5 of the most creative set-piece routines

#2 Messi, Suarez and the penalty trick

When Barcelona were awarded a penalty in the 81st minute of their February 2016 game against Celta Vigo, it looked like a certainty that Lionel Messi would knock in his 300th La Liga goal – he’d already scored a free-kick earlier in the game, and Barca were comfortably leading the game by three goals to one. Instead, though, the Argentine genius decided to pull off a brilliant trick by setting up Luis Suarez for his hat-trick goal instead.

How did he do it? Rather than shooting, Messi knocked the ball with his left foot across to the right, allowing it to trickle into the path of the onrushing Suarez, who slid the ball past the bewildered Celta goalkeeper and into the back of the net. The goal even took Messi and Suarez’s teammates by surprise, but it had clearly been rehearsed at some point on the training ground.

Maybe the best part? The routine was actually copied from a similar move pulled off by Barca legend Johan Cruyff, while he was playing for Ajax in 1982. In that instance, Cruyff rolled the ball to Jesper Olsen, who then passed it back to the Dutchman for him to score. Thankfully for Messi, his effort ended in a goal and not in the same embarrassing way that Thierry Henry and Robert Pires’s attempt to do the same move for Arsenal in 2005 did – with the ball being cleared prior to any shot.