I started watching the Copa del Rey final already in the second half, and I did what I always do: turn back to see (and above all listen to) the goals, both on Movistar with Carlos Martínez and on TVE with Juan Carlos Rivero . From my childhood I still have Real Madrid fans and a keen interest in announcers (I announced games and goals at home; I was, as I wrote, a big fan of Gaspar Rosety), so I like to listen to, and intimately value, goal announcers. important, and as soon as a big Madrid match ends, what I do is go to all the stations to get the goals again, and if the match is really big, I also look for them on foreign stations (and I go to the headlines, of course : L’Equipe, Olé, Gazzetta…). Anyway, this is to say that I finally stayed watching the final on Movistar because Carlos Martínez’s voice will always be for me associated with Madrid’s comeback against PSG and City (“another lateral center is expected”), and so it was When someone called me on the phone, I paused for a few minutes and resumed the game. After twenty minutes I had forgotten that I had paused it: for me it was the extraordinary and rigorous live performance.
Then something happened. The teams went to penalties, and the cameras focused on Vasco Aguirre with the Mallorca players surrounding him, jumping and celebrating each of the shooters’ names. There was euphoria, there was joy, there were hugs: not only did they reach the final against the odds, but they forced Athletic to penalties; In some way, they considered themselves winners and wanted to express it, and in the Athletic group there was concentration, seriousness and a final shout of encouragement all together. I decided to myself: the penalties belong to Mallorca, clearly. And when the captains went to the referee to decide field and first shot, the Basque players appeared on the screen crying and hugging each other with joy: the network had refreshed and was showing me the live broadcast, the real live broadcast, not the 20-minute delayed one with the one I had forgotten was watching the game. The confusion lasted for a few seconds.
This is how it happens many times, that we believe we are stepping into the present and everything is already happening twenty minutes later. While I suffered for 22 guys who were going to risk their lives shooting penalties, and thousands and thousands of fans were scared, unable to even look at the grass, everything was already done; Some laughed and others cried without knowing that someone was watching over them and a destiny they already knew. So I went back to watch the penalties already knowing who won, which is another thing we do a lot in life: wanting to capture the old emotion of a result that we know perfectly well. It is the process, the journey that the poets would say, that hurts or redeems; I already knew about Athletic’s joy but I didn’t know how, the shooters and the saves, the author of the last shot and the author of the first miss, who turned out to be the one to whom I directed all my thoughts: Manu Morlanes, the Mallorca player who It started to break after his penalty and continued to break when the shootout started to dye (what a football expression, what a pleasure to write it) of red and white. He would have needed much more than me to turn back on TV and in life for just twenty minutes.
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