Andrés Iniesta could play naked, of course without boots or goals, needing only the ball with which he has conquered the world with his aura and silk football, light and sensitive as a bird, humble since he was a child, when he was tied for life to that huge tree on the Fuentealbilla track, and has always been an anonymous citizen with a business name in Barcelona. A figure so sweet that it invites a cloying story that has little to do with his shyness and brevity – “simple and short, but direct”, Guardiola’s word – nor with his sincere football, unique player and midfielder par excellence, so authentic that It deserves to be “world heritage,” according to Luis Enrique.
He was never a player of a single coach, but his football generated the same consensus on the bench as in the stands, in his own and other people’s fields, in Europe, America or Asia. So unique and loved that it hardly allowed comparison beyond those universal fans whose gestures have evoked the figure of Roger Federer. Perhaps because of its elegance and harmony and surely also because it is so natural, as if it played without effort or blood and never broke a sweat; as tender, white and pale as you see him, even sad; more resistant than is deduced from its apparent delicacy and fragility; an athlete who has fibers instead of bones; a magician with the address of a lord or a Don, as Joaquim Maria Puyal recounted in his broadcasts.
To Paco Sehirul.lo, known as the “druid” for his decisive contribution and dissection of the so-called DNA of Barça, Iniesta always seemed like a “genius” for his mastery of space and time: “Sometimes it can seem like he is absent, but suddenly he leaves when everyone thinks he is gone. Always look where other people’s feet are. He has a very particular idea of movement; “It seems to float,” he recalled in Iniesta’s autobiography. The play of my life. “He takes advantage of doing things at the right time, he knows how to choose, and he has more resistance than strength, an elastic force. His muscles are like him: a mystery; white and compact, like a field hare,” concludes Sehirul.lo.
It is no coincidence that his references were Laudrup and Guardiola. “When I see him pass the ball from one foot to the other he reminds me of me; “We are like two snakes,” he recalled to the Dane to authenticate the croquette from which Iniesta was inspired. And from Guardiola he learned how to look at both sides before receiving the ball, peripheral vision, and quick decision-making, well-known traits of the City coach. Guardiola responded that Iniesta helped him understand the game better after praising his ability to “start and stop”, accelerate and stop, change pace and mark distances from the first 10 meters, a player who dodged and did not crash, slid and It vanished, as Tito Vilanova said.
“If we are in the stands and we see that number 4 is alone, then he turns around and gives it to number 4; Playing ball like he does is like driving on the highway; He is the only one who teaches us how to play the ball,” Riquelme emphasized. And Neymar concluded: “When he receives the ball there is an enormous calm, an immense stillness. It seems slow, but its effects are fast,” added the Brazilian, in tune with Paul Scholes, the United footballer who admires Iniesta. He anticipated, simplified and his neatness allowed him to hide the ball so that no one could take it from him in the same way that his flexibility guaranteed a unique turn and dribble, marked as the king of deception, Xavi’s ideal partner.
Iniesta is the sublimation of the Spanish midfielder, the best representative of the interior that every fan has in his head, the footballer who redeemed the midfielders in a team led precisely by midfielders like Luis Aragonés and Del Bosque. Iniesta felt like Messi in La Roja. “He is the greatest talent that Spanish football has produced,” concludes Xavi. There are some experts who point to him as the continuator of Luisito Suárez’s football, the star who won the Ballon d’Or and the only trophy that was denied to Iniesta. Although he was always generous, he was also very ambitious, as is evident in a conversation he had with his friend Valdés in 2005 after winning the League.
Both of them wondered in the Levante camp how many Leagues and Champions Leagues they would win with Barça. Iniesta answered: 6 and 3. In the end there were 9 Leagues and 4 European Cups, as well as 6 Copa del Rey and 3 Club World Cups: 32 titles in 22 years (1996-2018). Valdés was instrumental in helping Iniesta settle in at La Masia. “I spent the worst day of my life there,” Iniesta wrote. He had the feeling of abandonment and loss, of knowing that he wanted to be in that place and at the same time of not wanting to be separated from his family for the first time, ample reason to cry inconsolably, vulnerable and longing for Fuentealbilla. That 12-year-old boy had never left the track of his town in his life except to go to and from Albacete.
