Things that happen only once in a lifetime | Soccer

Interesting and wonderfully designed report on Zinedine Zidane in the newspaper As. In the canonical way in which legends are x-rayed: by interviewing their adversaries years later. ‘I played against’ is a delicate idea that does not play with its protagonists but with time. What will Zidane’s scoring defender have to say a minute after the end of the match, what will he not have to say when 20 years have passed. Ángel Morales, for example, defender of Espanyol, talks about two transcendental issues.

The first, Zidane’s characteristic physique, his corpulence moving through the air like a piece of paper. One looked at it and saw a mountain; one was chasing him, and he was chasing a feather. And he didn’t control. “More than controls, they were dribbles,” says Morales. Zidane assumed the ball under his control not with a first control that dominated it, but as a first gesture with which to get rid of the rival, or clear the field, or force a foul.

The second issue that Morales refers to is more tricky and fans of the sanctified Zidane tend to avoid even tiptoeing around. The volcanic character of him is very punctual, but decisive. Zidane was not a professional with the axe, one of those who hit and hit but never took a shower early (“I was chopping wood, sir, and my leg appeared in the middle”). Zidane in the fray was almost always automatic red. And Morales, in the work signed by Pedro Iranzo in As, also reveals a subterranean degree of hijoputism. In a match, a boy from Espanyol’s reserve team, Alberto Crusat, came onto the field. And in a fortuitous incident, Zidane fell on top of him: Crusat dislocated his collarbone. Morales then listened to Zidane’s conversation with his teammates: he told them “What do you want? He is very small. He should still be playing with my children in the park.” Morales was shocked by the joke, the tone, when a teammate had just been injured. He uses, by the way, the word “bastard”; as he would call it at the end of the game, as he calls it twenty years later.

Maradona is as iconic disfiguring English people at the Azteca as he is being arrested completely drugged after who knows how many days of partying and surrounded by cameras. We fans are closer to the party of that department of Buenos Aires than to the Azteca: the first can be done by everyone, the second can only be done by Maradona. In the same way that we can joke with an injured boy or headbutt an Italian who is telling us his sister, but out of a million balls that come down from the Glasgow sky only Zidane can hit it with his supporting leg as stiff as a skyscraper and the another making a right angle. “In training I have done it sometimes, but not so perfect. Through the square, making the turn and hitting the ball squarely with his body so well positioned, and at that moment… Those things happen only once in a lifetime,” he told this newspaper, and it was true.