilian free-kicks which was broken by the Luiz special here.
Free-kicks in Brazilian football are still identified with Roberto Carlos, like Luiz a tearaway and often prone to making errors as a defender. The difference is that Carlos used an extraordinarily long run-up for the power and always employed the outside of his left foot for the spin. For a while there was an unknown quantity about his free-kicks and he seemed to score at will. He scored a memorable one against France in a 1997 pre-World Cup tournament, which is still spoken about. But soon his efforts became uni-dimensional, as the spin disappeared and there was over-reliance on power.
Teams found ways to unsettle him – the most memorable counter was the 1998 quarterfinal in which Denmark's Michael Laudrup, instead of standing in the defensive wall, chose to stand a good distance behind the ball. The Brazilian had backed up so much in the ritual of his run-up that Laudrup was well within the rules to stand between him and the ball. The referee agreed and an irritated Carlos refused to take the shot.
Four years later, in Japan-South Korea World Cup, it was not Carlos but the young Ronaldinho who lined up the free-kick against England, and soon the free-kick-taking responsibilities were shared by the new entrant and Rivaldo – both masters of the precise dipping and curling free-kick.
Luiz's effort has added yet another dimension to the art of the Brazilian free-kick. Ironically, it came in a match which Brazil won to make the semifinals but paid a huge price for that. This was Brazil's most aggressive and physical showing in a World Cup since 1966, with 31 fouls in a total of 54. Inconsistency apart, Brazil have lost Neymar to a vertebrae fracture and Thiago Silva, the day's other goal scorer, to suspension ahead of their semifinal match against Germany.
With Neymar out and the rest misfiring, someone remarked that perhaps Brazil's defenders have scored more often than their strikers – Marcelo's own goal against Croatia included. In other times, it could be a cause for worry but if Luiz can manage to come up with such pieces of brilliance, no one is going to complain.