‘WHAT’S THE NAME of the Tottenham player who scored with that rabona a few weeks ago?’ Daniel Dennehy asks.
‘I used to do a lot of rabonas when I played for Malahide United.’
We all had a player like Daniel Dennehy on our football team growing up. Dennehy always preferred doing tricks over putting in the ‘hard graft’ expected of a traditional Irish midfielder and would rather try something outrageous on the ball than play a routine pass.
He is now a three-time Irish Freestyle Football Champion, which in a way makes him the most skillful person with a ball in the country.
Dennehy is traveling to Brazil this week to take part in the Red Bull Street Style World Final, which is basically the freestyle football world championship. The format is simple: two players go head-to-head for three minutes with each player taking turns with the ball every 30 seconds.
Whoever impresses the judges the most with their skills during their 90 seconds is declared the winner.
The objective is obviously a little different to when Dennehy was playing with Malahide.
“Playing football and doing freestyle are totally different things,” Dennehy said. “When I was playing football I would always try ridiculous tricks. My teammates would like it and would say to me ‘c’mon Dan, try something crazy’. My managers would usually give me bollockings but they couldn’t give out too much because most of the time my tricks would come off.”
Dennehy says his love of footballing flair comes from his mother, who is Brazilian and he recalls growing up on a steady diet of Ronaldinho and Ronaldo footage and trying to emulates the superstars.
About five years ago, he made the choice to just focus on freestyle football and it has been an unqualified success. He has a series of sponsors, from sportswear to nutrition companies and he gets paid to perform at different events around Europe.
The prize for winning the Red Bull tournament is to become a brand ambassador for the company, something that Dennehy says is very lucrative. He has competed in the tournament twice before, coming second in 2012 and ninth last year.
People might be surprised to learn how much preparation goes into a freestyle football tournament.
“I’m actually over in a camp in London at the moment preparing for the competition,” Dennehy said.
“I have a nutritionist and a mental coach so there is a lot of stuff happening at the moment. I am training five hours a day to get ready.”
In order to win the ultimate prize, a freestyler needs to have a dazzling array of tricks in their arsenal, each more ostentatious than the last. Dennehy says that it can take him a couple of weeks to learn a new trick, and one of his staples that incorporates a backflip actually required him to learn gymnastics from scratch.
His signature trick is called ‘Swag Scoop’ and it requires you to… actually, it’s probably best for the man himself to break it down.
One query I had for him was whether one of football’s superstars – say, Messi or Ronaldo – would be able to wipe the floor with the freestylers in Brazil. Dennehy was unequivocal in his response.
“Honestly, we would destroy them [Messi or Ronaldo],” Dennehy said.
“In freestyle you aren’t trying to score goals, so it would be compltely different for them. Lance Armstrong was a great cyclist but he wouldn’t have been able to grab a bmx bike and start doing tricks.
“Most professional footballers would get humiliated in this competition.”
Regardless of how a professional footballer would do in the tournament, one major name is on the judging panel in Brazil.
Romario is part of the panel who will critique Dennehy’s tricks (for his sake, hopefully he didn’t read the above quote) and the competition is being shown on national television in Brazil when it starts this Friday.
Dennehy thinks there is a lot of potential for growth in freestyle football.
“A lot of the people competing in Brazil have a big following online,” Dennehy said.
“I get a lot of people getting in touch with me about tricks I do and trying to learn them. I think more sponsors will get involved in freestyle football and I already travel to a lot of events to perform.”
The closest any of us are likely to get to performing the Swag Scoop or any of Dennehy’s other Showboat-worthy tricks is doing a few keepy-uppys. My personal record is 20, which is an Interstellar galaxy away from being in the same universe as Dennehy’s personal best.
“I would collapse of exhaustion before I would stop doing them,” Dennehy said.
“I can do an infinite number of keepy-uppys because the ball would never drop unless I really needed to go to the bathroom.”
