There are columnists who, in the short space available to them, manage to lead their readers by the hand. They propose a brief pact so that they can share with them a story that lasts just a few minutes, but that will take them towards the comforting sensation of stepping on known territory, of feeling at home. A journey that can approach—subtly and seemingly innocuously—the slippery terrain of emotions. As if they were drinking a refreshing glass of water that, in reality, was much more. By the time they realize it, they have already ingested it. And, with it, a dose of joy, melancholy or empathy. There are columnists who achieve all that and much more—laughter, for example—among their readers. Enrique Ballester is one of those columnists.
The last football book (KO Books) collects 90 articles published in the last three years by the Castellón writer, the vast majority of them in The Newspaper. With his now traditional technique of starting from a seemingly trivial everyday and football moment, Ballester is able to build an existential theory. To talk about parenthood, the passage of time, the unspeakable fears, the chaos that accompanies the job of living, how fashion works, the true value of days off, what one is willing to do for love and what is not, of making the most of the perishable stages in which talent and the desire to do things coincide, of how age is accepted through the rejection of innovations, of the goals that are scored and that are not Nobody remembers but its author, of how the human being is capable of saying anything to save himself and then, if that’s it, he will think about how to fit it with his reality, of how strangely comforting a minor injury can be, of cold sweats. that appear when the end of the game arrives and neither statistics nor technology nor experience serve any purpose other than putting balls in the pot. Enrique Ballester talks about all this—and many other things—in columns from which it is difficult to escape unscathed.
