Let’s play flying goalkeepers. We’ve all said it, on the street in the park or on any makeshift pitch, too many years ago or maybe less. It happens when the one placed over there can leave the hermitage and play together with the others, no longer excluded. Sometimes flying goalies were the only way to send someone between the posts made of backpacks, balled up sweatshirts, even cars that shouldn’t be babbled otherwise damn us. Like a prison it was the door, except for a few electomasochists (cit. Buffon), to the children’s grounds and the adults’ stadiums. Until René arrived, the handsome René from Medellin, Vallanzasca armed with a ball who even ended up in prison, to free up that role – Galeano wrote – of a loner waiting to be shot. Neither he nor the football greats knew it, but it was the dawn of a new era. We didn’t know it, but in those endless afternoons – on the pitch, the whole pitch, nothing barred – we dreamed a little of being René Higuita.
Are you crazy with this dribbling with the goalkeeper?, shouts the fan today with coronary shock. And think what the systematic construction from behind would have been like with the iconic Colombian number 1, innovator by madness. In the beginning it was El Loco, a nickname already in the lines of the first report on him by the Atletico Nacional talent scout: “He’s completely crazy, but he’s also a champion.” To which the emotional tides of the opposing hinchas sang: “This is not a goalkeeper, he is a cabaret whore”. And he, always positioned differently: «He gave me energy». The best fullback of the 20th century in South America, the first to attack by triangulating with his teammates, advancing and dribbling (also scoring, from free kicks and penalties: 41 goals in his career).
Romantic hero of Latin American magical realism, now told in the Netflix documentary “El Camino del Escorpion”, in Italy “The Scorpion’s Shot”, directed by Luis Ara. And even there on the cover there is his most famous move, the one in the title: the Scorpion, a backhanded save hitting the ball with his heels, conceived in an advert with children for Frutiño juice and hatched for a long time. “I’ve been waiting for that ball for 5 years.” Redknapp’s cross-shot, in the temple of Wembley on 6 September 1995, Loco’s smirk and leap (limiting himself: in the initial plans he wanted to block the ball between his legs). One of the craziest plays in history.
There are those who put it in competition with Gordon Banks’ flight, on 7 June 1970, to deflect Pelé’s header. But it is, in fact, like slipping into the impossible question “is Pelé or Maradona better”. And it is no coincidence that Dieguito was a friend of René. The Englishman’s save is plastic perfection, physical rigour, stylistic precision. That of the Colombian in England is irreverence, extremism of daring, a mockery of the attacker’s arrogance, together with athletic exceptionalism. Banks is a diving Canaletto, a Picasso comes out of the higuita save. The mustachioed child but still a child, who emerged from the poles of the world on 27 August 1966 in the very poor Barrio Castilla of Medellin, “where many are born and few grow up”. The goalkeeper liberator comes into play.
Showman, even physically – 1.75 tall, 72 kg of ideal weight but a strong tendency to exceed – distant from the prototypes embodied by the Soviet Yascin and our Dinone, Zoff who indicated the essence of the goalkeeper in his nose in the grass, crumpled on the the ball as in his legendary catch on the goal line at Sarrià 1982. René on the other hand flies ball and chain on the grass, black curls in the wind. On the road, he recognizes some masters: he takes inspiration from another Loco, the Argentine Gatti. And first Carrizo, the 1 of the Maquina del River. Higuita is the free-kick taker (we have one now that in Serie A there are almost no goals scored on set pieces): histrionic followers are Chilavert, Campos and Rogerio Ceni. Higuita the penalty saver: the masterpiece is the final of the 1989 Libertadores with the Paraguayans Olimpia, everything is decided from the spot; Loco saves colleague Almeida’s penalty, scores his 5th of the series, then neutralizes another 3. It is the first Copa for a Colombian club.
Atletico Nacional in which the No. 1 outside the posts, outside the norm, even outside the box, is not outside the box. The mad higuitism is taken by Chaco Maturana as the basis of its rationalist turn, the root of the current guardilism on a par with the Lavolpian salida, of the total football which had seeds in Great Hungary with the goalkeeper-libero Grosics and established itself with the Clockwork Orange who Jongbloed had number 8 in goal, also an alternate for the shirt. «In those days we played with 4 defenders plus the libero, Chaco took one away: 4 defenders and I was the libero. We gained a man up front.” Revolutionary, innovation that integrates with the European one by Arrigo Sacchi. The two coaches who played, for the aesthetes of the area, “the perfect match” in the ’89 Intercontinental Championship. Boring too and, as often happens, what solved things was the beloved imperfection. “One thing I’ve never understood: how to place the barrier.” Evani thanked her. “How many games have I lost due to free kicks, like that time in Tokyo, in the 119th minute, when Milan were already trembling at the idea of having their penalties saved by me.”
Those who ruined the magical nights of Vicini’s Azzurri. Italy ’90, Colombia returns to the World Cup after 28 years and surprises. Higuita amazes the planet with his alien football. Sticker album: the Cafeteros fascinated, if only for the amount of long hair. Among them Andres Escobar, murdered by drug trafficking after an own goal in USA ’94 (banality of evil and complexity of good: in 2019 only René, confessed friend of the narcos emperor Pablo Escobar, was among the players at the inauguration of the sports center in Belen named after the defender). Again, his friend Leonel Alvarez, author of the winning penalty in the 1989 Libertadores. And Valderrama, bush of blond hair, slow and magical with the assist (he’s the same as then, if not for the helmet of graying hair). El Loco exalted and made people despair: eighth with Cameroon, he dribbles and Milla plays the trick on him, Colombia eliminated. Yet in that tournament, from his absurd futbol to the 6′ of ball in the hands of Pat Bonner in a horrible Ireland-Egypt 0-0, it was born out of the need to spectacularize the fundamental regulatory change – stop the back passes to the goalkeeper that can be collected with your hands, you play with your feet like René – which brought us to modern football. It was later renamed the “Higuita rule”.
Everything changes at midnight on 23 July 1992, the last goalkeeper who can waste time like that is Peter Schmeichel at the European Championships won surprisingly by Denmark, rescued after the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia. Epochal transformations. In that summer of 31 years ago, a succession of events punctually captured by an analysis on – very suitable for René – loslalom.it: on 15 August the First Division becomes the Premier League, to manage the flow of pay money on its own tv coming soon; four days later, again in the economics of football, the European Cup becomes the Champions League. Today they are the first two global club products. From the Higuita law to the law of turbo-capitalist football. Now passed into the ultra-capitalist phase, with the infinite money and infinite ambitions of Arabia&Co.
In this, however, Higuita was innocent. He just wanted to play his way. “It was my way of feeling football.” And life, rocker and contradictory. Which was influenced primarily – a part that is slightly underestimated in the documentary film – by his connection with El Patron of drug trafficking Escobar, beyond the friendly visit to the La Catedral prison (in 1991, when he handed himself over to authorities, murders in Medellin alone reached the record figure of 15 thousand per year).
It also happens in the case of the mediation in the kidnapping of the daughter of Luis Carlos Molina Yepes (entrepreneur found to be linked to Escobar’s money laundering, investigated for the death of the journalist Guillermo Cano Isaza, also suspected of treason when El Patron del Mal was killed) which leads him in prison 7 months and towards the end of his career. In the prologue, it is Loco who had no boundaries on the pitch who limits the field of the film: «If we talk about sport, I am 100% innocent». When he left playing football, in January 2010, René said: “I’m not proud of everything I’ve done, I’m a poor sinner.” But it was much more, for football, sinning. —
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