Let me tell you one thing about Arthur Antunes Coimbra, or Zico to his mates. He is not a good manager. I know this from being able to regularly watch the dross he served up as coach of Fenerbahçe. Fair enough, he won the league title in 2007 and won Turkish Super Cup in the first year of his job. Also, under his command Fenerbahçe qualified from the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time in the club’s history, even beating Sevilla to become a quarter-finalist in 2007-08 season. This makes him the team’s most successful manager terms of the European arena. Zico was given a new nickname by Fenerbahçe fans: Kral Arthur (meaning ‘King Arthur’ in Turkish). How can I say he is crap? Well, he surrendered the league the following year despite having the best, most expensive squad in Turkish football history.
Zico certainly was one hell of a player, though. He scored 52 goals in 72 international matches for Brazil, and represented them in the 1978, 1982 and 1986 World Cups. They didn’t win any of those tournaments, even though the 1982 squad is considered one of the greatest Brazilian national squads ever, along with the one that won the 1970 World Cup. Zico is often considered one of the best players in football history not to have been on a World Cup winning squad. It’s hard to believe that anybody who was mainly a dead ball expert hit the target so often: when you watch the clip below you’ll find it hard to believe that you’re not seeing the same goal over and over again rather than a majestic series of free kicks. Zico could hit either top corner or either bottom corner as if to order. He worked bloody hard for it, mind, nurturing his sublime talent through incessant practice. After training he would hang a shirt in each top corner and challenge himself to take one of them down from 20 yards. As you’ll hear, his former team-mate and current Milan manager Leonardo reckons he did so 30 to 35 times out of 50 efforts each day.) He even had a metal silhouette made to simulate the wall.
He was rewarded for his hard work. In his first season in Serie A, with the unfashionable Udinese in 1983-84, Zico seemed to score a free-kick a week. For Zico, a free-kick was more like a penalty with a wall in front of him, he was that good. Watching some of the free kicks in this video, you’ll genuinely wonder how such a goal was physically possible. Zico also had a combination of mental strength and quick-wittedness that enabled him to out-think the opposing goalkeeper. Before one match in 1984, the Fiorentina goalkeeper Giovanni Galli decided to try to psych out Zico, announcing to the media that he knew Zico would put any free-kicks in the bottom-right corner. Almost inevitably, Zico stuck it in the bottom-left corner while Galli danced around in the centre of his goal, scared to put his weight on either foot in case he was made to look a fool. He was anyway. Don’t mess with Zico.
Here’s how he did it…
