• Joaquín. Three goals in 20 minutes

Just a month ago, an indiscreet camera hunted Joaquin criticizing Vinicius while warming up in the Santiago Bernabéu band. "This one is very bad," he told the Betis fitness coach about the Brazilian striker after a goal chance failed. Such was the commotion that the Cadiz had to apologize in a way, say, politically incorrect: «I want to publicly apologize, because he is 19 years old and because I am not like that. If I am the first to have less danger in the face of goal than a gypsy without cousins!

Beyond the questionable way of expressing it, the reality is that Joaquin was right. In the 758 professional games he had played so far he had a baggage of 97 goals, at an average of 0.13 goals per game . Or put another way, perhaps more clearly, scored a goal every 556 minutes, about one every six crashes. And at 38, in the twilight of his eternal career, he no longer seemed able to improve in that facet.

But Joaquin always has one more rabbit in his top hat, a different way of surprising the world despite having been playing at the highest level for 20 seasons. On Sunday, against Athletic, he did it in the most unexpected way. In the 20th minute of the match, Betis was already winning 3-0 ... with three goals from Joaquín, hero of a incredulous Benito Villamarín and exultant in equal shares before the feat that his captain was starring. The first goal came a minute and a half after the match, after an Emerson center from the right that left him alone against Simon ; the second marked him in the 11th minute, turning a Alex Moreno pass into silk; and the third and last one turned it to the 20 minutes of party, finalizing a counterattack initiated by Guardado and prolonged by Loren .

The oldest in the big leagues

«Who was going to tell me at this age! I do not think it will happen again, I leave with immense satisfaction and joy ”, said after the game the captain of Betis, guarding under the arm the ball of the game, signed by all his teammates to find a privileged location on some shelf in your house. Because it turns out that it was the first 'hat-trick' of Joaquin's extensive career. He had achieved nine doubles, but had never scored three goals in the same game . "I have pinched myself to verify that what was happening was real," he said, still stunned by the game he had starred in.

Hours after the game, Joaquin wanted to thank everyone who had congratulated him on the Instagram account, while spending a joke on a video posted "I'm going to stay at home quiet, because I'm busted .. And nobody believes that. I'm going to take a little glass, a little glass, a little glass ... ", the Bético sang.

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What he might not know yet is that his triplet was going to go down in the history of LaLiga and European football. No footballer had marked a hat-trick at his age (38 years and 140 days) in Spain or in the other four major leagues of the continent (England, Italy, Germany and France), according to BBC data. In LaLiga, the record was held by Alfredo di Stefano for 55 years. And outside of our borders, the oldest veteran was the Peruvian Claudio Pizarro , who achieved his last hat-trick in the Bundesliga with 37 years and 151 days, practically a year younger than Joaquin.

The feat was about to be even greater, since in the discount he had a very clear opportunity that Unai Simón solved with a prodigious intervention: «I hit him as I could but he made a stop, the poor man will have said 'the fourth I will allow you. ' Joaquin did not need that much to get out of Villamarín and sign a match for the history of European football.

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