The Saturday briefing
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
Q
Has a goalkeeper ever scored a goal?
John Rose, Poole, Dorset
A
It’s rare for a goalie to score, and there’s a lot of luck involved, but it does happen.
One famous example is Pat Jennings for Tottenham Hotspur against Manchester United in the 1967 Charity Shield at Old Trafford. He played a long clearance down the pitch and the ball bounced over the head of United goalkeeper Alex Stepney. The match ended 3-3.
Bournemouth keeper Asmir Begovic once held the world record for his long-distance goal, a 91.9-metre strike in 2013 when he played for Stoke. It happened just 13 seconds into a match against Southampton and he acknowledged that the unpredictable wet and windy weather had helped. Begovic did not celebrate, out of respect for Saints keeper Artur Boruc.
But his Guinness record was beaten by four metres this year when Newport goalie Tom King scored against Cheltenham.The wind helped the ball travel 96.01m into the net.
More common are keepers’ goals scored from free-kicks and penalties. Jose Luis Chilavert of Paraguay scored 56 goals in his career, including a hat-trick. Known as El Bulldog, in the 1980s he would dribble the ball outside his area as though he was a midfield player, with fans screaming at him to get back in goal.
His tally is only beaten by Brazilian keeper Rogerio Ceni, who scored 131 goals in his career with
Sao Paulo, after being assigned chief penalty and free-kick taker.
Q
When you see cattle drives in old films, what kind of distances would they travel and what was their purpose?
R Birchall, Up Holland, Lancashire
A
In 1865 after the American CivilWar ended,Texas had fought on the losing Confederate side, so the state was in financial ruin.The money was in the north, around New York and Boston, where they had a shortage of meat. Longhorns, which would sell for a couple of dollars in Texas, could bring more than 10 times that amount there.
But there were no railroads reaching the Texan plains, so cattle had to be herded for three to four months to Kansas, where the railway lines were at the time. More than 2,000 animals could be trailed by 10 cowboys, known as drovers, at
any one time.The most famous route was the 1,000-mile Chisholm Trail, which went from the south Texan valleys north to Abilene in Kansas. In its heyday, 600,000 cattle a year were herded there.
The pace was slow – about 10 miles a day – so cattle could feed on free grass and water along the way and maintain their weight – and well-fed cattle were less likely to stampede.
These drives petered out by the early 1890s as more settlers came toTexas.The open land became impassable to cattle, with barbed wire and longhorns trampling and eating their crops.
John Wayne’s 1948 western Red River gives a fictional account of the first drive along the Chisholm Trail and had a supporting cast of more than 1,000 cattle.
Q
Can we not capture lightning strikes and store the power in some way?
Chris Sharp, Barnsley, SouthYorkshire
A
One lightning bolt contains enough energy to power your home for more than a month – around five billion joules.
But although lightning occurs 100 times a second around the
globe, it is unpredictable.And objects hit by lightning can reach temperatures of 20,000C so you would need specialist equipment at a power plant to be up to the job.And converting that massive blast to a low voltage that could be stored for future use would be no easy task.
The Lightning Research Laboratory at the University of Florida claimed thunderstorm energy is up there with an atomic bomb, and researchers said trying to harvest the energy of lightning from the ground is “hopeless”.
Still, people have tried. In 2007, US company Alternative Energy Holdings came up with a design that involved a tower, grounding wires and a capacitor. But they could not make it work, although they conceded that with enough time and money it could happen.
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