I do see a difference between effective skilling and attempted humiliations and yes, Neymar occasionally tends to do the first. He sometimes just stands there with the ball eye-to-eye with a defender and creates some sort of showdown including stare-off contests before absolutely humiliating someone even if he could ahve done that in an easier way judging by his 1on1 qualities.
But Costa here in that situation, he is kinda surrounded by defending players on the wing. To his left: the opponent. To his right: the sideline. He goes straight forward and the rainbow seems to be a quite usefull rather than unnecessary skillmove to go there. I do usually see rainbowflicks as amazing and underused skills, not too hard to pull off actually, but absolutely unexpected and often efective if correctly pulled off. And Costa has so far performed an incredible skillset, but none of them has ever included stare-offs, standing step overs, leg shaking, Rabona-stops/passes or other sort of footwork with the only purpose to humiliate someone. The situations that Costa has been in have always somehow justified to do skillmoves because they helped.
[gfy]DeepCompassionateHedgehog[/gfy]
if you look at Brandt there, he does a step to the left, to close the space between him and the sideline. Even with an impressive ground-footwork á la Dinho, R9, Messi etc. its very unlikely to go through there while holding the ball to the ground, because there is absolutely no space. But Costa's rainbow looked like the absolute best thing he could do, Brandt wasnt even close to defending that.
