Soccer: 11 paragraphs of literature and soccer to win a World Cup

• RAFAEL J. ALVAREZ

  Madrid

Updated Saturday, November 19, 2022-01:47

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Jorge Luis Borges

organized a conference on immortality on the same day and at the same time that Argentina opened its 1978

Cup against Hungary.

And the library was filled.

"Football is a brutal game that does not require special courage because nobody risks their lives," said the essential Argentine writer, oblivious to the metaphor of this game that is born to us, kills us and revives us with each dribble, each touch, each oops, each goal.

Perhaps the creative height of Borges will make him a spokesman for all the intellectuals who despised (or despise) football and prevented him from entering their pages,

,

,

,

...

But if soccer is a miniature society experiment for 90 minutes (plus whatever the referee adds) and we are told such a true fiction, how could thought miss it?

"

In the devotion that many believers have for him and in the distrust that many intellectuals have in him", Eduardo Galeano asked himself and answered himself, who every time a World Championship began cloistered himself to watch all the games and put a sign on the door of his house: "Closed for the World Cup".

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What is a World Cup

Perhaps

is worth embodying all the intellectuals who loved (or love) soccer and brought it to their ink talent, Mario Benedetti, Albert Camus, Miguel Delibes, Jean Paul Sartre, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Günter Grass , Roberto Fontanarrosa, Osvaldo Soriano, Josefina R. Aldecoa, Eduardo Sacheri, Santiago Rocangliolo, Claudia Piñeiro... Or to all the footballers who played (and still play) with the ball on paper, Jorge Valdano, Ángel Cappa, Miguel Pardeza, Sara Serrat, Pablo Aimar, Jorge Sampaoli, Pepe Mel...

Without getting too intense, we will say that a World Cup is a month of life that death owes us.

At the gates of this, which paradoxes us between the passion of the game and the repugnance of a capitalism that accepts a championship in a country without

, we propose today an alignment with the 11 best paragraphs of literature and soccer.

Nurturingly helped by

, art historian and creator of the fantastic

website , we have put together this subjective and scoundrel starting 11, a challenging sieve for you to enjoy, then choose another starting 11 and become a coach.

After all, we all carry one inside.

We will use a 1-4-3-3 scheme, because the center forward is highly overrated and football is best played with a touch and possession literature.

And we call it

because it's a play on words, because there are words at stake.

[Authors' note: In 2018,

, a pediatrician in love with football and communication, created a space on Twitter called

to post short stories.

Alberto, we swear to you that we came up with the word without knowing that you had already baptized it, but, even so, it is only fair to bring you into this madness.

And with one of your stories: "The sniper aimed at the head. No one yelled goal despite such beauty"].

Football and literature... How about a certain Benedetti?: "Football is the only religion that does not have atheists. That goal that

scored against the English with the help of the divine hand is, for now, the only proof reliable of the existence of God.

Literature and soccer... As Galeano prefaced in

, "I am nothing more than a beggar for good soccer. I go around the world hat in hand and in the stadiums I beg: a nice little game, for God's sake" .

Illustration: Ulises Culebro

Goalkeeper: MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ

, who was extreme but here sublimates the goalkeepers:

.

Luis García Montero says that soccer players dream with their feet and poets run with their heads.

Miguel Hernández played as a winger for La Repartidora, a humble team from Orihuela, where Ramón Sijé, whom he loved so much, died.

Miguel was called

(snail) because he was good and slow.

And one day, on account of a harmless blow that the Orihuela goalkeeper hit the post, the enormous poet from Alicante created an elegy where the fiction of death and the game of rhyme were allowed.

"It was a deadly plunger. With how much! skill / and effect, your head / hit the post. Like a female sex, / the lightness / of the blow opened a grenade of sadness."

Right-back: FABRIZIO SILEI

, the surprise of a lane against infamy:

.

To the interesting Italian political scientist, sociologist and writer, dictatorships with uniforms from the past (or not so past) sound like something.

In this book he recreates the revenge of a hero.

But before...

"Dad, are we going to the stadium this Sunday?

-You only think about the ball!, reproaches his mother.

Instead of a head you have a ball!

- I don't know..., answers the father, undecided.

It will be the last game... Then the Wunderteam is over, Austria is over... only the Nazis will remain."

Right central:

, because if he talks about Italy here, either the ball passes or the rival passes, but not both:

Three lives are paralyzed that afternoon of the World Cup in Spain in which soccer showed that the result is not always the effect of the game... And here is a Colombian writer to tell it.

"The bullet hit sent him to the ground (...) Lying on the concrete of the sidewalk of Travessera de Les Corts with Vallespir, swimming in his blood, the voice of that body recited the surnames of the Squadra Azzurra to give strength and stay alive or to say goodbye to her by remembering that July 5, 1982, when Italy beat Brazil 3-2, in the demolished Sarrià stadium, on the avenue of the same name.

-Gentile, Tardelli, Antognoni, Conti... Rossi and Graziani".

Left center:

, neighborhood football, few jokes:

.

A guy who publishes

,

or

magazine

had to play this World Literary based on EL MUNDO.

