Real Madrid walloped Osasuna 4-2 on Saturday in Pamplona. Nothing's surprising there: The Merengues have walloped just about everybody in La Liga this season and are strolling away from the table while Osasuna wallows in 11th. I am just here to rave about one of the goals.
Real's Vinícius Jr. opened the scoring early. In the third minute, with the hosts dawdling in possession, he pounced on breathtakingly inattentive play by Osasuna's Alejandro Catena, lifting the ball off the center-back about 30 yards up the pitch, with no one else between him and Osasuna keeper Sergio Herrera, and then coolly finished a practically gift-wrapped goal exactly on the three-minute mark. It ended up being that kind of day. Vini ran himself into another one-on-one with Herrera not even five minutes later, latching onto the end of a gorgeous through-ball from Antonio Rüdiger, but then tried for the nutmeg goal and instead bonked it off Herrera's leg. In the 61st minute and with Real leading 2-1, Brahim Díaz, chasing a headed-on long ball at roughly the speed of light, split Osasuna's Unai García and Jorge Herrando to once again put Herrera in a one-on-one, and scored the visitors' third.
These were lovely goals—as was a crazy 18th-minute outside-of-the-boot half-volley by Dani Carvajal to make it 2-1—but the fourth was the gem. In the 64th minute, from slightly behind midfield Rüdiger played a brilliant outside-of-the-right-boot ball ahead to a diagonal Federico Valverde run; Valverde spotted Vinícius Jr.'s accompanying run and simply chested the ball down into the latter's path. Vini, zooming in on the left side of Osasuna's goal, and with Herrera, Catena, and Herrando all bearing down on him, simply stuck out his right foot at a dead sprint and booped the ball across the face of the goal—but with enough English on it that it wrapped around Herrera and swerved in before a desperate Herrando could get to it.
I'm not doing it justice. Get a load of this (should start at 6:16 in the below video):
Disgusting! There has never been a time in my life when I would not break every bone in my body and die if I tried that, all by myself, inside a bouncy castle with a goal frame made of pool noodles.
