Team of free kick specialists

International Football
#1

I am bored so.
You can create a team of any players - past or present. Only criteria, they should be rather good at scoring from a free-kick.

          Messi Drogba
Neymar Arteta Pirlo Nakamura
Kolarov    Alex   ---    TAA
           ---

For myself, I have only bothered with players who I have seen take a free-kick (live or someone who I appreciated during my active football watching days). I am sure there are plenty who are better. As much as I want to put Juninho, it would just be dishonest.
Hard call between Dani Alves & TAA.
Arteta’s no spin free kick versus Villa is still one of my favourite strikes.

#2

Ceni is your goalkeeper for this. Unsurprisingly Brazilian :grin:

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#3

Why is Arshita there? You need Juninho, the Lyon one. CR7, Beckham, RobertoCarlos and Gazza too.

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#4

Stuart Pearce ahead of him. Carlos only had one mad curling FK.

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#5

CR7 is one for the spectacular but his conversion rate is really low.
Juninho, Beckham, even Ronaldinho are definitely goats but I don’t feel honest adding them there as i never followed football consistently during those days. Nakamura is only addition from that era. For some reason, I used to watch Celtic in early days.

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#6

I suppose if the critertia is footballers you’ve watched. Otherwise you’d want to add in Platini, Maradona, Zico and Hagi

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#7

Pearce or Irwin? I remember Irwin scoring quite allot of them. Pearce’s were screamers though

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#8

Glenn Hoddle would make my list easily.

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#9

Irwin was easily one of the most underrated LBs I’ve seen.

More pens though wasn’t he?

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#10

On current form Ward Prowse deserves a place in this team.

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#11

Chilavert in goal. Irwin. Pedersen and Larson (Sebastian) in there somewhere.

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#12

Carlos Branco was top draw.

#13

He was their penalty taker but also their set piece specialist pre Beckham. Scored 6-7 FKs (and I did think it was more from my MOTD recollections) and plenty of assists amazing delivery on him.

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#14

First name on the team sheet.

@shamrockgooner Rogerio Ceni has over 60 free kicks scored…

@Pires Pirlo’s conversion rate was incredibly low. He didn’t even get that many assists from long free kicks either.

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#15

Ceni

Alves - Alex - Mihajlovic - Kolarov

Beckham - Juninho - Pirlo - Nakamura

Messi - Van Hooijdonk

Surely atm I can’t remember a ton of true free kick artists from the 2000s or the end of the 90s, but I guess it’s a decent team.

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#16

That’s good going. I’ve honestly never heard of him myself though.

#17

He’s only played professionally in Brazil. I’ve only heard of him because I read an article in FourFourTwo about him.

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#18

Thats rather surprising to read. His deliveries look pretty menacing whenever I saw him take one.

#19

Yeah honestly, he started out pretty good at inter and early Milan, then fell off a cliff basically after about 2005 (mentally weak wanker couldn’t recover from the final).

@shamrockgooner yeah I only heard of him
Like a year or two ago.

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#20

Thank you for that comment actually. During his time at Milan I always thought he was very overrated for his free kick ability, but I just didn’t bother to try to find other names atm… Love him as a player though.

Ronaldinho was a bit overrated too. Never a better free kick taker than Henry actually, but people never talked about Henry as nearly as much (regarding FKs).

Henry was easily better than Pirlo.

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