Here is a thought to encourage Bosnia-Herzegovina as they prepared for tonight’s first leg of their play-off against Republic of Ireland. The Irish have been far from the cleanest team still in contention for the Euro 2016 finals.
Here is the stat: Ireland average 13 fouls committed per match in qualifying so far. That hardly makes them notorious, but up against a side including Miralem Pjanic on his current form with a dead ball, it does make them potentially vulnerable.
Pjanic will have been identified as a priority man to mark, monitor and muffle in any case by Ireland’s coaching staff. How they must wish they had a Roy Keane, at the peak of his playing powers, to police the Bosnian playmaker.
Pjanic, 25, has been enjoying an excellent autumn for his club, Roma, the prompter and passer from attacking midfield of one of Europe’s most prolific sides, the man who more than any other diminishes Romanista nostalgia for Francesco Totti, owner of the claret No 10 shirt for the best part of two decades but now entering his twilight years.
Across Serie A, he is being compared to another era-defining veteran, Andrea Pirlo, who left Juventus for the American MLS in the summer. Pjanic has taken over Pirlo’s mantle as the peerless master of consistently converting free kicks from anywhere close to the edge of the opposition penalty area.
Since the beginning of the season, Pjanic, who has missed the odd fixture with injury and suspension, has scored four times from direct free kicks. They are never exact replicas: A couple arrowed into the top right corner, another bottom right, another top left.
His victims? The illustrious, like Juventus and Bayer Leverkusen, and those, like Empoli and Carpi, whose barked team-talks ahead of fixtures against rampant Roma stressed the importance of not giving away fouls within the diminutive, rather angel-faced Bosnian’s reach. The Pjanic zone, between 18 and 25 yards from goal, is every defending team’s panic zone.
From time to time, a player with responsibilities for direct free kicks will go on a run where everything seems to go right: Plenty of free kicks get awarded, and in the execution, each torque is perfectly calibrated, every loop and dip rises and falls just as intended.
Yaya Toure, of Manchester City, enjoyed such a sequence a couple of years back. Other lauded takers of free kicks can find that, for all their study and constant striving for the new variations, the golden touch will vanish, quite abruptly. Cristiano Ronaldo deserved his fame as deadly with a dead ball, but he has not been prolific in his ratio of goals-per-free-kick for the past year or so.
Pjanic is certainly on a hot streak, but he has always been nifty at delivering a set piece. He had a fine role-model.
When he was starting as a senior professional, at Lyon, after a childhood spent mostly growing up in Luxembourg, the son of Bosnian immigrants, he trained with the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano, a stalwart of the French club during their reign, in the 2000s, of serial Ligue 1 titles, and the regular conjuror of breathtaking, and effective direct free kicks.
“Juninho was my teacher,” Pjanic told Italian journalists last month, “although he would strike the ball in different ways than I do. He could make it dance.”
His former mentor now looks on with approval at the way his student can make a dead ball, well, at least jive, if not perform the full mid-air samba.
“Miralem always took an interest in my techniques with a dead ball,” Juninho said in an interview with L’Equipe. “What he does with free kicks now is special, and, above all, he’s consistently effective, which is the hard part. For me, he’s the best at it in the world.”
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