The idea came to Rene Higuita while filming a television advert for soda with some children in Colombia. One juggled a football in the air and bicycle-kicked it towards the goalkeeper, who instinctively threw both legs behind his back and punted it away.
Two years later, having made it his party trick in training and warm-up routines, the stars aligned for Higuita to write his legacy under the hazy Wembley floodlights.
England midfielder Jamie Redknapp’s miscued effort drifted tamely towards the goalkeeper, already renowned for his flamboyant style, who watched it drop over his head before lurching forward and jolting his heels like a scorpion’s tail.
It was the “perfect ball”, Higuita recalls in his Netflix documentary ‘Higuita: The Way of the Scorpion’. “I thought ‘no problem’. It came out perfect.”
Breaking his fall with two hands on the turf, cuffs of his baggy blue keeper’s jersey halfway up his forearms and long black curls flowing behind him, Higuita immediately burst into his iconic grin.
On commentary for Sky Sports on the night of 6 September 1995 was Martin Tyler, who initially thought the referee’s whistle must have gone – after all, the linesman put his flag up – but play continued.
“I was confused,” Tyler tells BBC Sport. “In real time, nobody would do that, why would they do it? It was like there was something mysterious going on. It was totally unexpected. He foiled Jamie Redknapp and he fooled the lot of us on the gantry!”
Bryan Robson, part of the England coaching team, could be seen laughing on the bench almost in disbelief and there was a similar reaction among the fans, despite just 20,000 of them filtering into the national stadium for a Wednesday night friendly in an era characterised by low attendances.
“There was this silence, people were just trying to fathom what had just happened,” remembers BBC Radio Newcastle host Simon Pryde, who was in the crowd. “Then everyone just burst into a mixture of spontaneous laughter and applause.”
England centre-back Steve Howey, who had been tasked by Newcastle boss Kevin Keegan with providing a scout report on the Colombia forward he was marking, one Faustino Asprilla, assumed the game must have stopped.
“Higuita wasn’t exactly the kind of character that was massively dependable, he used to come out and dribble past forwards and join in play, he was absolutely crazy. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise for someone like him,” says Howey.
“Everybody thought the referee had blown his whistle but as we found out quickly, he hadn’t – if it had gone in it would have counted.”
An otherwise forgettable friendly finished goalless, but Higuita had fans trying to recreate his physics-defying save in parks and playgrounds up and down the country.
“It was just the eccentricity of one particular goalkeeper in one particular moment which had a commentator rubbing his eyes in disbelief,” adds Tyler. “It’s from a comic book, really. It was like Roy of the Rovers… some kind of schoolboy, fictional stuff.”
Yet while this would prove Higuita’s globally defining moment, it was just another chapter in the unique story of a keeper who scored 43 career goals, inspired a game-changing new law and had only recently returned to the Colombia squad after being sent to prison for his part in a cartel kidnapping.
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