Sevilla-Roma and life in a penalty

Again the penalties, which will return to our worst nightmares. Minutes of rare tension, pure drama, with a closed ending, often unfair like that of many stories, whether they are told in the cinema or within the pages of a book. Thus Rome lost, dragged into the vortex of a moment where everything becomes confused, superimposing fear and pain, ability and luck, desire for life and death. The definitive way to success or misfortune, which passes through details made up of looks, movements, words.

While Goodthe Sevilla goalkeeper, was dancing on the goal, zigzagging left and right, the famous scene from Bruce Grobbelaar in the summer of 1984, when Roma lost their first major final. Liverpool’s South African goalkeeper moved between the posts playing the part of a frightened man, with tremulous knees and a funny clown face, undertaking, with that behavior, to desecrate the moment, make it ridiculous and resize it to a completely incidental fact, like an impromptu pantomime among friends. In front of him, a seasoned and courageous player like Francesco Grazianisaid Ciccio. When everything was ready, Ciccio looked to his left, in a sort of exhortation to the whistle, which he could also only have listened to. But Ciccio looked at the referee, perhaps not to see what Grobbelaar was up to a few meters in front of him. Once his run-up started, the goalkeeper crouched, bending on his knees and becoming as small as a child. Go watch that scene again because the sequence of him is really amazing. Graziani, in those few moments that separated him between what he was thinking and what he would have done, decided to behave in the most logical way of all, raising his shot above the “child’s” head. But, tense as he was, he exaggerated himself, hurling the ball well over the crossbar, into the stars.

I don’t know if Bono influenced his opponents, as Grobbelaar did in his time. Poor Ibanez and Mancini before him didn’t shoot so badly. But what remains of another cursed night are the looks. Bono had the face of someone who wasn’t afraid, the others seemed covered by dramatic masks. If you believe in fate, believe in God, someone wrote. Did the Sevilla goalkeeper know he was going to win or was he just acting? Not knowing Bono, it could be the first or the second hypothesis. But what remains suspended is another question, even more important. Are you really sure that football is not the most credible representation of our inexplicable life?