Soccer took him with his father’s or grandfather’s car along a very learned path, always with a chorizo sandwich in hand, until the third edition of the Brunete tournament was presented in 1996. That competition organized by José Ramón de La Morena “changed his life” because his football excited the Barça coaches and he headed to Barcelona. Iniesta had sworn that he would get his mother Mari out of the Lujan bar and his father José Antonio out of the scaffolding in La Manchuela. So he endured that night at La Masia as best he could and missed his parents so much the next day that when they met again, the three of them slept in the same bed at the hotel booked very close to the Camp Nou.
Intelligent and imaginative, Iniesta was a street player who was educated at the Masia conservatory to become a soloist who only improvised from music theory, like jazz musicians, just like Messi or Lamine. “He didn’t stop handing out candy,” said Puyol to define Iniesta’s game, debuting with Van Gaal on October 29, 2002 and angry with Rijkaard in 2006 for playing only half a half in the final in Paris. There were a couple of times when he even got close to the area to finish plays that others couldn’t, moments that ended in two famous goals: at Stamford Bridge in 2009, before the final in Rome, and in Johannesburg in 2010, day of the World Cup.
The faith of Barcelona fans and the strength of the Spanish fans were placed in Iniesta’s right leg. Although both were transcendent, they were not two equal goals, but between both There was a moment when Iniesta’s body said enough, seriously injured after London and the victorious final of Rome 2009. “I couldn’t see the light, I couldn’t find the way, I lost confidence in myself, the same confidence that had been the driving force of my life,” he confessed anguished. “Something unbearable, terrifying. It had to be the most glorious summer and suddenly, without knowing why, you feel sick, your mind doesn’t rest and the people around you don’t understand it. He had a great emptiness inside,” reads Iniesta’s book.
And when he seemed to be on the mend, news arrived that chilled his heart: the death of Jarque, his close friend, sometimes also his driver, a confidant since they met in the different Spanish national teams. There began his “free fall towards an unknown place, the abyss.” “I have proven that when the mind and body are in such a vulnerable situation, you are capable of doing anything,” he confessed. “I understand people who do something crazy at a certain moment. “I can’t take it anymore doctor!” Helped by family, friends, doctors and psychologists, Iniesta recovered his best football in the national team, double European champion, and in Barça.
He never spoke of depression or mental health but of emptiness, possibly because “he doesn’t usually tell things and it’s not easy to get into him,” as admitted by Raúl Martínez, the physiotherapist who found the tissue that was disorganizing his leg. “Andrés is an enigma,” says Martínez, who knows the genetics and sensitivity of a player whose head threatens to explode because he keeps to himself and somatizes his problems, suffers from everything and everyone, “I eat everything so as not to worry others.” mine”, freed from torment only when he takes the ball and sees the light: “What I do comes from within me”, he concludes. “He needs to feel,” many assert, “he is an artist, pure feeling,” happy to be in Barcelona.
He has arrived from Dubai, his destination last season, after leaving Vissel Kobe. Although he always knew how to play with pressure, there was a moment when he needed to distance himself from Barça and went to Japan: 2018. That boy who was left alone in La Masia has never left his family since he is a celebrity, also a champion for three times in the hitherto orphan of Vissel titles. A very serious injury left him in a wheelchair for a time until he got up again to fulfill his promise that he would retire on a football field, as has been the case after his time at the Emirate. At 40 years old, he has decided to stop and remember the silence he enjoyed so much in South Africa.
That day, in the World Cup final, Iniesta had the feeling, when he controlled the ball before shooting for goal, that “the world stopped.”
