Junior, DIM and Borja, sports patriotism: navel-gazing… (Meluk tells him)

I swear I bit my tongue as much as I could. I tried to act like I was crazy, to cover my ears, to pretend I didn’t understand. But no: I confess that, although I walked “from curb to curb” in the newspaper office and at home, telling myself that I wasn’t going to get into that mess, I couldn’t. It happened to me like what happened to Niña Tulia, the mother of El Flecha, the boxer in the story written by David Sánchez Juliao: “Don’t worry, the fight isn’t with you!” It’s not with me and I know that for that reason I will surely earn the inevitable blow, as if Niña Tulia herself were shouting it at me. It won’t be the first and, certainly, not the last.

First it happened with Junior and their elimination from the Copa Libertadores. Then, with Medellin in the South American and, later, with Miguel Angel Borja and the goal he scored against River Plate, the 30th of his accumulated campaign in that tournament: that self-importance that he carries inside came out again, that chauvinism that, as has been said here before, is “that narcissistic belief, close to paranoia and mythomania that what is one’s own is the best”, as ‘Dr. Google’ says in one of his definitions. Then, like a rash, that patriotism that “creates false arguments to encourage sympathies and feelings, instead of promoting reason and rationality” broke out. There is no vaccine against that.

Colo Colo was not a piece of cake for the parrot

That Junior was a super machine and that the Chilean Colo-Colo was nothing or almost nothing, that not winning was the last straw, that since they were a piece of cake, River Plate, which was also nothing more than ‘your daddy’, should start to tremble at once.

They had already beaten River without having played against Colo-Colo! Let the fans who wear a T-shirt and a T-shirt say that, well, come on. They can do it! But the opinion leaders and the media…? They didn’t even look at the fact that Colo-Colo’s roster is better valued than Junior’s or that it has more history because it won the Libertadores…

It happened with DIM, who beat Chilean side Palestino: “Now the gap between Colombian and Chilean football has been made clear!” they shouted irresponsibly to ingratiate themselves with the fans.

The tapa with Borja….

But what they said about Borja is the maxim, the cover: it turns out that after His goal and his great statistics as the top Colombian scorer in the Libertadoresthey stated without blushing that he is today one of the three best center forwards in the world… When he is not even a starter for the Colombian National Team!

Don’t get stuck… Breathe: yes, that’s what they said: that he sat at the same table with Haaland, Mbappé, Cristiano, Lautaro, Oshimen, Ka
ne, Sesko, Lewandowski, Griezmann… (And I don’t put more so they don’t get stuck anymore).

And of course, the only way to defend his frivolous opinion is with a banal “it’s my opinion”, “we have to believe in what we do”. That frivolous opinion-mongering, without data or foundation, is what this profession has done. How strange it is for Juan Gossain to say: “In every newsroom they should put up a sign that says: ‘The truth above all else’, because the truth is the basis of journalism. Nothing can be above the truth”.

It’s reality, it’s the facts, the data, not the easy-going “it seems to me”, “I believe that”, “I think…”. Because you’re looking at your own navel tassel… Bah!

Meluk tells him

Gabriel Meluk

Sports Editor

@MelukLeCuenta

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