The scene is similar to when Daniele De Rossi did not want to go out on the field because the match against Sweden had to be traced, which would leave the team without a World Cup. National. There was hardly any time left. Ammunition was needed. And the captain of the National Team and Roma considered, contradicting his coach, that he was not the one to avoid the catastrophe. “Me? Why the hell am I going to enter if we have to win, not tie!”, he yelled at the coaching staff, refusing to take off his tracksuit. And he didn’t play.
Once a month I dream that the day of the game arrives and Guardiola decides that he be the starter. He whispers to me in that hoarse, hypnotic voice that he trusts me, that my game will benefit the team and that he go out on the pitch and enjoy himself. “Enjoy what?”, I reply. And I insist, stammering, that he is not in his right mind and that it is in neither of our interests for that idea to prosper. Guardiola, true to himself, persists. And I, already lacing up my boots, begin to tell him that I went to a school where it was forbidden to play football. The director, I tell him desperately, a maniac who dedicated himself for decades to emotionally torturing several generations, considered it a barbaric sport incompatible with intellectual activity. Because of him, controlling a ball with his foot is today for me as great a challenge as it was for him to educate normal people. “Get Pedro or Henry out!” I implore Guardiola. But he doesn’t listen to reason.
The best dreams, like lies, require touches of reality. They need to extract from the unconscious some hint of truth. The brain, however, does not send the correct signals in this case about one’s age or abilities for the task that the hypothalamus proposes while we snore at three in the morning. And it happens because, in reality, one thinks that he could continue playing some quality minutes in the team of his dreams until the players of his fifth begin to retire.
It happened to me with Xavi. The day he left, somehow, we both hung up our boots. But he went with his family to Qatar, and I stayed there. It will have happened to many boys and girls born in 1987 with Piqué. The brain, that is the problem in this type of dream, has no vision of the future. Not business. And he stays anchored in the player period. The electrical impulses of the REM phase should suggest that we set up a sports store, as was done before. Or that we went to train as coaches in the United Arab Emirates. Even if we founded a start up cool girl full of interns with whom we would change the rules of the Davis Cup, we would buy Andorra and then we would separate from Shakira. But not. She blackmails us with our memories. Or with trauma.
And when our idols have already decided to leave, he insists on continuing to order us to jump onto the pitch to make a fool of ourselves in front of our fans.
Piqué has gone off to live his life. Forget him. We’ll still be there smearing every Sunday. Enslaved by the memory of our childhood. Feeding shameful worlds in the month of November in desert dictatorships, where homosexuals are insulted and persecuted and the rights of workers are crushed. They will ask us to get excited again, you’ll see. And for some of us, several nights a month, that wonderful husky voice will once again convince us to go out and enjoy ourselves. And hopefully one day we can shout at him what De Rossi said to poor Giampiero Ventura.
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