Real Madrid v Bayern Munich was a great
game kept you guessing to the very end on which team would go through
. Both teams where very capable of grabbing victory with a place in
final against Chelsea at stake . An extra incentive for Bayern with
the final being held in their own stadium.
But all the quality ended when it came
to the penalty shoot out . The fine tuned millionaire footballers
kicking a computer designed aerodynamic piece of synthetic material
at the goal . Ok the goalie saved a couple but they where bad
penalty's . For players of that calibre , the first official penalty
was scored by Billy
Heath for Wolves on the 14th
September 1891 against Accrington Stanley Wolves won 5.0 , but he
would not of used the same ball far from it , but still 12 yards, Here is a
quick look at the evolution of the ball in football.
Click for game highlights http://footyroom.com/real-madrid-2-1-bayern-munich-2012-04/
The
football
Although
tales of football’s early history involve hogs’ heads being used
during medieval kick-abouts, the first dedicated footballs were made
from animal bladders, blown up by mouth and then knotted. However,
the ease with which these bladders burst led to more solid, leather
and cork-encased versions being constructed in Britain during the
18th and 19th centuries, and to rubber and wood being used elsewhere.
A breakthrough came in the mid-1800s with the invention of an
india-rubber bladder, and a pump with which to inflate it, meaning
that the roundness of the ball could – for the first time – be
guaranteed.
In
1872,England’s Football Association laid down the first guidelines,
stating that a football should be spherical, with a circumference of
68 centimetres, cased in leather, and weigh between 396 and 453 grams
at the start of play. The mention of its weight at the kick-off was
an important distinction as these early footballs had a propensity to
absorb water, often more than doubling in weight during the course of
a match. Combined with the laces that were required to hold them
together, this made the task of heading decidedly hazardous, with
concussions a common occurrence.Regional variations also persisted, with the first-ever FIFA World Cup™ final in 1930 a case in point.Agentina and Uruguay had both brought their own balls and there was an impassioned pre-match argument over which should be used. The compromise? Argentina's ball was used in the first half and Uruguay's in the second, with that change at the interval perhaps crucial in La Celesteturning a 2-1 half-time deficit into a historic 4-2 triumph. The ball also emerged as a factor in the 1934 final, when Italy– 1-0 down to Czechoslovakia with eight minutes remaining – equalised through a Raimundo Oris shot that swerved wildly beyond the goalkeeper’s grasp. Gli Azzurri went on to win the cup, and the following day Orsi attempted 20 times to repeat his ball-bending trick for the assembled photographers – failing every time!
Distortion of the ball’s shape was not uncommon at advanced stages of matches and could have been crucial to the trajectory of Orsi’s fateful strike. Adidas began supplying balls for FIFA tournaments in 1970, beginning with the iconic ‘Telstar’, and though still leather, a crucial advancement was these balls were coated with a special polyurethane to eliminate water absorption. However, it wasn’t until Mexico 1986, and the adidas ‘Azteca’, that the FIFA World Cup saw its first fully synthetic football, although the years since have witnessed further milestones, with the 1998 ‘Tricolore’ breaking with a purely black-and-white colour scheme, and the 2006 'Teamgeist' and 2010 'Jabulani' scaling new heights of technological sophistication.
Highlight's of the first World Cup Final they used a different ball in each half click to watch http://www.fifa.com/classicfootball/history/milestonesoffootball/video/video=1083334/index.html
