Football does not value the skill the forward showed against Iran but the World Cup should be an outlet for the unbound

There was a moment on Monday night in Kazan, as Ricardo Quaresma veered in off the right wing towards the Iran goal, shifting the angle of his body with a dinky little half-step, when you knew exactly what he was about to do.

José Mourinho must have had an inkling, watching from his shark-tank penthouse high above the Moscow skyline. “Quaresma will have to learn, otherwise he won’t play,” Mourinho had told reporters 10 years ago when Quaresma was one of his players at Internazionale. “I am sure he’ll change and become more tactically disciplined. Right now he likes kicking the ball with the outside of his foot.”

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And so it came to pass. Still not learning, still not changing, Quaresma did kick the ball with the outside of his foot, sending it off in an outrageous arc that started two feet outside the far post. For a moment the ball seemed to hang in the air. Finally it came veering in at such an angle Iran’s goalkeeper, Alireza Beiranvand, could only wave an arm as it passed, spinning and dipping into the precise meeting-point of the corner seams of the net.

They call this the trivela in Portugal, the technique of cutting across the ball from front-on, producing something that’s either spanked in a swerving arc or lofted and faded to pick out some difficult pocket of space.

A problem with the trivela is that it is associated with one-footedness, with the egotism of the gifted but lazy star

Odd as it might sound, the trivela has become a kind of black‑market art. Rafa Benítez urged Luka Modric to stop using it when he was at Real Madrid. Elite academy players are taught to put such frippery away, to work instead at being a two-footed 360-degree passer. The trivela has become verboten, a flashy, tricksy technique, anathema to the idea of the collective, of controlling and managing the human variables.

An entire column about kicking the ball with the outside of your foot: nobody’s going to read that, said every sensible newspaper desk editor ever. But they will, because everyone loves the trivela. The players you’ve loved down the years have loved doing it. The great Serbian midfielder Dragan Stojkovic has YouTube videos dedicated solely to his use of the lofted back-spun trivela pass, a man for whom the entire world was interpreted through the outside of his right foot.

At which the point: the good news. The trivela is back. Or at least, it’s back at this World Cup, recurrent leitmotif of an unexpectedly boisterous and expressive group stage. Denis Cheryshev scored a thrilling goal with the outside of his foot in Russia’s opening game. Against Iceland Modric produced a trivela-cross so delicately spun the ball seemed to wriggle and giggle and look a little bashful as it hung in the air.

Plus of course there’s Quaresma. In Kazan the Iran defence just let him run inside, perhaps seeing no danger with the ball on Quaresma’s right, assuming he could be “shown inside” in the textbook fashion

Except Quaresma doesn’t really do the textbook. Early in his career at Sporting Lisbon he seemed to come as one half of a junior super-duo with Cristiano Ronaldo. As he drifted a little he was portrayed as the Bad Ronaldo, revving his Model T out by the railway tracks, chewing gum and generally failing to transform his technical skills into something closer to the Ronaldo model, the idea of the footballer as a machine for winning.

Aged 19 Quaresma refused to play for Barcelona ever again because he wasn’t being given enough freedom to express himself. The only response to which is: Lol. In 2012 he left Besiktas after throwing water bottles at Carlos Carvahal during an argument. Finally he came back as a popular hero to Porto and then to Besiktas. A late bloom followed. Two years ago he played with verve and discipline as Portugal won the Euros.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ricardo Quaresma curls the ball into the top corner with the outside of his right boot. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Perhaps there might even be a lesson here. A problem with the trivela is that it is associated with one-footedness, with the egotism of the gifted but lazy star. The rules here are pretty clear. At the top level you can only be properly one-footed if your good foot also happens to be a tool of the divine. See for example Diego Maradona or the Brazil teams of the great years, all street-football nudges and feints. Rivelino in full cry was like watching a peg-legged pirate captain wheeling around with a cutlass in his hand.

The modern game is unsympathetic to this. Elite-club footfall is a gruelling thing, a place where players are relentlessly graded, their roles ever more streamlined. The spaces have closed. Stats on pass completion and ball retention are endlessly unpicked. There is no time. Keep to the patterns. And for heaven’s sake put away that trivela.

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Perhaps this rigidity might help explain why we have enjoyed such an oddly liberated, slightly wild World Cup to date.

This is after all how the World Cup should be now, an outlet for something more vigorous and unbound, a projection screen for the imagination.

Towards the end of Colombia’s win against Poland there was another lovely moment as James Rodríguez started to showboat, reeling out his range of drag-backs and flicks, then turning and punting the most spectacular trivela-pass across the pitch. From a man who knows more than most about the grind of big-club football it felt significant; an expression not of control and discipline but of something uplifting and recognisable, of a kind of freedom.