HEADS! — Square Ball 25/10/25
Get it in the mixer
October 24, 2025
Written by: Jonathan Peel
The professional footballer’s ability and, crucially,
willingness to head a football is one of the major things that separates them
from us hobbyists. Have you tried heading a football lately? It really bloody
hurts. I’d happily stand on the edge of the eighteen-yard box and kick
footballs towards a goal, but standing in the middle and heading crosses? Not
for me, thanks.
It’s for this reason that Dominic Calvert-Lewin makes me
feel things that I don’t think I’ve felt since Luciano Becchio was last gracing
the turf of Elland Road.
They’re not a like-for-like comparison. Calvert-Lewin’s feet
contain the ability to trap the ball before it rolls ten feet away from him,
for example, while Becchio frequently displayed the ability to kick the ball
into the back of the net with his feet — a skill that Dom doesn’t seem to have
quite mastered the art of yet.
But the feeling that I haven’t felt since sweet Luciano is
that I now believe, for the first time since the Argentine bagsman was traded
for that carthorse Steve Morison, that in Calvert-Lewin, we now have a striker
in our squad capable of scoring a towering header from the edge of the box.
Becchio scored some great goals for Leeds: the volley away
at Middlesbrough, the Panenka penalty against Barnsley, the “well-placed”
carnage starter in the Millwall play-off game. But one that holds an
inordinately large space in my heart was a headed goal in a 4-2 win away at
Huddersfield, in the middle of another otherwise forgettable Championship
season that ended with us 13th in the league (obviously) under the masterful
stewardship of Neil Warnock.
In my mind’s eye, the goal played out like this: Becchio
starts his jump from around the edge of the D, connecting with a whipped cross
from the left that I presumed was by Bob Snodgrass, the ball travelling at
approximately ninety miles an hour, and somehow brushing the roof of the net on
its way in.
He appeared to hover above the ground for a good ten seconds
Before writing this article, I watched the goal back. It’s a
Ryan Hall(?!) cross. Luciano rises from a stationary position and is probably
closer to the penalty spot than the edge of the box. It is a great header, and
it does hit the roof of the net, but only because Huddersfield goalkeeper Alex
Smithies — or, to give him his full title in Leeds, The Hapless Alex Smithies —
helpfully palms the ball up into it.
So, not as mythical a goal as I thought it was. But maybe
that’s just headers. Maybe a good headed goal does that to me. As previously
mentioned, heading a ball is really hard and really hurts. Perhaps that makes
my appreciation of a good header even greater. And I think, with Calvert-Lewin,
we have the opportunity for some great headers.
There was a leap that he made in the Fulham away game where
he appeared to hover above the ground for a good ten seconds. I’m fairly
certain it was just a simple knockdown to a teammate, but it left me like
Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in The Matrix franchise. I’d seen my Neo, I’d
seen The One. Here was the man who could head a ball from thirty yards out (or
fifteen or so), straight into the roof of the net. I believe.
Yes, for Dominic, the whole ‘kicking the ball into the back
of the net using your feet like an actual striker’ needs some work. But I might
just have a solution for that as well. Clearly, Calvert-Lewin can only score
goals with his head. So is there any way we can drag Rob Price back from
wherever he’s currently performing his Dr Frankenstein medical experiments and
get him to somehow attach versions of Calvert-Lewin’s head to his feet?
