Anton Stach’s goal for Leeds in their recent victory over Crystal Palace was, in basic terms, fairly irrelevant. Leeds were already 3-1 up, the game was in the 10th minute of stoppage time, and Stach’s dipping free kick was simply the icing on the cake.

But in another sense, this feels like a particularly noteworthy goal, because of the nature of the strike, and the trajectory of the shot.

As Stach setup to take the free kick, the situation was very routine. Dean Henderson was guarding the far post, focusing on the danger of a curled free kick towards that top corner, or a cross-shot that fizzed across the players gathered in the box. His wall was set up to defend the near post. And, to a certain extent, Henderson was saying to Stach: go on then, have a go — if you can get the ball up over the wall, and then down again beneath the crossbar, from a position on the edge of the box where there isn’t much space to work with, fair play to you.

Stach took on the challenge — and he nailed it. But the significant aspect is not merely that the ball goes into the net. It’s that it hits the net only about one-third of the way up. Stach didn’t simply dip the ball under the crossbar — he dipped it several feet under the crossbar.

OK,  you can question the Palace wall — the middle two players were a little slow to jump, but Stach still clears them, and then brings the ball down successfully.

All this is, first and foremost, about excellent technique. But it’s probably also about the new Premier League ball.

This is the first season of the Puma ball, branded as ‘Orbita’, after 25 years of the Premier League using Nike balls. And, much as players and managers are regularly mocked if they mention anything about the nature of different balls being used in different competitions or different seasons, this genuinely does make a difference to the flight of shots.

The Puma ball features 12 panels, whereas last season’s Nike ball featured only four. And, while there’s more to the aerodynamics of a ball than the simple number of panels, the general rule is that the fewer the panels, the more the ball ‘continues’ along its flight (although it may ‘wobble’ in the air). The more panels, the more air resistance and the more players can control the movement of the ball by imparting spin.

This season, Premier League players seem more capable of controlling the movement of the ball, in terms of lateral movement — but particularly in terms of vertical movement. In other words, there have been a number of goals comparable to that Stach free kick, where the ball has suddenly descended midway along its path.

The first example was Dominik Szoboszlai’s brilliant free kick winner in an otherwise flat contest between Liverpool and Arsenal at the end of August. Midway through its flight you wondered whether the ball would dip enough to go under the crossbar, but it descended and struck the inside of the post, three-quarters of the way up, before bouncing into the net past David Raya.