The story of Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol at the 2008 Olympics is famous (it’s famous: it’s viral, but in reality it’s not the same thing, sometimes it’s even antithetical). Bryant, a close friend of Gasol, two guys who considered themselves brothers, told his teammates in the locker room that at the start of the game Spain was going to find out what the United States was all about and what he, Kobe Bryant, was all about at the Olympic Games. And in the first play he gave Gasol a slap (block in slang) that knocked him three meters to the ground. Did Kroos think something similar minutes before the game against Spain? If he did, it didn’t work out well. Instead of hitting Carvajal hard, he hit two Barcelona players, Lamine Yamal and Pedri, injuring the latter, who left the game, and Kroos did not receive any yellow cards despite deserving two. The German star was sent off in tears five minutes into the match at the World Cup hosted by his country? It’s a shame that Pedri wasn’t sent off. Kobe Bryant did it to show his team that he was with them above any personal circumstances; Kroos did too, but for his former team. Just enough motivation for Germany.
“Kroos plays every game without knowing if it will be his last,” said the commentator. Well, like us with sex, we don’t kick around. The German number 8, a football legend, did indeed play his last game. He faced not one previous generation, but two. He faced the future. It was not a game of the present. It was a game governed by a football that will be played better in many years, but which is already being successfully tested amidst the astonishment and bewilderment of the rivals.
And that, for many minutes, despite the referee, who was at his best reminiscent of the referee from the World Cup in Korea who finished the match with his eyes slanted. But there was Spain, the Young One; there they were, putting a bell on the ball and giving themselves the luxury of keeping it in a German stadium in front of their national team, sending Lineker’s saying that football is a game of eleven against eleven that Germany always wins to the winds (he already did it in South Africa); man, how can they not be eleven if there are no red cards for them? And not even like that.
Whenever Spain plays wonderfully in a major tournament, those of us born in the late 70s (and those born at the end of a similar decade) think that the idyll will end traumatically and some misfortune will occur, sometimes naturally. This was the game that was lost in the 90s. This is the game that is won after 2008, even cruelly. Kill Bill, the Tarantino film in which Uma Thurman collects historical debts. Against a giant and in its country, painting its face in various ways, taking the ball away from it enough times to make the stadium nervous; we must one day talk about that discreet and subtle pleasure of stealing the toy from someone else’s house, juggling it, letting time pass while the ball runs and runs along its usual corridor controlled by rude visitors with that snobbish touch that comes from indifference to others.
This Spain doesn’t care what anyone or anything says, even if it’s in 87. Here there is an uninhibited and happy team that is dedicated to doing better something that it knows how to do well, playing and winning, and it doesn’t care if the old ghosts come out of the closet: it burns them in the 120th.
Germany scored, and whoever ties at the end of the match has the right to play the last song (but that doesn’t mean they’re going to dance to it). And Spain dances like Carolina, I danced yes sir. They were no longer so young, nor so fresh: suspicious changes by Luis de la Fuente took Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal off the field, the two best players in the Euros, because there is a sinister theory that it is better to win 1-0 than 4-1. And so, at the moment when Germany was opening up to attack with everything and meters and meters of field appeared for the wonder wingers, the wonder wingers left the field.
But so what. There is murderous blood in this team. Football is a fascinating sport, I don’t remember who said it and I’m sorry (perhaps Valdano, the Churchill of football quotes) because one writes about the game for 90 minutes, the other scores a goal and that chronicle is worthless. How is it worthless? It’s worthless for everything; does a goal change the past? Did we do everything wrong because in the end, in the last minute, we did it wrong? Did we do everything right because in the last minute, after doing everything wrong, we did at least something right? Yes, definitely yes. Sometimes out of 120 minutes there are a few decisive seconds played and then nobody shows up or we all show up. Sometimes in 80 years of life there are a few minutes in which we have to unbalance the score and we unbalance it for the worse. The fact that the result is the least important is for those who win, who don’t suffer it. But the result is, at the very least, interesting. Spain won because it has a bit more of a sharp edge, a bit more willing, a bit hungrier. And without its two stars on the field. With another in defence giving up a red card at the last second to counter a German attack. You suffer and you win. You win and you stop suffering.
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