Here Ortiz rises to neighborhood soccer, the embryo of our downfalls.

"Koldo stepped on the ball, spat and took a few steps back, the last one in a slight curve to his left. He tried to hit the ball with his instep, but he did it with the outside and the ball bounced and went over a wall of boulders.

-You screwed up, said Fichu.

-Shut up, asshole!

-You don't know how to accommodate the body.

-You shut up.

-They gaped at the rubber band of yellow and green crystals that crowned the wall.

"Not for a day," Koldo said, kicking at the gravel.

Damn, not a fucking day has the ball lasted me".

Left side:

, as left-footed as Lionel:

.

This curious writer and journalist tells here a story of guilt, forgiveness, executioners with a series of victims, and even love.

And, to all this, Messi.

"From the training to the horses. From the gallop to the hotel. And, in each race, in each curve of the road, I began to lose the ball. What Messi did not take from me was stolen from me by these four-legged madmen".

Right midfielder:

, a Brazilian who writes feinting, feinting, dribbling, like Garrincha:

.

The author of this book that guts life through soccer is Brazilian.

With this it is all said.

Here he describes a marvel: when a no-goal is worth more than a goal.

that was what happened and what the videotape allows us to see and re-view forever, do you understand?

A tremendous thing, Tiziu".

Midfielder:

, the poetry of touch, socialized football:

In

, this printing pivot brought to the pages the day that football invented Dignity.

So, without exaggeration.

(And that the game was not on the 21st, but on the 3rd).

"June 21. In 2001, the football match between the teams Treviso and Genoa was surprising. A Treviso player, Akeem Omolade, an African from Nigeria, was frequently whistled and mocking roars and racist chants in Italian stadiums. But Today, there was silence. The other ten Treviso players played the game with their faces painted black."

Left midfielder: RAFAEL AZCONA

, because left-handers play how they want.

Player in the Piarist team, the legendary writer and screenwriter found, also in football, a territory for biting, irony and black humor.

Soccer and Azcona?

thrashed.

"Gooooooool! The crowd's shout caught the happy old Panocha with his back to the door. When he turned, stunned, and saw the fucking ball between the tights, he couldn't even vent his anger into a blasphemy, because his teammates fell on him above him to hug him and kiss him. 'You're bad, Panochita,' he said to himself, bursting into tears. But as he fell to the ground, crushed by that mass of sweaty and joyous meat, a hymn was raised in the stands: 'Panocha, Panocha! , Panocha is great, like Panocha, there is none!' And without stopping crying, the old Panocha, Panochita, began to melt into a delicious delicacy and ejaculated as he had not ejaculated for centuries.

Right midfielder: ANA MARÍA MOIX

, the talented rarity of what can happen:

Catalan affiliated with tobacco and soccer, one of the great poetic prose of the last third of the 20th century published in 1998 an unpublished text in

that addresses a sacrilege...

"The attitude of those close to him was completely logical: how to trust, in the future, in a man who, suddenly and in an absolutely thoughtless way, stopped feeling solidarity with the football team he had always carried in his heart? A A man like that, the renowned analyst told him, inspires distrust. Who tells us that the same thing can't happen to him with the people around him? The colors of a club are like the mother, like the children, like the homeland, like the language that one speaks... In short, as the most sacred thing: as oneself. And to stop loving oneself is a symptom of serious insanity and the possible beginning of... 'By the way, what team were you from? You will understand that If it's mine, I'll be forced to refer you to another colleague who doesn't feel involved in your problem'".

Left midfielder: MARIO BENEDETTI

, when the attack is art and this story a convulsion for the spirit:

.

For Benedetti, soccer got into prose and verse, because he saw in the game a mirror of life, with its social classes, its business, its beauty, its joys, and even its torturers and tortured sharing a team.

Uruguayan, he also knew about dictators, of course.

In this story, the goal is a misfortune.

"The trip is over, Benja, and not only that, my career here is also over, there is no goalkeeper who survives being scored between the legs. Benja dedicated two hours to cheer him up. I feel as bad as you, Martín. I can't get used to the idea that I've done that to you. No, Benja, you didn't do anything to me, I did everything to myself, I'm not good for a goalkeeper. Not at all (...) Look, Benja I can't recover from this even by saving three penalties in a single afternoon. But, Martín, I don't want to see you like this, you're twenty-one years old, you have life left, your whole life. Do you know what happens? It happens that for me life is football, even more so, my life is the three sticks. It's as if I had run out of life".

False nine: JUAN VILLORO

, because he closes the game without needing to finish off.

.

This headline is a title.

Villoro, a Mexican fan of Necaxa, "which is like literature, for enlightened minorities", has been a journalist in several World Cups and a writer on the essence of soccer.

Like the day he said that a great game can end without a winner and without goals because nothing in the world admits this non-quantifiable form of glory.

He and God know it.

"Before leaving the field, it is worth remembering the shadow players, those who stayed on the road, with broken bones or nerves, afflicted with the various circumstances with which the days prepare their siege. They, the never-seen, were as necessary as the white lines that separate the letters in the books".

By the way, Jorge Luis, Argentina won 2-1.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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