The schools don’t teach such goals; perhaps the streets do. Bayern Munich winger Luis Diaz’s angle-bender against Union Berlin was conceived in the streets of Barrancas, an isolated, indigenous village in La Guajira, Colombia. He played barefoot and suffered malnutrition, and was so thin he was nicknamed ‘noodle’ in school. Celebrated schools of structures and systems would not have inculcated in him the goal sense or the instinct to imagine a goal from the most inconceivable angle.
It was a goal from nothing; or a goal from nowhere. Few forwards would have even bothered chasing the overhit pass from Josip Stanisic. But Diaz espouses lost causes, bristles with a raw, sometimes too much, energy. He slid and twisted his body to keep the ball from bumbling out of play. He dragged himself to his feet, ghosted past onrushing defender Janik Haberer with a dainty flick. Then the instincts, pure and natural, whispered to him: ‘Shoot’. And he did.
Had practised wisdom prevailed, he would not have. His eyes would have wandered for a teammate’s wink, a raised hand or a frantic squeal. Half a dozen were foreseeing a cutback in their direction, their feet already recoiling for the swipe, their heads heaving to oblige the cross. Harry Kane was pleading for the ball on his feet. The defenders and the goalkeeper had blocked the angles and routes. The usual and normal ones. Not the mad, bad ones. This was mad, unimaginably mad.
The XG, Opta’s statisticians, pinned this at 0.03, a lower probability than scoring from a straight corner, romanticised as the Olimpico.
When Diaz shot, his left shoulder and half his body was well behind the upright at the near post. The angle was dramatically narrow (1.8 degree). He was a yard or two behind the six-yard line, providing the ball the hang time to produce the bend that could fox the goalkeeper. But in the sheer energy of the moment, Diaz had little time to compute the angles, or the exact ounce of weight or bend he had to impart on the ball. The ball would have sailed over had he overhit it; had he under-hit, it would have fizzed into goalkeeper Frederik Rønnow, who was anticipating, if at all Diaz had the daring, a shot to the near post.
The Colombian just let instinct guide him and hoofed the ball into the top corner, beating the goalkeeper, to his own wonderment and that of his teammates.
“The way he kept the ball in and got past his defender and then scored was just a special goal, a really, really special goal. He’s been pulling stuff out like that all season but I reckon that’s probably his best,” strike-partner Kane would say.
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Method to madness
It’s not just the strike, but the whole sequence that reveals the deep layers of the forward Liverpool let go this season in the front-line overhaul. From the ball-recovery slide to regaining his balance and slipping past the defender, all in a single act of fluid movement in mere nanoseconds – like a long single frame from a Christopher Nolan movie – was a simple but complex piece of choreographed athleticism. The strike requires a sufficient degree of technical expertise to obey the instincts.
ルイス・ディアスのゴラッソ！#ブンデスリーガ pic.twitter.com/MWPw3hjWRJ
— ブンデスリーガ 日本語版 (@Bundesliga_JP) November 8, 2025
Only one goal this season, across the top five leagues in Europe has been scored from a tighter angle (Marcus Tavernier for Bournemouth against Nottingham Forest). That was from a corner, from a dead-ball situation. It’s more difficult to score a goal from a near-corner angle when the ball is alive. There is less chaos inside the box, the defensive structure is often intact, as it was with Union and a shorter distance for the ball to curl away and then bend in.
The most divine of the angle-benders was Marco van Basten’s iconic strike, an astonishing volley against Russia in the 1988 European Cup final, a goal that was near perfection.
As was Inter Milan forward Youri Djorkaeff’s bicycle kick against Roma from an impossible angle. The Frenchman contorted his body like an accordion in the direction of the goal. Diaz’s strike didn’t have the theatrical flourish of those goals, but the technique and balance were equally sumptuous.
George Best was another fine practitioner of angle-benders as well as direct goals from corners. He used to get irritated at whispers of ‘fluke’.
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“It used to annoy me when people thought something I did was a fluke,” he said, many years later. “I remember once playing against Ipswich and I scored direct from a corner. I used to practise that. I used to be able to stick them in the net directly from the corner spot nine times out of 10. Next day in the press, they’re saying it’s a lucky goal. Anyway about two weeks later, we’re playing them in the Cup and in the first five minutes, we get a corner. I took it and thought, ‘I’ll show you another bloody fluke’. It scraped the angle [of bar and post] on the wrong side. If it had gone in, I was going to walk up to the press box, bow and walk off the field. Mr George Best, entertainer extraordinaire, has made his point and will now retire.”
Perhaps, Diaz practises such strikes in training. But it was an extraordinary piece of skill that the schools won’t teach.
