To be more specific, there’s a person in a red shirt with white numbers (52), just to the right of a person wearing an all white shirt. I think the ball hits the net when it’s in line with that person.
In case you didn’t know, a knuckleball is originally a baseball term for a ball thrown with very little to no spin by a pitcher to a batter. While many players can throw a knuckleball, it is extremely difficult to control since the ball “dances” in many directions. Very few pitchers in baseball history have been able to master the pitch, but the ones that have are legendary. Typically, a knuckleball pitcher throws knuckleballs almost exclusively. It’s also very difficult to catch the pitch and many catchers hate being on the receiving end of them, since it leads to many passed balls. The term has been borrowed by many other sports to describe a ball or puck that moves in a similar manner for similar reasons.
ETA: Also, the term is misnomer as the knuckles don’t actually make contact with the ball. It’s actually the just the fingertips and fingernails that are touching the ball. Digging the fingernails into the ball is a key to throwing and controlling the pitch.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a fun documentary on the knuckleball called, what else? Knuckleball. It mostly centers around Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey (just before he won the Cy Young, too, what fortuitous timing on the filmmakers’ part.) But it includes some of the classic knuckleballers like the Niekros and Charlie Hough. Really fascinating insight on the much maligned pitch and its history (but they don’t go much into the physics of it.)
But we’re not talking about that. That happens at 0:14. We’re talking about the sharp turn it takes at 0:13, well before it reaches the goalpost, let alone the net.
No, I didn’t know that since baseball is almost a complete mystery to me. I assumed that the expression came from British sports lingo, but maybe there’s also a connection to cricket (which is still more mysterious to me :)).
That’s the characteristic that’s also conveyed by the German “Flatterball”, because “flattern” = “to flutter”, meaning the ball flutters left and right like a bird.
First off, the ball travels too fast for just saying where it is “at 0:13” to have much meaning. It’s not precise enough. The ball covers a lot of range while the video time reads 0:13.
Second, I don’t see any evidence that everyone in this thread is in agreement about where it first hits the net. Telemark, for example, says
That location is well to the right of center, close to the upright. I think that is what most people believe, but most people haven’t actually said exactly.
I’m suggesting that this isn’t the case, that it first hits the net earlier than that, at the point I described above. That is, I believe, earlier than most people think it hits the net.
This matters because if you it first hits the net where it falls down from, the curve in the air would be much more pronounced than if it hit barely to the right of the center.
Well without a timecode burned into the screen, how much more precise could I be? To me it looks like at 0:13 it takes a sharp right, and then at 0:14 it hits the net and abruptly falls to the ground.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying, but it sounded like your theory was that it didn’t take that first sharp turn until after it hit the net, which is clearly not true.
You could do what I and telemark did, and describe where the ball is when you think it first hits the net.
It sounds like you think it first hits the net at the location in line with where it is as it falls down. But I can’t really tell where you think the “sharp right” is occurring.
I think what ZenBeam is saying is that maybe the ball hits the net when it’s approximately in the center of the goal posts, in other words when it’s just barely to the right of being above the center goal post support, and then tumbles sideways along the net to the right, before abruptly falling.
I don’t think that’s the case - to me, it’s pretty apparent that it hits the net just to the left of the right goal post, then falls down as soon as it hits. Its motion is smooth until it gets almost to the right goal post, and then it suddenly stops and falls. If it hit the net earlier, then I think we would see some discontinuity in its motion at that point, and then if it were just tumbling sideways across the net, it wouldn’t stop so suddenly to fall.
I could change my mind if a convincing case were made, but I’m pretty confident that it hits the net when that change in motion occurs.
People keep on saying things like “before it reaches the goal posts”, but there’s no way to tell that from this camera angle. We don’t have any depth perception.
Not with precision, no. But having watched enough football and knowing how far back the net is from the actual goalposts you can reliably assume that very little of the travel takes place after crossing through the uprights. The ball travels roughly 40 yards in the air, 35 of those are in front of the goalposts. Unless is slows down appreciably for those last 5 yards you can conclude that the curve of the ball takes place well before it hits the net, which is about 85% of the flight time.
I know registering is a hassle, but the slo-mo low angle replay does clearly show when it hits the net, as it is zoomed in much closer.
Man, I really don’t want to register with them. Can you tell us whether it dropped right after hitting the net, and dropped from the spot where it hit the net, or whether it went sideways against the net at basically the same height off the ground for a distance, before then suddenly dropping?
If you really want to know…
(They don’t make you sign away your firstborn, in blood, LOL)
FWIW - does the play by play guy not say “he hooked it through” or something like that? Which implies that he thought he saw a curve. Now, I don’t know whether he’d be watching live (I mean his eyes on the actual field) or on monitors, but at least there’s that.
Where it hits the net is irrelevant. As I explained way back in Post 20, and as Telemark just reiterated (more eloquently), the vast majority of the time the ball is in the air, it’s on the near side of the goalpost. For all intents and purposes, as soon as it crosses the goalpost, it’s in the net. And it makes that sharp right way before that happens.
(But yes, just to clarify, of course the ball is falling straight down from where it hits the net. Like it’s supposed to.)
No, it isn’t. It makes a difference in how much the ball hooked. If it hit near the center of the net, it only hooked enough to reach the center of the net on the fly. If it hit farther to the right, it had to hook more to reach that much farther on the fly.
I’m not disputing that the ball hooked. But if it did hit in the center, and you’re imagining it hit far to the right, then you’re thinking it hooked more than it actually did.
(For the record, I don’t know whether it hit near the center. That’s what I’m wondering about.)
Except if like many here, you’ve watched, over 500 football games in your life, and you’ve seen 2,000 footballs hit the net and immediately fall to the ground. It’s obvious to virtually everyone here. (I’m fairly certain this is a woosh as well.)
That ball clearly takes a sharp right turn in mid flight and then hits the net and falls to the ground.
Nah, I’m pretty certain it originated in baseball, it’s not commonly used in Britain - I’ve never used it to describe a curling/dipping shot in football (soccer), nor a ball in cricket. It doesn’t really exist as a concept in cricket (as far as I know), presumably because it would be hard to achieve with a legal bowling action (the arm is not allowed to bend or straighten), and in cricket most balls hit the ground before reaching the batsman, so achieving movement after the ball has hit the ground is the goal - if the ball moves in the air between the bowler’s hand and hitting the ground, that doesn’t trouble the batsman nearly as much.