The Olympic Stadium was still shouting ‘Pedro! Pedro! Pedro! ” while Napoli resumed the game and, in an attempt to resist the pressure of Milinkovic-Savic, Koulibaly threw long in the direction of Insigne, on the left side of the field. The Lazio defense had rejected the ball close to the lateral foul, and after a contrast between Mario Rui and Marusic he had found it between his feet Fabian Ruiz. In an attempt to calm down, slow down and resist the pressure of Pedro coming from behind, Fabian had pivoted in place, turning backwards, thus being in front of him. Sergej Milinkovic-Savic (the player to whom, when he arrived in Italy, he was compared). Without panicking, Fabian Ruiz gets out of that complicated situation with an instinctive and unpredictable gesture: he dribbles Milinkovic-Savic with a tunnel. The Spaniard passes the ball backwards and the Serb raises his head to the sky in disappointment.
Pedro had celebrated the 1-1 (a splendid left-footed volley, tense and fast, on which Ospina had arrived but without being able to do anything else but deflect it into the low corner) as befits a goal that not only brought back the Lazio on equal points with Roma and Atalanta, the three teams currently fighting for a place in the Europa League and one in the Conference League, but which would have avenged the 4-0 first leg and prevented another defeat with a top team after the recent ones with Milan and Inter. Climbing the billboards and crossing the athletics track to get under the Curva Nord. After a few seconds, however, he turned and called his teammates to get them back on the pitch and try to win the game.
In the few minutes that remained until the end, however, Napoli showed that the draw was close to him too, already building an opportunity with Osimhen before the final 2-1. Arrived twenty seconds from the end of the game with a long shot from Fabian Ruiz.
Now, the one scored against Lazio was Fabian’s sixth goal of the season, the sixth goal scored from outside the box. No one in Serie A has scored as many as he has from outside the box – although Malinovski (5) and Calhanoglu (4) are not that far off. Last year Fabian had scored half (the leader in this ranking was Insigne with 7) while shooting more or less with the same frequency from outside (1.1 times in the 2021-22 season; 1.3 in this current, according to Whoscored). Its accuracy has changed a lot.
Last year the ratio between attempted shots and goals was 0.7 (a figure similar to that of even previous seasons), which means that it took him more than 10 shots to score a goal, this year the ratio is 0.21, a goal every five shots, more or less. Already last season the goals exceeded, albeit slightly, the Expected Goals, with an overperformance of +0.4, in this case, however, the figure jumped to +4.9 (in this case the data are those of Statsbomb).
If you have lived on Mars for the last ten to fifteen years, let me tell you: in contemporary football, shooting from outside the box is now prohibited. Unfashionable. Once you followed the midfielder who carried the ball after halfway and you could hear the background noise that told him to shoot – “tiraaaaaaaaaa” – today often kicking from outside the area has become a bad sign for a team, an indication of poor quality in offensive play. It is inconvenient from a statistical point of view, they are conclusions with a low hazard coefficient.
Yet, in the five main European leagues, around one goal per game continues to be scored from outside the box (1.18, to be precise). The reasons why, although not advisable, the players continue to try and score from a distance is self-evident, just look at Fabian’s goal scored against Lazio: high-level players shoot very well, even in “moderately” difficult situations.
It is said of the great attackers that face to face with the opposing goalkeeper is as if they were kicking into an empty net, for players like Fabian Ruiz the same goes from the edge of the area. Of course, the farther you go, the more it can happen that you encounter an obstacle in the way the ball has to travel to get to the goal. In the shot from behind Strakosha’s goal, Fabian Ruiz’s goal seems almost impossible. If you pause as the ball approaches his left foot, there is a block of blue shirts formed by Milinkovic-Savic, who had thrown himself on his back trying to intercept the shot, and Luis Felipe who, with his hands behind his back is immediately behind him. On their left Acerbi is coming in a slide and behind, obviously, there is Strakosha slightly moved towards the near post. With the still image, if you have not seen the goal or you have not noticed it, you would hardly be able to tell where the ball went.
