From Luis Suarez to Ruud van Nistelrooy, Diego Forlan played alongside some great strikers in his career. But his greatest partner in crime was the Jabulani.
As the connoisseurs will already know, Jabulani isn’t the name of one of Forlan’s former team-mates but the official ball used at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Adidas gave it the full marketing spiel: the ball was made with eight bonded panels, supposedly giving it a perfect spherical shape.
But it soon became clear that Adidas had made a total balls-up and the players in South Africa knew that something was off.
“The football is horrible,” goalkeeper Julio Cesar said after testing it in Brazil’s training camp. “It is like one of those you buy in the supermarket.”
Even Italy goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, usually so mild-mannered, poured scorn on the Jabulani: “The new model is absolutely inadequate and I believe it is shameful to play such an important competition, where so many champions are taking part, with a ball like that.”
While goalkeepers were very critical in their assessment of the Jabulani, they were by no means the only players who felt that way.
“It’s very weird,” Brazil striker Luis Fabiano said. “All of a sudden it changes trajectory on you. It’s like it doesn’t want to be kicked. It’s incredible, it’s like someone is guiding it. You are going to kick it and it moves out of the way. I think it’s supernatural, it’s very bad.”
Craig Johnston, the former Liverpool midfielder and designer of the Adidas Predator ball, was particularly aggrieved.
“Whoever is responsible for this should be taken out and shot for crimes against football,” he wrote in a very strongly worded letter to FIFA. Bit much, Craig.
Alongside the maddening drone of vuvuzelas, the Jabulani ball quickly became one of the biggest talking points of the 2010 World Cup. Players from all over the world were increasingly frustrated as their passes went astray and their free kicks disappeared into Row Z.
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READ: A definitive ranking of every World Cup ball since 1966: Jabulani, Tango…
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But there was one exception.
While most players were busy throwing their toys out of the pram and complaining in the media, Forlan was relaxing at Uruguay’s base camp as he was one step ahead of everybody else.
The striker, who scored 28 goals in all competitions for Atletico Madrid in 2009-10, was looking to put on a show at the 2010 World…
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