banana kick
noun; informal; football

- a kick that makes the ball change direction suddenly in the air

- a kick that makes the ball bend away from the player’s body

- a swerving kick

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, YourDictionary, Lexique panafricain des sports

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PHRASE ORIGIN

Banana kick is a transparent compound: the ball’s bent flight recalls the curve of a banana. The earliest securely dated example I could verify is from 1966, when The New Yorker reported that Pelé’s free kick against Bulgaria came off his foot in what the press called a “banana kick”. That wording suggests the label was already current among sports journalists.

No single player or writer can be securely credited with coining it. Curving kicks themselves are older than the expression; footballers had long learnt in practice that striking away from the ball’s centre could make it swerve.

The image travelled neatly between languages. German Bananenflanke uses the same fruit-shaped picture, usually for a curling cross. In both languages, the banana serves as a tiny diagram of the ball’s path.

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NEWTON'S TENNIS BALL

The first person to explain why a banana kick bends was trying to understand colour.

In February 1672, Isaac Newton sent the Royal Society the paper that made his name. He had shone sunlight through a prism and noticed that the band of colours on his wall was oddly long. One possibility nagged at him: perhaps the rays of light were travelling in curves.

What put the idea in his head was tennis. Newton recalled watching a ball, struck with an angled racket, swing off along a curved line. His explanation was simple. The stroke gives the ball both spin and forward motion. On the side where the two work together, the ball presses into the air harder, and the air shoves it the other way.


Newton then wondered whether tiny particles of light might spin and bend in the same way. He checked, and found the rays ran straight: "I could observe no such curvity in them."


So although the idea went nowhere in optics, s ome 180 years later, the German physicist Heinrich Magnus demonstrated the effect with a spinning brass cylinder, and it has carried his name ever since.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

BANANA KICK, banana shot, bending shot, curler, swerving kick

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“The physics of BANANA KICKS are fascinating, …as the ball slows down, the spin catches the air more effectively—turning a seemingly straight trajectory into a sudden, violent swerve.”

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