“In art, delicacy is not necessarily the opposite of strength”, wrote John Berger of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s watercolors. Even in football, to tell the truth, you can be delicate and strong at the same time. The difference between Fabian Ruiz’s left foot and Malinovskyi’s, for example, is all here: the Ukrainian kicks with such force that the ball enters the goal before the goalkeepers’ brains are able to communicate with their muscles, with trajectories. unpredictable because the ball in contact with his foot deforms like that of Holly and Benji. Fabian, on the other hand, hits with power but to make the ball follow a line, a drawing (imagine the tip of a pencil tracing the profile of a face, the curve of the forehead and then of the nose), which he has already thought.
In this case, the ball passes outside, exiting the post (always in the shot from behind), circling Milinkovic-Savic and Luis Felipe, and then enters the corner precisely, where Strakosha cannot reach.
As exceptional as it is, Fabian Ruiz’s accuracy and effectiveness this season is no accident. Rather, they derive from the perfection of an athletic, technical and intellectual gesture that he has repeated since the time of Betis, every time he is in the area – at the level of the foul line – and which is now “his of him”. Fabian looks for that portion of the field and his companions, when he is there, look for him. If you look carefully you will see that Insigne was loading his classic shot around, before noticing the staid but decisive arrival of Fabian, and when he notices it he supports the ball as if it were an indirect punishment. And if you look even better, you will see Dries Mertens on the sidelines, in the yellow bib, raising his arms cheering even before Fabian kicks in the goal.
If Fabian is in the line, and there are no defenders close enough to counter him, the goal is almost certain. A few weeks ago, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper AS, he thanked Spalletti’s play and his team mates, Anguissa and Lobotka, who allow him to get closer to the penalty area. Against Sassuolo he had raised his position to press Maxim Lopez and when Zielinski recovered the ball at the height of the area Fabian was already in “his” area: he had time to check, look at the goalkeeper and the defender in front of him, Chiriches , and then kick with the left neck to cross on the right post.
However, he usually kicks on the post to his left, with such similar shooting mechanics every time that it has almost become a “signature move”. Fabian leans over his left foot, his back curved like an arch, almost seems to lean out to see what’s beyond the corner of a wall. He kicks crossing his feet, the right slides under the left, diagonally on the ground like the wheel of a bike cornering, while the slightly open arms seem to hold an imaginary oar in his hand.
Giving the ball to Fabian Ruiz from sixteen, eighteen, twenty meters, with a few seconds left, is like giving the ball to Lebron James on the siren. For him it is a question of coldness and really like a basketball player it seems to be only a question of trajectory – even if the feet are not the hands, it is good to remember, and every now and then even people like Fabian cannot hit the ball with the ball. desired precision. Also against Lazio, last November, Fabian kicked from far away, with Lazio midfield and defense in front, anticipating the pressure of Lucas Leiva and passing the ball into the space between Petagna and the post to the right of Pepe Reina. He didn’t kick very hard, it didn’t help, the point was to get the ball to the far bottom corner.
Sometimes it looks like he’s playing bowling, and he only has 7 pin left to knock down. In September 2021, against Sampdoria – another assist from Insigne who, with his back to goal, sees him arrive and lets him shoot just like you do with the strong three-handed ones – the main difficulty for Fabian Ruiz does not seem to beat Audero, how much to avoid to hit Candreva who jumps in front of him: for this he kicks low, with the ball bouncing like a flat stone on the surface of the water and arrives in the usual lower left corner.
There is not an infinite number of possible trajectories to be given to the ball. Malinovskyi’s left or Dybala’s may have more surprising possibilities, but Fabian’s is undoubtedly more elegant and refined. It requires more thought. Fabian’s eye measures the available space, the distance, calculates the movement of the players in front of him and tells the foot where to pass the ball. His reed movements moved by the wind, the cleanliness with which he hits the ball make it seem that football is seriously – for him – an aesthetic exercise. And the elegance of the lines drawn by his balloons recalls that of the stroke of Pablo Picasso, Andalusian like him.
Okay I’m exaggerating, but shooting from outside the box almost always seems a bit casual, the important thing is to “take the goal” and maybe be lucky, while for Fabian it’s a more very specific and personal matter. Kicking from the line is a research, a series work.
Fabian seems beyond the border that separates Insigne’s obsession with round shots from the consistency of the shots “Alla Del Piero”, and who knows that sooner or later even the shooting round in the lower left corner will not take his name. “Shooting to the Fabian”. Sounds good.
