Paul Simpson - Who Invented the Bicycle Kick?: Soccers Greatest Legends and Lore

Rooney pulls it off. His great bicycle kick against City was improvised from a mis-hit cross from Nani. The move is said to have been introduced to England in the 1960s by Uniteds Denis Law, who had picked it up at Torino.

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There are other, less convincing, claimants for the honour of inventing the bicycle kick. Legendary Brazilian striker Lenidas, whose elasticity earned him the nickname Rubber Man, claimed the move was his creation. But he first used it, records suggest, for his club Bonsucesso in 1932 more than a decade after Unzaga. Chronology counts even more decisively against Carlo Parola, the Juventus centre-back who used the trick so often he was known in Italy as Signor Rovesciata (Mr Reverse Kick) and Doug Ellis, the deadly Aston Villa chairman who claimed to have invented this move while playing for Southport during World War II.

By then, though, the bicycle kick had achieved international notoriety. In 1927, Chilean club Colo Colo toured Europe and their 24-year-old striker, captain and founder David Arellano performed the trick so often he was the toast of Spain until he was killed, struck down by peritonitis after colliding with another player during a match in Valladolid. The black line above Colo Colos club emblem is a memorial to a flamboyant striker whose memorably premature death is a grim warning about the perils of showboating.

Regal Records in 1932 : the first FA Cup final souvenir disc was a 78rpm record commemorating the clash between Arsenal and Newcastle. This first entry in a genre we might call FA Cup vinyl was very different to its successors. For a start, the record was released before the final. And instead of the catchy, platitudinous pop songs that became obligatory, this record consisted of interviews with the players. Each finalist had a side of the record to themselves.

Controversial it isnt. The announcer, who sounds as if hes killing time before narrating his next Path newsreel, introduces the Gunners popular captain Tom Parker the right full-back, a wholehearted player, who is respected by his colleagues and opponents throughout the football world, and is equally as a good a fellow. Parker then describes the recording as a greater ordeal than anything that Wembley has to offer before promising that his team will play the game and play it well. (In the event, they lost 2-1, with Newcastle equalising controversially from a move during which the ball had gone out of play.)

There was then a strange lull before the vinyl baton was picked up in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Before the Bundesliga was founded in 1963, the national championship was decided by a cup final. In 1959, a composer called Horst Heinz Henning decided to celebrate the fact that local rivals Eintracht Frankfurt and Kickers Offenbach had reached the final by releasing a record which had an Eintracht song on one side and a Kickers tune on the other. A one-man hit factory with more pen names than Jonathan King, Henning never showed a trace of humour in his songs but, in 1977, surprised everyone by releasing a record called The House At The Arse End Of Nowhere.