There are fashions with which human beings prosper and improve, such as going for a run without being chased or pilates, and others that clearly harm us and take us backwards, such as the trend cut out, that is to say, that all the clothes, suddenly, have a hole that is irrelevant; the habit of using English expressions for everything—like cut out—, or the so-called gilicorner. The Royal Academy Dictionary does not yet include the term, but in its only meaning it consists of converting a scoring opportunity (getting into the area so that some little head pushes the ball into the goal) into a throw-in or worse: a salad of passes that return you to the middle of the field and with a pinch of confusion or bad luck , while the rival (see Barça’s fourth in the Super Cup against Madrid).
It started as an anecdote and is now a category, to the point that it is common to see corner kicks with four passes – how many things can go wrong in four passes? – on second division fields. I imagine that in training, in the presence of the coach, it will sometimes go well, but in reality it almost never. The car also stops making the noise at the exact moment we take it to the shop. In other words: the success of gilicorner It’s just in their heads.
In football, as in love, thinking too much is usually counterproductive, especially because in this sport, which is now more than 160 years old, the easiest thing is to have your mind read and guess your next move on the field. In fact, great players are often the ones who rely more on instinct than on the blackboard and see the gaps that no one else sees and that just a few seconds ago did not exist — that is where the goals and the magic are made, This is another of the poorly calibrated tendencies of modern football—and the bad habit of pigeonholing them on the pitch is developing, limiting their movements in strict game approaches. Geniuses, of all life and in any discipline, must be left alone. Technology is the enemy of creativity and orders always restrict ideas.
The VAR and the New Testament have brought a little more justice, but in modern football—being the gilicorner one of its most expressions—the ball is stopped for much longer than before and the game has lost spontaneity. Then there are those offside “due to a kneecap” or a bang, proof of something we were unaware of until recently: there is poetic justice and there is also ridiculous justice. Maybe we have gone too far as guarantors.
Modern football has been filled with stripes, heat maps and statistics, which are the opposite of unpredictable. How nice it was to see a change of pace, the player who makes the run of the century and jumps all the lines of the field, avoiding rivals until the providential assistance. In a game that, like all passions, is born and grows in the most primitive, in the drive of uncertainty, in curiosity and in instinct, it is bad business to leave so much space to the bureaucrats of square and bevel, to try to complicate excess the beautiful, the simple. The best path to the goal has always been the shortest. Let’s save the minutes wasted on those four-pass corner kicks to score the same. More art and less rehearsal. After all, it’s only 90 minutes, a breeze. If you want, let’s train our feet to jump and our foreheads so that, at the moment of truth, in the one-on-one, they know how to tilt the ball downwards, to that corner where happiness nests, capable of lifting thousands of butts. at the same time in a stadium: the tiny gap between the net, the posts, the crossbar and the limbs of a goalkeeper. In a corner kick, nothing more is needed, and the goal—I promise you, dear coaches—we are going to celebrate the same. Let’s limit the gilicorners. Not even when they enter, due to that statistic for which an exception always confirms the rule (see Atlético de Madrid’s goal against Osasuna on January 12) they compensate for the frustration of all the chances lost due to an excess of flourishes from set pieces . And there are already a few.
