"Score a normal goal, man."
Federico Valverde doesn't do normal goals. He looks at a tap-in like you would that chocolate smudge on your brand-new white shirt -- with disgust. Why is it there? What purpose do you serve but muck the pristine beauty of the shirt/sport?
If you identify with that, you can easily understand his approach to goalscoring: why walk it in, when you can smash it with everything you've got from wherever you want. Why tap it in from five when you can send in a rocket from 35. Before Real Madrid's match against Sevilla on Sunday, he'd scored five goals this season, and four of them had been from outside the box. So, when Rodrygo passed the ball to Dani Ceballos for a short corner, when Ceballos stroked it to Eduardo Camavinga and when Camavinga rolled it out to Valverde some 35 yards out... you knew exactly what was coming.
It didn't really matter that the box in front of him was fully packed. It didn't matter that the goalkeeper was decently positioned, on the line, in the middle of the goal. Valverde ball-rolled the pass out to his right-hand side, giving him the room to wind up and absolutely unleash.
Watch him, and not the ball, and you'll see he's hit it so hard that both his feet are off the ground. Pause the replay right after and it's like he's hovering several inches in the air: the traditional Valverde recoil. Hit play now and follow the trajectory of the ball -- he's hit it from dead centre. There's one defender falling in front of him, another standing there looking to head it away, and the goalkeeper's right behind him. Three standing in one line, and the ball's taken that exact route -- with just a bit of bend to the right. Should have been stopped? Not even in slow mo does that look possible.
After the match, Jude Bellingham would post on Instagram: 'Score a normal goal, man.'
The best part of this? It was fully planned -- the coaching staff looking to tap into this expertise of Valverde's. "It (the ball) could have hit the third tier of the stands," Valverde said with a laugh after the match. "We rehearsed these shots in training, some went well, and some went badly. The coach had some doubts, but thanks to his assistants we did it." Which is why both Carlo Ancelotti and Valverde himself rushed to Francesco Mauri, Real Madrid's set-piece coach to celebrate.
The goal was Madrid's second of the day and they'd end up scoring four vs. Sevilla's two. The three points pushed them to second, above Barcelona and just a point below city neighbours Atletico.
For Valverde, meanwhile it's six goals now this season, five of them scored from outside the box -- the most by any player in Europe's top five domestic leagues. For anyone who's seen a Valverde goal, that will the most expected stat of the season.
And so, for a special iteration of the ValverdeRocket™, he takes our Moment of the Weekend.