Pros: Aid curl Aid control Good looking Sturdy Aid power Amazingly cheap

Cons: Fairly heavy Heel is slightly tight fitting Narrow midsection

Review: At first glance the Nike Total 90 Strike III's are an attractive pair of boots, particularly, in my opinion, in the Red/White/Shadow colour scheme, however when one looks more closely at the boots it is clear they are much more than this; they are cleverly designed to aid curl and control, the instep features what I believe to be an ingenious feature which consists of a plastic section of elevated hexagonal rings that I have found allow me to recieve the ball from passes or crosses with more ease and control, and the laces as with many boots are situated on the outside of the foot so as not to interfere with the more common use of the inside of the foot to control the ball. I take both the corners and free kicks for my team as well as penalties when we get them and since buying the boots have taken several free kicks and corners, I have found that I have had to adjust my kicking as it is much easier now to put a great degree of curl on the ball, twice I have scored from the corner itself! With reference to the free kicks I find I am delivering more powerful kicks with four of nine free kicks becoming goals and four more forcing fantastic saves from the oppositions' goalkeeper. Although I attribute much of this to my own skill due to huge amounts of practice I cannot stress highly enough how much help I have recieved from the boots. The boots have also had to deal with a fair amount of 'rough and tumble' in the three weeks I have had them, and whether I am sliding in to tackle a striker who is just about to shoot or getting tackled myself the boots have never seemed less than fully capable of withstanding the damage, they are very sturdy boots and I have found little sign of wear and/or tear in the past three weeks even though I have played eight matches and had countless training sessions, the boots really can take a beating! Some flaws I have noticed in the otherwise perfect boots are that compared to some other boots on the market such as the Adidas F50i's (which admittedly are almost triple the price!) they are quite heavy, however this is a small problem and I have not attributed any mistakes made to this. What I do believe has affected my performance, at least in the first week I had the boots was that the heel and midsection were narrow, chosing a size up eradicates this problem but then the boots are too long! After the first week I found the boots to have altered to my own foot size due to simply just wearing and playing in them. However, I would note that for a recreational or amateur club player you consider this time to be longer, as I often play three to four hours per day and six to seven on weekends, a lot for somebody who has other things to do other than football! However, the most attractive thing to me was the price, I had my pick of any and all boots on the market playing at quite a high level and the fact that these boots were only £50 in shop which I am uncertain whether I am allowed to mention was a huge and very pleasant surprise to me. I would reccomend that if you are considering buying boots and these are in your price range then do, they are great boots, I wouldn't have paid £100 for them in the shop but if I knew then what I know now I would have been very tempted to, the boots are some of the best I have come across, however give some thought to whether you would prefer FG (firm ground), SG (soft ground) or AG (artificial ground) studs or blades as they can really affect your play, FG blades are best used on grass in dry conditions and are SG on grass in wet conditions, obviously it is more likely to be the case that some days the grass is wet and some days it is dry so I would reccomend the FG blades as they suffer minimal performance hindrance in the wet and perform superbly on dry grass whereas the SG studs peform equally as well on wet grass as the FG blades do on dry yet they suffer terribly on dry grass especially on patches where the grass is worn away, you may find yourself slipping if you try to change direction too quickly. The AG short blades are best used on astro-turf where you could just as easily wear trainers. Good luck on choosing your boots and enjoy the beautiful game!