The wild free-kick routine taking the Club World Cup by storm ...Middle East

The Club World Cup may not have captured everyone’s attention, but wherever football is being played, there is always scope for innovation.

That has been evident in the opening days of the tournament Stateside, where there have been NBA-style player walkouts and Peep Show-style ref-cam footage of goals and key incidents from the referee’s perspective.

But while those gimmicks have been ratified by Fifa, possibly to appeal to a US market accustomed to watching sport with a side helping of showbiz, other novel ideas have been initiated by the players.

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Esteban Andrada may not be a household name outside his native Argentina or Mexico, where he plays for Monterrey, but the 34-year-old goalkeeper has made one of the most interesting contributions to the tournament by setting up a “double wall”.

During Monterrey’s game against Inter Milan, Andrada instructed eight of his players to form a defensive wall against an attacking free-kick, but there was a catch: they were split into two groups of four covering both sides of the goal and leaving the middle section exposed.

It worked, with Inter failing to score, helping Monterrey see out an impressive 1-1 draw against the Champions League runners-up. A social media buzz followed praising Monterrey for their pioneering tactic, but were they truly the first to do it?

David Preece was a professional keeper in England, Scotland, Denmark and Iceland, helped scout and recruit shot-stoppers for Manchester City and has coached them at Sunderland, Swedish club Ostersunds, and Bengaluru and Mumbai City in India. He has seen the mythical double wall before.

“I played in a side that used it when I was in Denmark at Silkeborg IF under Viggo Jensen, who was an exponent of it,” he tells The i Paper.

“His thoughts were, why give the taker a big area to aim for when you can give yourself an equally better chance of saving both sides?”

Now we’re talking #doublewall pic.twitter.com/k6yWLSE0X7

Leaving the centre of the goal unguarded and not picking one side over the other looks risky to the untrained idea, perhaps because it is so uncommon.

However, the strategy does have merits, according to Preece.

“It allowed me a better sight of the ball,” he says. “The information you get in the initial trajectory of the strike – a player’s body shape, the pace and direction of the shot, etc – is crucial to reacting as early as possible to it.

“As a ‘keeper, you can be tempted to cheat and anticipate the ball going over the wall and get caught out. Being more central allows you to be patient and balanced.

“It also disrupts the player taking the kick’s thought processes because he is used to the traditional set-up. It’s all about reducing the amount of space you have to cover and adding extra layers of difficulty [for the attacker] to the situation.”

So, how could an attacking player adapt to facing two separate walls?

“The most important advice I would give to a player is to learn to apply forward spin to the ball,” Bartek Sylwestrzak, a ball-striking coach who specialises in free-kick techniques, tells The i Paper.

“I’m aware that this goes beyond that particular situation and it brings a broader perspective, but that’s the answer, because a player who can apply forward spin to the ball can go over the wall with a good amount of power, even from such a short range.

“If you envisage a player who is a competent, top spin hitter with this double wall, he is actually put at an advantage because the goalkeeper occupies a central position, and now both corners are exposed.”

Not every free-kick taker is competent in this skill, however.

Sylwestrzak claims that most players struggle to apply forward spin on the ball, even at elite level, which can make scoring from this type of situation harder.

“A double wall does make things difficult for them, because now for most players, both corners are, I would say, almost unavailable,” he adds.

“They may still hit the target, or the ball could go through the wall. There are always low percentage situations that could result in a goal. The player may hit the ball powerfully through the gap and hope that he’ll beat the goalkeeper because of the power of the shot.

“But these options are far inferior and give a much lower chance of scoring than hitting a forward spin strike over the wall.”

Set-piece innovation isn’t always popular. Gary Neville labelled Arsenal’s set-piece coach Nicolas Jover “the most annoying man in football” last season.

The draft excluder – when a player lies down behind the wall – became popular in Brazil in response to Ronaldinho’s crafty, under-the-wall free-kicks, but was initially viewed with scepticism in Europe. Now, it’s practically ubiqutous across the sport.

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Could the double wall become equally mainstream?

“When you experiment with something like this, you have to give time to implement it, and that’s what puts off coaches for trying it in-season,” Preece says.

“Like any tactic like this, though, the success of them is through training of them and repetition in games, so everyone is confident in what they’re doing.”

Perhaps there could even be a situation when a goalkeeper demands a double wall and a draft excluder simultaneously. Now that would be a true innovation.

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