They are making way. You have to stop looking at Odegaard as a promise. No need to see more: it is a finished product. He has deployment, soccer criteria, ability to clarify plays with filtered passes, dribbling, mid-distance shot. A multitalented, practical and attractive. When I say that he could use one more year at Real Sociedad, I don’t do it because he doesn’t believe in his maturity, but because at the moment the Madrid squad has plenty of resources. The context does not offer guarantees to win ownership. When the squad, for reasons of programming and age, is cleared of the highly prestigious competitors it currently has, Odegaard will be able to arrive with the honors that a crack of your condition. While waiting and with his youth, it is better to play 50 games with Real than to wait sitting in Madrid.
Hazard to water the flower. Pep Guardiola says that “Hazard is good to say enough”. That is the player that Madrid lost two months ago without the team moving a hair. Today, players are just as proud of the goals they don’t concede as they are of the ones they do score. They owe their leadership to that change in profile. It was necessary to add muscle (those of Mendy and Valverde are made of reinforced concrete), put individual instinct at the service of collective intelligence and accentuate prudence at the cost of losing a sense of adventure. But Hazard is knocking on the door and will bring the expressive, unbalancing and contagious football that characterizes him. The team, which closed the back door, will find variants with him to knock down the front door and thus Zidane will complete his work. Madrid will play like never before and, as prejudice rules, we will continue saying that they have a flower up their ass.
Fabian. The Napoli crisis caused such noise that we forgot about Fabián. But this week he said “here I am”, scoring a wonderful goal against Inter. He received the ball on the edge of the Italian box from a Conte team, meaning there were no spaces. Since it is not convenient for him to think with the ball at his feet, he threw a short wall. He again got bowled over by an opponent who he dribbled back and, when he found a small gap, he took an awkward shot that he nailed at an angle. Because of his rhythmic style, more than a move it seemed like a slow grandfather’s advice. Tall, with his head raised, the criteria of a strategist and a field of action that goes from area to area, he transmits so much calm and security that, when he receives the ball, football’s uncertainty ends and one, as a fan, relax. Until his talent screams and lifts you off your seat.
An alms, please. Super-professionalism is weaving elitist plans for the near future, and its spotlights dazzle us so much that the perception that the new Copa del Rey is nothing more than a handout for romantics never leaves me. As I am passionate about football and being romantic was always an accusation that suited me well, I accept alms. Because it reminds me that soccer is everything: a game at recess; another, improvised, in a park; a challenge against the neighborhood next door and, now getting serious, the admiration for the idol, the love for the shield, the beautiful and fanatical fantasy of believing that our club, no matter the size, is different from all of them. There was always an aristocracy that occupied the covers and that now moves, like never before, the industry. But down there there is still a fabric of clubs with enormous power: sentimental. The Copa del Rey brought out the treasure that explains that social and cultural phenomenon called football.