VICE Sports Premier League Player of the Weekend: Rudy Gestede

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

When you Google the phrase 'one trick pony', the search engine should just return a YouTube clip of Rudy Gestede heading footballs. After all, that's all Rudy Gestede does. Sure, he scored with his feet for the first time this weekend, but it was just a momentary lapse in concentration. Usually, he'd have stooped down and headed the ball home, using his seemingly concrete skull to his professional advantage. Rudy Gestede causes more damage in the air than terrorists and Naomi Campbell combined. That's why he's our Player of the Weekend.

Heading the ball isn't the most glamorous thing in the world. In a sport where people swing inch-perfect free-kicks, go on pitch-long dribbles past hapless defender after hapless defender, execute acrobatic mid-air strikers, and ping fuckers in from 30-odd-yards, heading the ball feels sort of ancient. Truly the Throwback Thursday of scoring methods, heading is obviously much harder than it looks, with timing, positioning and technique all key. Rudy Gestede, however, manages to mask all of that. Given that he connects cranium with ball in the same manner most bouncers do forehead with nose outside of clubs and bars all weekend, there's more assault to his special move than finesse.

Gestede should, by rights, have his own set button combination to press on FIFA to head the ball, like a wrestling finishing move would. The game should go slow motion, and the net should split in comic fashion, with small embers burning where the ball made its connection. Perhaps more FIFA Street than the normal game, but exceptions need to be made for a man who has managed to make himself a Premier League footballer on the back of being able to do one thing well.

Now, that last sentence sounds a bit harsh, but really, what else does Rudy Gestede do? Have you seen him elegantly collect a ball from the air, turn, hold up a defender and play in a teammate, like you'd expect strikers of his size to be able to? No, you haven't. All you've seen is Rudy Gestede momentarily launching himself into the air like a shit Marvel character, using his head like a fucking rhino and lashing a ball into the goal. Of the £6 million Aston Villa paid for his services in the summer, at least five-and-a-half was for his ability in the air.

His manager, Tim Sherwood, a man famed for his simple take on the world, is tailor-made to get the best out of his big new striker. You pass it, you cross it, he heads it – you can almost hear the tactically astute team talk in your head. At training, Tim has old Rudy separate from the rest of the team, with a springboard set up jumping distance away from a brick wall, the aim of the session being to work out whether the wall cracks before Gestede's head does. Shooting practice is conducted with cannon fire and medicine balls, with a _Guinness _Book_ of Records_ stack of cinder blocks for the warm down, ready for Gestede to turn into rubble.

This week's commentator for the Villa game on Match of the Day was Jonathan Pearce, a man often so poor at his job that he regularly detracts from any enjoyment of the game taking place. However, he may have redeemed himself. Clearly led on by the French nature of Rudy's surname, Pearce began to pronounce it as "just-head", rather than the phonetic manner most of us use. Inadvertently summing up Gestede's entire skill set as he spoke, Rudy Just-Head is close enough to nominative determinism to force the link.

Rudy Gestede isn't a man of many talents. In fact, he's a man of one really specific talent. When he goes bowling, he sets up the children's ramp and heads the ball down. If, when the Hulk lost his temper, all that happened was that his head expanded and hardened, Rudy Gestede would still headbutt him to death. With all the money spent in the Premier League on technically proficient players to score aesthetically pleasing, well-crafted goals, Rudy Gestede steams through like a one-man herd, scoring pinpoint bullet header after pinpoint bullet header.

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