Gifts to a rapt Villarreal

Madrid was getting out of the bind with Vinicius, who took free kicks like pauses for breathing, and also because of the dialogue that Kroos and Modric began to have: one passed it to the other, almost horizontal, slightly diagonal balls, from one interior to another , achieving a come and go and a rhythm like a rocking chair that was widening Madrid and making it rise. Already in the 10th minute, Modric assisted Vinicius with a pipe and trivela, who failed. He was bright but erratic in the definition.

Madrid had another good argument on the right. He was Militao on the side and there, in a couple of starts, he saw a power and a stride that were no longer remembered in that demarcation. He went up several times and in the 20th minute he could have scored or made a lethal assist on a great occasion when he entertained himself. The pass had been from Benzema, the first glimpses of what looks like a recovery. It was not the only artistic assistance that she gave. At the end of the first part, she left it first, with a luxurious cadence, to Vinicius, who failed again against Reina.

It was a great game from another time, from when the coaches weren’t so in charge. A happy game, technical and serious, precise and fast, a runner, but a nice and orderly runner. Villarreal has a delicious game when Parejo finds Gerard and he distributes to the wings, as in the clear opportunity that Yeremy Pino had in the 23rd minute, obscured by Courtois’s elastic body.

After the break, some things were repeated. The local ardor, which was not wild either, caused a defensive failure in Madrid. MendyAs if he had some serious optical problem, he gave the ball to his rival and Gerard, systematically generous, gave it to Yeremy again, who this time did not miss.

In addition to the robbery, the result of his major, much of Villarreal’s damage occurred in actions in which Gerard went down to midfield to move it at the first touch. It didn’t seem like a very sophisticated action and to some extent it was predictable and even normal. But to the robbery or gift of Madrid and to the mentioned mechanism of Gerard the game was added to the counterattack, already with clear spaces.

The street runner grew longer, more frantic at times, even faster.

Vinicius took the initiative like the champion that he is, and in the 55th minute he made a colossal play: he went into the area, with several on top of him, he leaned on Tchouaméni and faster than anyone else he touched for Benzema, who missed, but in the action itself Vinicius was at the heart of it, as a defender, in the struggle to stop the Brazilian, committed a hand by hitting the ball with his arm. Involuntary? Yes, but with meaning. Because the defender stretched out his hand more than his sleeve by being so demanded by Vinicius’s speed. Vinicius had provoked a penalty new or at least rarely seen that occurred before the kick and before the assistance, a penalty that he did not intend to intercept, caused by the troubles and demands of the chase.

In the immediately following play, there was an even rarer penalty. He was attacking Foyth and Alaba fell. When he stumbled, his hand went dumb and there he intercepted the ball. It was almost more the ball to the hand than the hand to the ball. It is the new question of penalties: did the hand come or go? It is not that there was no intention, it is that there was accident. And even something else: anti-intentionality, because Alaba, who was on the ground, held onto his hand and to avoid taking a penalty he raised it: he took a penalty for not taking a penalty, he also took a penalty for responding to the instinct to lean on when falling. In other words: there was an accident, there was an instantaneous reflex (humanly unavoidable?) and even two, because the instinct to lean on and the instinct to not take a penalty collided in clumsy hesitation; there was a lack of intention and even ‘unintentionality’… but it was a penalty.

Two pieces of evidence: the new defenders they have to be one-armed. That they reach soccer with one hand or that they are amputated during the training process. The quarry that specializes in that will take advantage.

The second piece of evidence is that the VAR and the referees are already deciding almost all the matches. The VAR and the regulation changes have broken the old penalty concept, enhancing it; as if a football revolution, penalties are now a renewed, cosmic lottery, as if the chance of football took new forms, and greater prominence. It is a tactic football, exhausted from schematism, which paradoxically ends up deciding on the raffle of involuntary, accidental, unsuspected penalties… That is football: tactics and chance, but not magical chance, but chance in its hateful arbitration form, like a discretionary eye that sees everything. In terms of football, are we also the object of the cruelest surveillance, without privacy (without the minimum privacy of the reflex gesture!), perhaps one more point in the panopticon? That is football, an absurd panopticon of the multiple eye and like an insect of the technical-media-federal complex…

But let’s get back to the game. Madrid’s penalty was scored by Benzema, and Villarreal’s was taken advantage of by Gerard.

Penalties aside, Madrid is being too much soft in defense: a gift, a stumble…

The party, already much more serious, entered the ‘Camavinga minutes’because more than Camavinga entering the party, it is the party that enters it.

The game, that first jockey, went progressively crazy until a climax in which Pedraza crossed the field as if he were George Weah.

Parejo and Gerard (what a game, what elegance!) They are a luxury that Spanish football showed the world together with the brilliant stubbornness of Vinicius, who was about to equalize and kept haggling at discount. Villarreal’s counter-attacks, with Morales and Danjuma, were devastating, but Madrid resisted, led their center-backs to attack, even Courtois went up, already uncovered on goal, unable to achieve the equalizer they perhaps deserved. He touched the merit, although not his defense. His defense did deserve the defeat. With an opponent like Villarreal, in a game that was perhaps the best of the championship, giving away balls, trembling under pressure, faltering at the start and stumbling in the box seems like a lot of advantage. Madrid is defending worse or with worse luck, and that should not be made up with the new arbitration surrealism (referees with Dalinian mustaches, please!) and the VAR’s dodgy doll.