Footbal: Arsenal - Chapter 60: Arsenal 2–0! Kieran's Bending Free Kick Lights Up the Pitch (Patreon)

This was the bending free kick Kieran had spent so long practicing for this very match.

After England's first World Cup qualifier, Beckham had sought him out at the national team to exchange shirts. Naturally, Kieran had been delighted to agree.

Beckham was busy expanding his connections throughout football. When he joined LA Galaxy, he had acquired the rights to an MLS expansion franchise, the foundation of what would later become his Inter Miami club.

How did you bring a famous player to your team?

Simple. Wait until he was getting older and approaching retirement, then buy him.

He'd cost less, and he'd still draw supporters.

That was the strategy Beckham planned to build his future club around. It meant keeping his football contacts close, making new ones and extending his business interests.

And there was no chance he would overlook Kieran, the game's latest teenage sensation.

After all, both of them were England internationals.

Their conversation went so well that Beckham was practically treating Kieran like an old friend.

More importantly for Kieran, the exchange brought him a second personal one-on-one coach in the system's Timeless Training Room: a Beckham training model.

That gave Kieran an idea.

He gathered an enormous pile of shirts and began swapping them with Wenger, Arteta, Giroud, Rooney, Gerrard and several others.

He even mailed shirts to Pirlo and Chiellini in exchange for theirs.

Once the return packages arrived, his training room was suddenly home to a whole collection of personal instructors.

Rooney and Gerrard showed him how to strike the ball with the outside of his foot. The resulting shots curved beautifully, graceful and light without sacrificing their speed. They looked magnificent.

But Kieran knew he hadn't mastered that technique yet, and he wasn't about to try it in a match before he was ready.

With Beckham, however, he learned the famous Beckham curve.

It wasn't particularly difficult to make an ordinary shot bend. Producing the enormous arc of Beckham's signature banana free kick was something else entirely.

It demanded very specific positioning from the standing foot, along with the right angle at the ankle and precisely controlled power.

Fortunately, Kieran had extraordinarily flexible ankles.

After only a few attempts, he discovered that his own bending efforts were remarkably close to Beckham's technique.

He had acquired another secret weapon. And Kieran had no intention of leaving it hidden.

In this crucial match against Madrid, he had put it to use immediately.

Twisting his whole body into the strike, he drove his foot through the ball and watched it sweep in a broad arc around the wall.

It curved like a blade flashing through the air.

The shot had tremendous pace and pinpoint accuracy. Before it had even gone past the wall, Kieran already knew it was going in.

A ball struck like that was extraordinarily difficult to save. Madrid goalkeeper Diego López had been completely screened by the bodies in front of him.

Even as the shot began its curve, he still hadn't seen it.

Only when the players in the wall turned their heads to follow the ball did Diego López realize that Kieran had already taken the kick.

With such a strange trajectory and so much speed, there was almost no chance of stopping it.

Diego López could only stand rooted to the spot, a helpless figure in the background, as the ball whipped toward goal and curled into the far corner!

The white net rippled in wave after wave.

“GOOOOOOAL! GOAL! GOAL!” Jamie screamed.

“That's Beckham's curve! It really is! And I'm not exaggerating! Kieran's added something of his own. The ball moves even faster, but it looks even more alive!”

“Kieran! He's a born England superstar! Everything the great England players could do, he can do. Even what they couldn't do, he can do!”

Martin was just as overwhelmed. “England is entering Kieran's era, and perhaps the whole football world is too! With Kieran leading the way, I believe England really can bring football home again! Just think what the future might hold for English football!”

In the other commentary booth, Tommy Smyth nearly shouted himself hoarse.

“Kieran strikes! He's unleashed that bending shot!”

“IT'S IN! WHAT A GOAL! What a beautiful free kick!”

“That's just outrageous! No goalkeeper is saving that! By the time Diego López saw the ball, it was already behind him, practically waving hello!”

“Wenger hasn't celebrated straightaway. He's staring at his young protégé. He knows that the boy he's watching is bringing his dreams into reality, step by step.”

“Arsenal may still have a long journey ahead of them in the Champions League, but the road no longer looks dark. As long as Kieran is standing there, you can believe an Arsenal miracle is possible!”

Then Tyldesley added his own thunderous call. “It's in! Arsenal two, Real Madrid nil!”

“Around the wall and straight into the far corner! How do you even describe that curve? Anyone who sees this strike could fall in love with football, with the sheer art of shooting!”

“It bends beyond belief. You can't predict it or catch it. The way that ball soars past the wall and across the pitch is like the human pursuit of freedom itself, always rushing toward something exhilarating!”

Everyone marveled at the Beckham-style free kick.

Yet calling it simply a Beckham curve didn't seem quite right either.

Kieran's football didn't really match what you would expect from someone raised in Arsenal's academy.

Academy players were shaped by a system, much like students trained in a formal school. Their techniques were efficient and standardized, but they often lacked the improvisation and imagination of street football.

Was Kieran's game more like Brazil's flamboyant samba football, then? Not exactly.

Perhaps it came from the time he'd spent practicing on wide-open grasslands, combined with the endless running and jumping of his previous life.

There was a distinct freedom and inventiveness to his style.

Like a passing breeze, the ball could take an unpredictable path. It moved with speed, yet seemed almost weightless and graceful.

Wonderful to watch, and thoroughly unpleasant for any goalkeeper facing it.

That was fine. As long as the supporters enjoyed it!

Another sea of red and white rolled through the stands.

This time, the fans reacted almost instantly. Kieran had already trained them to expect the extraordinary.

When their King of Arsenal scored, all they had to do was cheer and celebrate.

Arsenal's goal music rang out, and the giant tifo bearing the cannon appeared once more.

With drums pounding, Kieran sprinted toward the stands.

He couldn't exactly imitate a cannon seven stories tall. Instead, he copied the cannon from the Arsenal badge, aimed his hand toward the sky and pretended to fire.

A performance with an imaginary weapon.

For a moment he felt strangely like a starter firing the pistol at an athletics meet.

The supporters found nothing embarrassing about his gesture. They enthusiastically copied it, aiming their own hands at the sky.

Arsenal was a club built around the image of an armory, after all. Its supporters knew plenty about guns and cannons.

Not how to use them, of course. They just knew about them.

Soon some supporters began improvising. A few pretended to fire machine guns into the air, making rapid “rat-a-tat-tat” sounds. Others offered dramatic “bang, bang” noises from imaginary sniper rifles.

Men, women, children, older supporters: everyone had become equally childish.

Naturally, Kieran's teammates weren't about to miss out.

They had privately agreed that the next time they scored, they would finally perform the coordinated dance they'd learned together.

Against Reading, their interaction with the longtime London supporters had interrupted the plan.

And when Kieran scored the opening goal against Madrid with that astonishing long-range bicycle kick, everyone had been so excited that they tossed him into the air instead. The dance was postponed again.

They still hadn't done it, and Giroud was getting impatient.

But now, watching the whole stadium join in with Kieran's imaginary shooting gesture, Giroud realized how brilliant it looked.

He joined in immediately. The group dance, he decided, could wait until the next celebration.