HEADS!

The professional footballer’s ability and, crucially, willingness to head a football is one of the major things that separates them from us hobbyists. Have you tried heading a football lately? It really bloody hurts. I’d happily stand on the edge of the eighteen-yard box and kick footballs towards a goal, but standing in the middle and heading crosses? Not for me, thanks.

It’s for this reason that Dominic Calvert-Lewin makes me feel things that I don’t think I’ve felt since Luciano Becchio was last gracing the turf of Elland Road.

They’re not a like-for-like comparison. Calvert-Lewin’s feet contain the ability to trap the ball before it rolls ten feet away from him, for example, while Becchio frequently displayed the ability to kick the ball into the back of the net with his feet — a skill that Dom doesn’t seem to have quite mastered the art of yet.

But the feeling that I haven’t felt since sweet Luciano is that I now believe, for the first time since the Argentine bagsman was traded for that carthorse Steve Morison, that in Calvert-Lewin, we now have a striker in our squad capable of scoring a towering header from the edge of the box.

Becchio scored some great goals for Leeds: the volley away at Middlesbrough, the Panenka penalty against Barnsley, the “well-placed” carnage starter in the Millwall play-off game. But one that holds an inordinately large space in my heart was a headed goal in a 4-2 win away at Huddersfield, in the middle of another otherwise forgettable Championship season that ended with us 13th in the league (obviously) under the masterful stewardship of Neil Warnock.

In my mind’s eye, the goal played out like this: Becchio starts his jump from around the edge of the D, connecting with a whipped cross from the left that I presumed was by Bob Snodgrass, the ball travelling at approximately ninety miles an hour, and somehow brushing the roof of the net on its way in.

Before writing this article, I watched the goal back. It’s a Ryan Hall(?!) cross. Luciano rises from a stationary position and is probably closer to the penalty spot than the edge of the box. It is a great header, and it does hit the roof of the net, but only because Huddersfield goalkeeper Alex Smithies — or, to give him his full title in Leeds, The Hapless Alex Smithies — helpfully palms the ball up into it.

So, not as mythical a goal as I thought it was. But maybe that’s just headers. Maybe a good headed goal does that to me. As previously mentioned, heading a ball is really hard and really hurts. Perhaps that makes my appreciation of a good header even greater. And I think, with Calvert-Lewin, we have the opportunity for some great headers.

There was a leap that he made in the Fulham away game where he appeared to hover above the ground for a good ten seconds. I’m fairly certain it was just a simple knockdown to a teammate, but it left me like Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in The Matrix franchise. I’d seen my Neo, I’d seen The One. Here was the man who could head a ball from thirty yards out (or fifteen or so), straight into the roof of the net. I believe.

Yes, for Dominic, the whole ‘kicking the ball into the back of the net using your feet like an actual striker’ needs some work. But I might just have a solution for that as well. Clearly, Calvert-Lewin can only score goals with his head. So is there any way we can drag Rob Price back from wherever he’s currently performing his Dr Frankenstein medical experiments and get him to somehow attach versions of Calvert-Lewin’s head to his feet? ⬢

This article is free to read from The Square Ball magazine issue three, 2025/26 — get your copy here.