We attend block football.
One has experienced the politics of blocs, a concept of Churchill, whose soccer epigone wants to be Álvaro Benito. In bloc politics, everything was black or white, summed up in the Panamanian song of Basilio Antonio Fergus Alexander, Basilio: “Black neck swan, white neck swan / who are loving each other / who are denying each other…”
One has known the life –not strictly polygonal– of blocks, whose best finished literary expression is in a book (“which is neither a novel nor a book of stories”) by Pedro Touceda, a resident of the 4th floor of the Yellow Tower, in the “seventy ” Colonia de Lourdes (designed by Sáenz de Oiza), next to the Casa de Campo. Pure magical realism. “To my father
he won the lottery, and he proposed vacations in Ibiza”, which was the snake in the garden of block life:
–What would happen on the beach of Las Salinas? Were we all going to be left in the balls, with how important the bathroom latch had been?
And one has come across block soccer, which seems to be the formula that soccer has to pretend to be a scientist, now that Science, thanks to Dr. Carballo (Azara, Cajal, Simón… and Carballo!”), is the religion of journalism.
The blocks, like the rivers in the regional education plans, are high, medium and low, measured with the square and bevel of Álvaro Benito, who is our Brunelleschi, guardian of perspectivism in this new Renaissance.
Low block would be Maguregui: all hanging from the crossbar, like Sandokan, the bullfighter who invented the bat pass, consisting of hanging by the feet of the barrier and messing with the bull with the crutch. Middle block would be Clemente: “All the players must go out on the attack, and then everyone must also go back at full speed.” And high block would be Xavi, the schoolboy from Lillo, master of verbiage and “zugzwang”, a German word taken from José Raúl Capablanca’s “Fundamentals of Chess”, and which indicates the position in which the player obtains a worse result if he has to move a piece that if he doesn’t, a concept that Luuk de Jong never fully assimilated.
-Capa -writes Cabrera Infante- smiled watching his opponent’s face when he produced what looked like a zigzag and was a “zugwang”.
Ancelotti has taken Zidane’s veterans and has settled in the lower block, which is a sovereign glander, a four-legged temple: Courtois and Militao behind, and in front, Vinicius and Benzema.
Ancelotti was a parishioner of the 4-4-2, because it reflects, according to him, the shape of the pitch, which is a rectangle, giving rise to a team with maximum balance “and indisputably defensive”, although he sees a drawback: in attack , you use lateral passes more to advance and reach the end zone, while with the 4-3-3 you can cross the lines faster and attack more through the middle.
-Maybe the ultimate is Guardiola’s idea of having eleven midfielders, including the goalkeeper.
On Saturday, with a mixture of 4-4-2 and 4-3-3, Madrid came out of Vallecas alive at the hands of Courtois, Militao’s head and Vinicius and Benzema’s yours-mine, with Asensio, who plays to football like someone who rows with his girlfriend in a boat on the Retiro pond, receiving the praise. The Modric-Casemiro-Kroos axis, if the opponent increases the revolutions, crumbles, something that does not worry Ancelotti, who knows, as an old man, that in football, as in politics, the cat is less important than the mice.
-White cat, black cat, it doesn’t matter, if it catches mice -Deng Xiao Ping told our Gonzalón, in the middle of Movida Madrid, back in 1985, who returned from China captivated by the wisdom of the Great Communist Cat with a refrain that is became the motto of the new world power, today in the hands of the Great Vinipú, with its “communist capitalism”, which is nothing other than Franco’s “state capitalism”, the cradle of our most conspicuous liberals, on the political basis of single party, where we are heading with the Grand Coalition. Single match, yes. But liberals, too.
In the end, the absences due to suspension of Casemiro and Mendy may be decisive in helping Ancelotti to overcome the tie with PSG, who now have everything in their favor, because they have the result, they have Ceferino and they have the final in Paris that was going to be played in Saint Petersburg, one of the three harsh sanctions against Putin, along with the expulsion from Eurovision and the Villacís color games in La Cibeles, where hopefully in May (“spring is to see Madrid win,” he said Bernabéu) let’s see Ancelotti ride the Cup 14, Cruyff’s number.
