It was the 1997 Tournoi de France (French for "Tournament of France", often referred to as Le Tournoi). It was a friendly international football tournament held in France and was use as a warm-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup also to be held in France the next year.
The four national teams participating at the tournament were Brazil, England, host France, and Italy. The playing pattern was that each team is to play against each other in a single round-robin tournament with the group winner also being the winner of the tournament.
The Tournoi de France is most notable for the famous Roberto Carlos 35-metre curled free kick in the 21st minute of the opening match against France.That Free kick is considered as one of the best in the modern game.
Ronaldo was obstructed, and a free kick was awarded.Up stepped Roberto Carlos, he dropped the ball at the spot and took 10 steps backward. He hit the ball from 35 meters, the ball acted like it was going towards the corner flag,but suddenly it curved like a banana to land in the net.
The bend or curve was so pronounced that the French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez made no move for the ball thinking it would go safely clear.
That free kick has been written off by many with some saying it was a fluke assisted by the WIND.( what we call in our local Nigeria vernacular "Na luck").
A French team of scientists discovered the trajectory of the goal and developed an equation to describe it.
They say it could be repeated if a ball was kicked hard enough, with the appropriate spin and, crucially, the kick was taken sufficiently far from goal.9 which was 35 meters in this case)
Also a ball boy 30 feet away from the goal post also ducked thinking it was going to hit him. But it astonishingly the ball made a last moment sweep left and landed in the back of the net.
A study published in the New Journal of Physics suggests that the long-held assumption that the goal was a fluke is incorrect.
According to them "Carlos' kick started with a classical circular trajectory but suddenly bent in a spectacular way and came back to the goal, although it looked out of the target a small moment earlier.
A certain Dr Clanet described this path as a "snail-shell shaped trajectory", with the curvature increasing as the ball travels.
Because Roberto Carlos was 35m (115ft) from the goal when he kicked the ball, more of this spiral trajectory was visible. So the apparently physics-defying sharp turn of the ball was actually following a naturally tightening curve.
Dr Clanet and his colleague David Quere were studying the trajectory of bullets when they made this discovery.They used water and plastic balls with the same density as water to "simplify the problem".
They explained that since the ball traveled with speed it had the tendency to eliminate the effects of air turbulence and of gravity. (My fellow Engineering students will understand better If they apply the laws of projectile here. Ironically it was one of the topics I loved back then in school)
Dr Clanet went further to explain that if the distance is large (like with Carlos's kick which was 35 meters) you see the curve increase exposing the trajectory."
Today makes it exactly 19 years since Roberto Carlos took that spectacular free kick. And suck kick including that of David Beckham went further to inspire the likes of Andrea Pirlo, Juan Roman Riquelme, Shunsuke Nakamura, and modern footballers of our time.
By Chinedu Laurel Okorodike (Aka Juanizy)
