Videos

What Ronaldinho can accomplish in a commercial, James Jeggo is capable of conjuring in the middle of a professional match. Channeling the great Dinho, Jeggo performed his own personal crossbar challenge while an Australian A-League game took place around him.

With the score level at 0-0 in the 61st minute, Jeggo smashed an unstoppable drive against the crossbar before receiving the ball again, this time making no mistake as he unleashed a venomous rip which found the back of the net. Spectacularly, all of this took place in the space of less than five seconds.

Arnold Fabián Peralta Sosa and his wife were out buying baby clothes for their three-month-old daughter in his home town of La Ceiba, Honduras.  While the details of the case are still to be resolved, Peralta was subsequently shot dead, having suffered numerous cranial injuries, in the parking lot outside the shopping mall.

Some say that stopping a penalty in soccer is the hardest thing to do in sports. There is no real penalty saving trick. The net is so large, the ball so small, and the shot is coming from such a close range that keepers must guess which way they are going to dive before the ball is hit to have a chance at saving it. Even if they dive in the correct direction it is unlikely they’ll be able to stop it. If they’re unlucky and dive the wrong direction, well, let’s just say that every keeper in the world has been left on the proverbial other side of the coin. 

Where counterattacks are concerned, the keeper's job is distribution. Get the ball, get it to one of the field players, put everything in motion then get back in your goal. 

This is not what Nacional's U-14 goalkeeper, Guillermo Centurion (what a name!) had in mind when he intercepted a corner kick. 

Instead of distributing to a field player, he distributed to himself. Then he led the counter, dribbled the length of the field, embarassed the other team's keeper and coolly slotted the ball home.

Carles Puyol embodies all of the characteristics of a defender you fear: he’s strong, he’s aggressive, he’s got hair to put Tarzan to shame, he just might be an animal of a man. You are used to him scoring goals off of set pieces, but that’s about it when it comes to Carles Puyol skills. He’ll pass around the back like all world-class center-backs do. He’ll have the odd long ball forward.

So Barcelona may not have gotten the result against Bayer Leverkusen they would have wanted, but Lionel Messi once again showed that him 1 on 1 with a goal keeper is absolutely no contest.

In the 20th minute, Ivan Rakitic played a perfectly timed diagonal ball that connected with Messi in a defense spitting play. It was beautiful, and left Messi in so much space I wondered if he would call an old friend and “catch up on old times” before he scored. Instead, he just scored.

Cristiano Ronaldo is wishing us a merry Christmas in the most Cristiano Ronaldo way possible, with a music video of "Jingle Bells," set in his house, the opulence of which rivals that of the videos made by gangsta rappers from Miami. We're surprised Rick Ross and DJ Khaled don't have cameos.

He took the opportunity to show aff all the really nice stuff he has in his house, and there is a lot of really nice stuff in his house. He is, after all, Cristiano Ronaldo. We also get primers on his teeth-brushing and toast-making techniques, which is information that we desperately needed.