El Loco’s scorpion, thirty years on from Wembley
René Higuita’s moment of joy and nerve, the save that reshaped goalkeeping.
The night Wembley gasped
There are football moments that live in the bones. A flight of a ball, a heartbeat of silence, a collective intake of breath, and then the roar. Thirty years ago to the day, under hazy Wembley lights, René Higuita gave us one of those. England and Colombia were meandering through a goalless friendly when Jamie Redknapp scuffed one towards the visiting goalkeeper. Higuita let it sail beyond his head, sprang forward, planted his hands to the turf, then whipped his heels up and through the ball. The scorpion was born and the press box dissolved into laughter and disbelief as much as applause.
Martin Tyler put it plainly later, he was confused in real time because nobody would do that. Why would they do it. Yet there it was, a daft idea made glorious on the biggest stage in English football, the sort of schoolyard flourish you tell your mates about on the Monday. As Tyler told BBC Sport, it was totally unexpected, and he felt the whole ground had been fooled for a moment.
For Higuita, it had been brewing. He had tried it in warm ups, he had toyed with it in training, it came to him, so he says, while filming a fizzy drinks advert with kids back home. In his Netflix documentary he sums the feeling up with a shrug and a grin, it came out perfect.
A move born of joy, risk and Medellín
To understand why anyone would try such a thing in an international match you have to climb into the world that made Higuita. He grew up with little, he carried a defiance that never left him, and on those Medellín pitches where football was the language of escape he first played as a forward. The gloves only came later. That sense of the game, the touch, the urge to create rather than only destroy, it all travelled with him when he dropped into goal. At Atlético Nacional he became a symbol as much as a stopper, part conductor, part chaos agent. He could sweep, dribble, dink, and he could score too, more than forty times in his career, many from free kicks and penalties. BBC Sport puts the figure at forty three, with three for the national side.
Before Wembley there was Buenos Aires and Asunción and Montevideo, the long road to the 1989 Copa Libertadores that ended with Nacional lifting the biggest prize in South America. That final went to penalties and the goalkeeper with the lion’s mane saved four and scored one. He was always a protagonist, never a passenger.
Italia 90, glory and the glorious mistake
When Colombia returned to a World Cup after nearly three decades, Higuita arrived as both talisman and tightrope walker. He saved a penalty against Yugoslavia, he played as high as a spare defender, and he juggled the ball over Jürgen Klinsmann with the sort of impudence that either makes you love a player or loathe him. Then came Roger Milla and the moment that would follow him forever. A heavy touch, a sprinter’s steal, and Cameroon thundered on to history. FIFA’s own retelling now frames the episode as a pivot in the tale of a one off who would not change, and in truth would not want to change.
Higuita fronted it. He always did. The line between courage and folly is thin in sport and he walked it with a smile. He spoke of mistakes and responsibility and moved on. A country that adored him still sang his name.
Law, time and a revolution in gloves
Two summers after Italia 90, the back pass law arrived. Time wasting had strangled too many matches, keepers were picking the ball up and sitting on it, and the guardians of the game decided to push football forward. The change, written into Law 12, told goalkeepers to trust their feet when a team mate kicked the ball to them. It was not invented for Higuita, yet it made Higuita make sense to the wider world. The keeper as playmaker, the guardian as instigator, the idea of a sweeper keeper stopped being a novelty and became a blueprint.
Watch the Wembley clip now and you can see a future peeking through. First touch, awareness, audacity. Take away the scorpion flourish and you still see a goalkeeper who read the flight, took a decision, and backed his technique. The party piece became the headline, the philosophy underneath changed a position. The FA’s archive of that night still travels the internet, the technique forever young in the replays.
El Loco and the price of being a folk hero
The nicknames can be affectionate and cruel in the same breath. El Loco, the Madman, the one who would dribble a forward and then ping a pass into midfield. You do not live like that without turbulence. Colombia in the early nineties was a hard place to be famous and principled, and Higuita’s friendships, choices and loyalties pulled him into storms that would have swallowed lesser characters. He acted as a go between in a kidnap case, accepted money for his part, and found himself on the wrong side of a strict law that forbade anyone from profiting in any way from such crimes. He served months in prison and missed USA 94. The facts of that period remain complicated and often retold, but even careful versions agree on the essentials.
