Pégale a la pelota.

In one of the lessons on sports, I kept coming across sentences like this:

Escúchame, pégale a la pelota con el pie izquierdo.

I kept missing them, because I was viewing "la pelota" as the direct object, so there is no need for an indirect object pronoun (pégaLE) nor for the "a" in "a la pelota"

So I asked one of my tutors, and got a great explanation. When it comes to hitting, punching, or kicking things, especially in sports, there is an implicit direct object: the punch, or the kick, that is given to the explicitly stated indirect object (in the example above, la pelota).

To belabor the point, the sentence could be restated as:

Escúchame, dale una patada a la pelota con el pie izquierdo. (I have no idea if this would actually be said this way by a native.)

So, in English, that sentence could be translated as:

Listen to me, give the ball a kick with your left foot.

This makes it clear that the ball is, in fact, an indirect object that is the recipient of the kick, which is the direct object.

I hope this helps out some other poor pleb that keeps getting these wrong :)