Iliman Ndiaye, Harlem Globetrotters-Style Moves and Sobering Football Stats

COULD IT ACTUALLY HAPPEN?

If you haven’t seen the footage of Iliman Ndiaye executing a reverse bouncing nutmeg at Everton’s training ground, you should check it out. Through performing a move so nasty that it would have fit right in at a Harlem Globetrotters show game, the skill instantly ended what was meant to be a casual practice to conclude what had been – up to that point – an revealing conversation about how amateur players can get another opportunity after being dropped from professional academies.

Ndiaye, who competed in amateur leagues directly before being signed by Sheffield United at 19, is ideally suited to address this topic. “Don’t concentrate on the rejection and one day your luck is going to come through,” he advised a young player shortly before deploying said ninja move on his teammate, in doing so perfectly illustrating the gulf between Premier League and amateur footballers he had been trying to bridge.

Ndiaye is far from the only professional footballer to go slightly overboard. Prime Michael Owen gleefully humiliating a young shot-stopper in front of a fuming Neville Southall is undoubtedly the prime example in this specific category – but the ex-Anfield star is just one of many culprits. Both Christian Eriksen and Shinji Kagawa have reduced toddlers to actual tears with a series of harsh skills, although it’s considered that the latter was at least driven by the Japanese player’s social media disgrace caption – “difficulty breeds resilience” – and the accompanying hashtag of #friendship.

Kagawa’s ex-BVB colleagues Lukasz Piszczek, Jakub Blaszczykowski and Nuri Sahin at least had the decency to suffer a loss against 100 children when the group competed during the mid-game pause of their last appearance for BVB. A Real Madrid XI that featured Cristiano Ronaldo and Xabi Alonso were more competitive when they faced 109 Chinese kids in a similar experiment. But returning to the beginning, it’s estimated that only 180 of the 1.5 million boys currently playing organized youth football in England will ever appear in the Premier League, a stark reality for toddlers and teenagers across the country.

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DAILY HIGHLIGHT

“Football took me but it never deserted me because I never stopped believing. I went from location to location. The love of football drives you. I couldn’t always see where it was taking me. But today I have the answer” – Serbia coach Veljko Paunovic takes time out from his training to share his path.

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