Poquí has done it again.
It happened on Saturday: as soon as De Burgos whistled the end of Barça-Atlético, so damned for the culés (1-2), Joan Poquí hit the button et voila. There was his chronicle of the game for Sports World and the encrypted message that, chapter by chapter, he dedicates to the reader. “Olympic cauldron,” it said this time.
Those who had put me on the trail of this story had been Joanjo Pallàs and Carles Ruipérez. It is clear that good old Poquí likes to play with words and readers. Poquí is a kind of Quevedo in version 3.0. When Barça plays, they send us a message. To decipher it, you have to link the first letter of each paragraph.
While the chronicler tells me that “it’s not that difficult either,” I put my hands on my head
–You should know that the thing comes from 2018, from that Barça-Real Sociedad that said goodbye to Iniesta –Poquí tells me while we have a coffee at Diagonal 477–: to pay tribute to the legend, he had decided to encrypt the message. Chaining the beginning of each paragraph I put: “Andrés Iniesta”. I liked that game, so I’ve continued doing it ever since. In the last two seasons I do it in every game.
Iniesta is to blame, then.
While Joan Poquí tells me that “it’s not that difficult either,” I put my hands on my head. I think about the pressure of closing the chronicle, the immediacy of digital and the uncertainty of the result. I think of the vertigo of the blank page. I think that Poquí, in a situation of maximum stress, is capable of keeping three fronts open: he can follow the game, string together the text and play with the encrypted message. On the day of Barça-Leganés (0-1; and that result was definitely uncertain), it was allowed to encrypt in Catalan: “Cogombre mecànic” (a cogombre It is a cucumber, a nickname given to Leganés, a resident of a city located between orchards of that fruit). In a match refereed by Gil Manzano, the message was in English: “Apple tree.”
–Iniesta is to blame –I insist.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” he insists. Sometimes I choose the message before the game starts. I assemble the paragraphs from the first letter. And that doesn’t pressure me. On the contrary, it helps me to structure the chronicle. Of course, I must confess that some messages are unreproducible (and he reveals some to me and it is true, they are unreproducible, no matter how many times I have reproduced them). L’Onzethe TV3 program in which he collaborates).
Ojiplático leaves me, and here I close this tribute to a myth of journalism.
(PS: Reader, if you want to find out what I’m trying to tell you in this column, I suggest you chain the first letter of each paragraph. There goes my gift for this Christmas).
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