He returned to the national team in time for the Copa América of 1995, and then came the flight, the heels, the laughter, and the legend.
How it felt inside Wembley
One reason the scorpion endures is that it caught out everyone. Players, coaches, commentators, the bloke in row Z, all dragged into the same daft grin. Sky’s gantry could not believe what it was seeing. On the England bench Bryan Robson laughed in disbelief. In the seats there was that hush which only football can manufacture, when your brain tries to compute and fails, followed by the release, the giggle, the applause. Martin Tyler summed up the moment with the weariness and wonder of a man who has seen everything, he felt there was something mysterious going on and that Higuita had fooled the lot of them.
Higuita’s own view, told again in that Netflix film, is charmingly simple, he saw the ball, he made a decision, and it came out perfect. You believe him because the movement looks like instinct more than planning. It is the sort of thing a child tries on a dusty pitch, the kind of flourish your mate attempts in the park.
The art before the art
There is a temptation to file that night under novelty and move on, yet the scorpion sits on top of a mountain of craft. Higuita was brave with the ball, not reckless for the sake of it. He played in an Atlético Nacional side that wanted to build, he read the game early, and he saw passing angles that others ignored. He was not the only one. Jorge Campos was flying around for Mexico at the same time, tiny by goalkeeping standards, huge in personality, comfortable with the ball on his laces. Their generation kicked open a door. Modern keepers like Alisson and Ederson walk through it with a shrug. The job description changed.
If you break the scorpion down to atoms, you get balance, decision making, courage, and a quiet knowledge that football is supposed to be fun. You also get the sense of a performer who knew that joy can be as powerful as any tactic, the idea that a game needs moments that make you laugh out loud.
What the scorpion did to the rest of us
We tried it in school playgrounds and on the grass in the park. We tried it in five a sides on Tuesday nights when nobody was watching. Sometimes someone even caught one clean and there would be that daft laughter again. The trick became a rite of passage of a kind, like the first nutmeg or the first bicycle kick that did not jar your back. The move has been mimicked, teased, and occasionally weaponised ever since. The Guardian once stitched a little gallery of scorpion moments together, the way football builds its own folklore out of copycats and echoes.
You can watch the FA’s video back as often as you like and it never grows stale. There is something pure about the silliness, a reminder that this game can still surprise us. Even now, on the big stage, you see the standing scorpion or some variation in a warm up and your head turns. The original still does the rounds on social feeds every September and still pulls the same reactions from people who were not even born in 1995.
The other ledger that matters
It is tidy to pretend a career is one night and one clip. Higuita’s ledger is far richer. He won the Libertadores, he helped drag Colombia to the last sixteen at Italia 90, he scored and he saved, and he carried a kind of theatre with him from club to club and country to country. The numbers are a nudge at the truth rather than a complete picture. Count the clean sheets if you want, count the goals if you must, but the real total sits in how many players he gave permission to be brave with the ball, how many goalkeepers he convinced to make the first pass, how many kids he encouraged to see football as a canvas rather than a grid.
As for the move itself, it has ancestors and cousins. The scorpion kick as an idea goes back to earlier showmen, and football historians will point you to embers of it in older footage. Higuita did not invent the urge to try something ridiculous. He made the ridiculous feel inevitable at the right moment in the right place.
Thirty years later, what remains
If you only remember one thing today, make it the grin. He lands, he pops up, he wears that grin as if to say, football is allowed to be this. The laws have changed since, the rhythms have changed too, and goalkeepers are now encouraged to be the first play rather than the last resort. The IFAB laws spell out the responsibilities with clarity, the back pass is a test of feet as much as hands now. Higuita was the ripple in the pond that told everyone to look again at the water.
I like that the clip lives forever because it makes football feel alive again. It is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It is proof that the game still belongs to the people who will risk looking foolish to do something beautiful. Higuita risked more than most, on the pitch and off it, and paid his prices without ever losing the joy that made him special. That is why the scorpion still bites, not because it was clever, but because it was joyful.
One small postscript
To relive it, the FA’s on the day cut is still a tidy watch for a minute or two, a little time tunnel to a September evening and a goalkeeper who refused to be ordinary. Then, if you want the longer story with all the rough edges left in, the Netflix documentary does a good job of letting Higuita tell it his way.