Shjor Andrea Pirlo wrote:
My own Eureka moment arrived when I was sat on the toilet. Hardly romantic, but there you go. The search for Juninho's secret had become an obsession for me, to the extent that it occupied my every waking thought.
It was at the point of maximum exertion that the dam burst, in every sense of the term. 
The magic formula was all about how the ball was struck, not where: only three of Juninho's toes came into contact with the leather, not his whole foot as you might expect.
The next day I left the house really early, even electing to skip my usual classic PlayStation battle with [Alessandro] Nesta as I rushed to the training paddock. All I had on my feet was a pair of loafers – I didn't need proper boots to demonstrate what I was now convinced was the right theory.
The kit-store guy had already turned up for duty.
"Can you pass me a ball, please?" I asked.
"Get to f***," he said under his breath, almost hissing at me.
"What was that?" I replied.
"I said I saw a duck."
"Right you are. Go on, you fool, throw me over a ball."
Reluctantly, he chucked one across. Mentally, he was already preparing himself for a trip to the woods to recover it. Instead I stuck it right in the top corner, just where the post meets the crossbar.
A geometric gem. I placed the shot so perfectly that it would have gone in even with a keeper. Luckily for our goalies, none of them were around.
"Why don't you try doing that again, Andrea," came a provocative voice from behind. This was now a battle of two against one. Me on one side, the kit store guy and the ghost of Juninho Pernambucano firmly on the other.
"Okay then, spoilsport. Just you watch," I said.
Up I stepped and unleashed a carbon copy of the previous free kick. It was a thing of absolute beauty, stylistically impeccable. I lined up another five strikes and it was the same story every time. By now it was official: I'd cracked it. The secret was no more.
In essence, the ball needs to be struck from underneath using your first three toes. You have to keep your foot as straight as possible and then relax it in one fell swoop. That way, the ball doesn't spin in the air, but does drop rapidly towards the goal. That's when it starts to rotate. And that, in a nutshell, is my maledetta.
When it comes off exactly as I want, there's no way of keeping it out. It's specifically designed to head over the wall before taking a direction that nobody can predict. For me, the best feeling in life is watching the ball fly into the net after it whizzes a couple of centimetres over the heads of the defenders. They can almost reach it, but not quite. They can read the maker's name, but they can't stop it going in.
Sometimes a pinch of sadism is the ingredient that makes victory taste that little bit sweeter.