Wesley Sneijder. Photo credit: UK in Italy http://flic.kr/p/9d5PoN
The background
The opening round of top-level football tournaments are usually fairly cagey affairs which see few teams prepared to throw caution to the wind. But the opening round of Euro 2012 has been far from drab. In fact, it’s been highly entertaining viewing so far. There have been some scintillating displays and plenty of tasty goals. Russia have produced the most eye-catching performance. They routed a decent Czech side 4-1 and sub striker Roman Pavlyuchenko scored arguably the goal of the tournament so far.
Sneijder’s backheeler, Szczesny’s rabona
The biggest upset so far has been Denmark’s 1-0 humbling of the The Netherlands. But Dutch Wesley Sneijder has produced the most talked-about moment of Euro 2012. At an open training session, Sneijder scored a ridiculously sweet jumping backheeler which has already been viewed over 725,000 times on YouTube since it was uploaded on 8 June.
Bizarrely, one of the other most buzzed Euro 2012 clips is also a technically-astounding training ground moment – Polish goalkeeper (yes, goalkeeper) Wojciech Szczesny’s nonchalant ‘rabona.’
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