Wizards of the hat-trick
Has any player scored a hat-trick from free kicks in a football match?
This has happened five times. They are all relatively recent, reflecting increasing skill levels, but also changes in the design and materials of the ball, which allow for more variation in movement.
The first free kick hat-trick was achieved by Lazio striker Beppe signori in a 3-1 defeat of Atalanta in April 1994. signori’s method was simple, but effective. A teammate would tap the ball and he would blast a left-foot piledriver at one of the top corners of the goal.
serbian player sinisa Mihajlovic played in italy from 1992 to 2006, turning out for Roma, sampdoria, Lazio and inter Milan. Vinnie Jones-like in defence, he was famous for his exquisite free kicks.
in 1998, playing for Lazio against his former club sampdoria, he gave a free kick masterclass.
his first two strikes went over the wall and curled away from the left hand of the sampdoria goalkeeper. The final effort curved inwards to the right of the goalkeeper, starting outside the far post and bending inside.
Dundee United and Nottingham Forest striker Ray McKinnon’s frustratingly barren career in front of goal was punctuated by Britain’s only free kick hat-trick, in a 3-2 win for Dundee over Kilmarnock at Rugby Park in February 1997.
set-piece expert Kostas Frantzeskos holds the record for goals from dead balls in the Greek top flight.
he achieved the feat in the last game of the 1996-7 season, with his team PAOK playing Kastoria FC. he was not so good at scoring from the penalty spot, leading to his famous quote: ‘Next time we win a penalty and they want me to take it, i’ll ask for a wall.’
The most recent hot-shot was Cristiano da silva in 2015. The Brazilian, who plays for Kashiwa Reysol in the Japanese first division, scored all his side’s goals in a 3-3 cup tie against Vegalta sendai. his team won the penalty shoot-out.
however, a notable omission from this list is the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano. he pioneered methods of striking the ball, making it fly through the air and veering in a number of directions before finding the net.
Though he has netted 44 of his 100 goals for Lyon from dead ball situations and scored two on three occasions, he has never achieved the free kick hat-trick.
Max Whiteman, Salford.
We are told that 68 per cent of the universe is dark energy and 27 per cent dark matter. What is dark energy?
LiTTLE is known about dark matter or dark energy. Dark matter is what makes it possible for galaxies to exist because when scientists first calculated why the universe is structured the way it is, it quickly became clear there’s just not enough normal matter.
Dark energy is more mysterious. We can’t detect it or measure it, but we do see its effects.
in 1929, astronomer Edwin hubble examined how the wavelength of light from distant galaxies shifts towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum as it travels through space.
Finding that more distant galaxies showed a large degree of red shift, he determined this was because the universe is expanding, and the wavelengths of light are stretched as the universe expands.
More recent discoveries have shown this expansion is accelerating. Before this, it was thought the pull of gravity would eventually cause the expansion to slow or retract and collapse in on itself.
space doesn’t change its properties as it expands — there’s just more of it. New space is constantly created everywhere. Wherever there is empty space, more is forming every second, so dark energy seems intrinsic to empty space.
This energy is stronger than anything else we know and is getting stronger. Empty space has more energy than everywhere else in the universe combined.
Emilie Lamplough, Trowbridge, Wilts.
During the Great Plague of London, thousands of victims were thrown into burial pits. Are any of the sites known and marked?
ThE correspondence about marking London’s Great Plague burial pits reminds me of when i was working in Berkeley square, Mayfair, and a group of us used to have our lunch in Green Park.
Once, sitting on a slightly raised area, a policeman strolled over and said: ‘Do you realise you’re eating your lunch on top of one of the Great Plague burial pits?’
We never knew whether he was joking, or if knew something we didn’t.
Michael Davison, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey.