Perhaps the moment in which football best imitates life is when a clear foul occurs and the referee does not whistle and the game continues, with one team circulating the ball and the other defending itself, both suspecting that what they are doing is wrong. It will be worthless if someone finally scores a goal. Then that fantastic phenomenon occurs: attacking with skepticism. Several minutes may pass, eternal for the spectator, and it may even happen that everyone forgets that there was a foul in the beginning and throws themselves into the game with everything: well, it’s not worth it either. I don’t know if the regulations contemplate it, but could an offside occur that the referee does not see in the first minute, the ball does not come out for 89 minutes, a team scores in the 90th minute and not the goal but the goal has to be annulled? game?
There are lives like that too, invalidated from the beginning, but few. The normal thing is that at some point something goes wrong that you don’t detect, and you move forward (or back, depending on the moment) without knowing that everything has been canceled from the beginning and there will be no result. And yet, here is the lesson already sung by Machado about the road: wasn’t it worth it in some way? Didn’t the team have fun while making a spectacular play?
Those minutes, even years, in which everything continues to function as a simulacrum, can be even more profitable than those destined for transcendence. Pedro García Cuartango has a phrase about it: “Few realize that the enjoyment of life depends much more on knowledge that has no use or practical meaning than on the ability to increase the current account.” If we transfer it to football, it exaggerates: one always prefers what is useful. But in the same way that this season the missed chances by Mbappé later disallowed due to previous offside hardly provide relief for the player (“what’s wrong with me?” you might ask), disallowed goals are a deposit of confidence: (“It hasn’t gotten on the scoreboard, but I beat the goalkeeper, I got away from the defender, they will be more attentive and nervous in the next play”).
In this Sunday’s match, Madrid scored three more goals than they put on the scoreboard. One served to confirm Mbappé – he had done it in Arabia, but Barça’s win is not the context to vindicate anyone – that he is already in stratospheric mode: he even scored a penalty, who would have thought. There was another one, Valverde’s, that did hurt Madrid: you can’t have a streak like that crazy for a long time, and Madrid missed that bullet. It was a game drawn in a strange way. It started with a great goal from Las Palmas at 27 seconds, followed with a missed goal into an empty net by Brahim in the third minute and was unstuck, for Madrid, with a forward penalty, that absurd trip of someone who handles the ball better. opposite area than in one’s own. Sandro committed it on Rodrygo. The forward penalty is characterized because it is almost always taken against an opponent who is leaving the area; Rodrygo was leaving the Las Palmas area looking for God knows what angle, and before leaving, Sandro knocked him down. This also happens a lot in everyday life: you are leaving the bar to go home, and before you cross the door they give you a penalty.
