Your best enemy would have to be almighty. Only in this way would the challenge of beating him require all your ambition, force you to reach the highest level, justify all your efforts and make the company admirable. Your best enemy would have to always remain unpredictable in his performance and, when it came to elucidating his virtues, almost indecipherable, because that would mean that you would always have to treat him with the utmost respect, even when you think you can beat him. In fact, the greater the capacity for surprise he retained, the more this great enemy of yours would make you lie in wait when you faced him, and the better you would know to avoid falling for his tricks, feints and tricks. If possible, your best enemy would have to be proud of not knowing what his magic consists of. Who does not know why he wins, nor does he want to know, will probably take a long time to find out why he loses. When he starts losing, sure…
Real Madrid’s extraordinary campaign in the Champions League, with surprising and spectacular comebacks in the second legs, always in front of their fans, and after being vulgar, and even insignificant, in the first legs and in the first half of the laps, has generated a current of enthusiasm and euphoria that I would dare to describe as almost religious, between the press and the fans. We are all turned on and fascinated by how capricious fortune is, and although we do not detract from Benzema’s finishing talent or Courtois’s ability to stop balls, both immense, the ineffable quality, of witchcraft, of spell that has been in the Chance of these Deus ex machina comebacks, are unbeatable ingredients for the show.
“Don’t try to understand it,” Marco Asensio tweeted on May 5, the night of the comeback against City. Twenty-three years earlier, on April 30, 2009, Martí Perarnau had already published an exquisite x-ray of this peculiarity of whites. The article, in the newspaper Sport, was entitled The miracle as a football concept and said things that are still fully valid today. “By definition – he began by saying – a miracle is something extraordinary, a singular phenomenon that does not admit successive repetitions. Except in Madrid, where the miracle is the daily bread and has lost its uniqueness until it has become a football concept”. And, later on, “what is Madrid’s idea of football? There’s no answer. Some will speak of individual talent; others, of faith and ambition: of the unfailing madridista courage; some, of the supernatural value of the white shirt. But the football answer does not appear ”. Best enemy? Impossible.
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