Inter's Marcelo Brozovic changed free-kicks forever with tactic vs Barcelona in 2018

Lionel Messi, Kevin De Bruyne and Ronaldinho are just three of the players who have scored free-kicks by shooting underneath the wall over the years.

It can be so difficult to stop the world’s best players from scoring set-pieces from outside the penalty area that those brave souls who stand in the firing line are required to jump as soon as contact is made.

However, that inevitably led to some of the most skilled technicians in the business exploiting this instinct by proceeding to shoot along the ground with the unsuspecting wall duly getting out of its way.

Or at least, that used to be the case, because it’s not for no reason that the sight of free-kicks being scored underneath the wall is becoming less and less common.

It all comes down to the fact that teams are now going to ridiculous lengths in order to stop every kind of free-kick from being a threat whenever they commit a foul anywhere near their own box.

You only have to look at the extraordinary lengths that some La Liga defences went to in order to thwart Messi latterly, going so far as positioning players on the line and dropping deep towards the six-yard box, to get the picture.

But if any particular anti-free-kick technique has gained infamy over recent years then it’s the infamous ‘draught excluder’ that Messi himself actually pulled off once for Paris Saint-Germain.

We are, of course, talking about the method used to prevent free-kick takers from shooting underneath the wall by positioning a player to lie on their side behind it so that the defenders can still jump.

It’s a strange, though no less amusing, phenomena that has become increasingly common at the highest level with the silly sight of players taking on the role of a human plank starting to look