黃河水倒流 The Yellow River Runs Backward
逐句解 Line by line
What she kicks is a Yellow-River-Runs-Backward; a Buy-It-On-Goldfish-Sands.
Two more trick names, and the first is the most extravagant in the list — the Yellow River reversing its course. 倒 is dào, inverted, upside down, not dǎo, to topple. Whoever named these moves was not aiming for modesty.
That one mistakes it for a Header; this one spins and goes straight into a Crook-Strike.
兒 is ér, a full syllable, and this line proves it. A modern speaker saying 頭兒 runs the two together into one sound — the 兒 vanishes into the syllable before it, which is why the word is written tóur in a phrasebook. That habit is later than this book. Here the half-line has to come to seven beats and it only does so if 兒 gets a beat of its own. 那個 and 這個 are the poem doing commentary — one player reads the move wrong, the other capitalises.
Square and upright she takes it on the shin; straight on, the toe comes in to strike.
臁 is lián, the shin — the flat of the lower leg, which is still where a footballer traps a dropping ball. 捽 is zuó: 康熙 手部八畫 gives 昨沒切 and glosses it 持頭髮也, to seize by the hair, then 手持也 to grip and 觸也 to strike against. The last of those is the one the foot is doing.
Heel lifted, she flicks it off the straw sandal; a backward stab, and a Turn-and-Gather.
潠 is xùn — 康熙 水部十二畫 gives 蘇困切, 音巽, and the 說文 gloss 含水噴也: to hold water in the mouth and spray it out. Applied to a foot and a straw sandal it is a flick, the ball spat off the shoe.
The trick list keeps going, and the names get bolder. A river reversing, a purchase made on a sandbank, a header misread. These are not descriptions; they are the names players gave each other's moves, and the boasting is built in.
Two of them can be read with some confidence because the old dictionaries preserve the verbs. The shin one is plainly a trap on the flat of the leg. The sandal one turns on a word that properly means spraying water out of your mouth, which describes a flick off the top of the shoe better than any technical term would.
Notice the poem has started narrating a rally rather than listing moves. One player misreads, another turns and punishes it. For four lines this stops being a catalogue and becomes a game with an outcome.