2024-05-10 03:01:00
In the early hours of last Monday, in the halls of the Palermo property where the Book Fair takes place, as soon as all the visitors left, the ghosts gathered? of great figures of world literature that emerged from the interior of the books exhibited there and beat the final match of the League Cup between Vélez Sarsfield and Estudiantes de la Plata played on the afternoon of last Sunday.
Each writer recounted, in their own style, different passages of the game.
Gabriel García Márquez began:
“Many years later, before kicking, with the ball on the penalty spot, the footballer Fernando Zuqui will remember that remote afternoon in which he scored the goal that made his Estudiantes champion, in a dramatic penalty shootout.”
The presence of both fans in the stands of the Madre de Ciudades stadium in Santiago del Estero was described by Oliverio Girondo:
“They settle, they sit, they take possession, they get excited and they shout.
They become alarmed, they become restless, they protest and they shout again.
They shudder, they are moved, they shake and they insult.
They scream, they tear, they anguish and suffer.
They fanaticize, they get heated, they turn on and they transform.
“They get upset, they get happy, they get excited and they go crazy”
But let’s start with the first passages of the match, precisely with the first goal of the match reported by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra:
“In a place on the field, whose name I don’t want to remember, not many minutes into the first half a goalkeeper with a graceful figure named Marchiori emerged and had to face the robust footballers Cetré and Mancuso, as if they were two fierce and huge windmills. “Malignant was his fortune, that the shot of one of them allowed the ball to enter the goal.”
The tie comes in the form of a poem from the incomparable Gustavo Adolfo Becquer:
“It hurts the Fortín because of the left wing
Thiago shoots and the fan gets excited.
Cross the sky and fall softly
The ball in the goalkeeper’s hands punctures.
The bar cheers, roars and shakes
Aquino tries, it is his complete emblem,
The attack does not stop, the enthusiasm grows
Scaro holes out and equality finally arrives.”
Then there were penalties, then the pen of Jorge Luis Borges spoke:
“To me, so soon, talk to me about the young Álvaro Montoro
who has committed the worst of sins
that a footballer can commit. He missed a defining penalty.
May the glaciers of oblivion not drag him away
nor cow him, merciless.
May the fans forgive him for not having been efficient.
Luck was not on his side.
But that’s not why you should suffer
the shadow of having been unfortunate.”
The final celebration of the La Plata fans was narrated by the Chilean Pablo Neruda:
“I like it when they are silent because they are as if absent,
The return to Liniers will be silent and not pleasant.
It fills our soul to have triumphed in Santiago
and knowing that the Cup is already on its way to La Plata”.