Welcome back. Now you might think that greate footballers are born, not made, that bending it like Beckham or delivering a perfect kick is a matter of nature rather than nurture. But an expert who studies the game at length believes there's far more to it than that. Ken Bray is a sports biomechanic. He says, he says that the beautiful games' most beautiful moments are largely down to science. Alastair McKee went to meet him.

If you want to kick a perfect free kick, if you get any backspin on the ball, that's gonna make the ball rise. However if you take it on the side...

Teaching the art of spin, a talented young footballer, Maddy Carlumey learns the sicence behind taking the perfect free kick, literally how to bend it like Beckham.

Now the special thing about David Beckham is that he can get deep on the ball and that works topspin by striking the ball, so rotates like that. And then the deflective force is down in that direction. And I bet you can do all of that. I bet you can.

The success of the Beckham Swerve(貝氏弧線球), moving at 70 miles an hour, spinning 10 times a second is famous for getting England out of trouble. Here in October, 2001 his 90th-minute goal against Greece, earned the home team a place in the 2002 World Cup finals.

What Ken Bray has done is to break football down using biomechanics. The laws which explain how living organisms move in relation to mechanical principles. By attaching sensors to the leg of a footballer, Bray could measure the exact movement it makes when kicking the ball. Inevitably, it all comes down to numbers. This is the equation for Beckham's magic free kick. Back on the training pitch, how is all this affecting Maddy's free kicks? Ok, we'll come back later.

Meanwhile in the laboratory, video cameras analyse a throw-in by the England defender Gary Neville, developing an understanding of how his use of spin gets the ball further than any other player. A similar approach is used with penalties. An artificial ball launcher delivering an assortment of spot kicks varying in speed and direction. Bray reckons his crack to fail-safe (Guaranteed not to fail)formular.

Now in a research we've done, we've shown that there's a proportion of the goal area that's absolutely unreachable by the goal keeper no matter how well he dives. So there's an inviting target of about 28 to 30 percent of the goal area left undefended.

Of course, it's not always that easy.

"Oh, he's put it miles over the bar."

"Don't balloon it over the bar as if you're taking a free-kick like David Beckham. Hit it at the pace it used to be, 60, 60, 66, 67 miles an hour.

Back to Maddy on the training pitch, and ..oh,dear. With the World Cup so close, no analyses of football would be complete without a look at the team formations. Should it be 4-2-4, 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 4-5-1 or even a return to the formation of 1870 with 7 strikers.

Now interestingly I've analysed, say, all the classic formations, by looking at the number of passes any player can produce up to about 40 metres.

Ok, hold that thought, the real burning question for science is will Rooney be fit for the World Cup.

If you want my heart, my heart says yes. Unfortunately, my head says no. I think Rooney has two metatarsal fractures and these are six weeks, as long a duration. However Englang gets on this summer, with or without their star striker is definitely telling tale there for the future. And they appear to know how to bend the ball.